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Coming Home | The Literary Reawakening of Southern Appalachia
I've
always felt at home in the mountains. I don't know why. I was born in
Wilmington, on the flat coast, way at the other end of the state, and
brought up in the rolling Piedmont, near Charlotte, which passed at
the time for a big city. I get no particular tingle from either place.
I feel embraced by the mountains.- Charles Kuralt, Charles Kuralt's
America I have lived in Asheville off and on now for 12 years. Five years ago, I moved here with the intention of staying forever. I did not come alone. Masses of the disenchanted continue to leave Florida, California, New Mexico and other places here and abroad to come to this upthrust region of earth made soft, and sometimes impenetrable, by thickets of rhododendron and laurels, beds of galax, fiddlehead ferns and trillium. Like those others who left the places where they grew up or once lived, I find comfort living in a town surrounded by millennia-old mountains. I am drawn here just as are our three featured writers, Charles Frazier, Robert Morgan and Fred Chappell. "When I went off to college, I came back to the mountains to work during the summers," Frazier told me during an interview last April. "There was this old guy there who had heard I had gone down to the flatlands to go to school. He said he never felt good down there: 'I feel like I'm riding in the bed of a flatbed truck with no sideboards,' he told me. That always seemed about right to me." Fortified by a wall of mountains on each side of the valley that nestles Asheville, I sometimes feel as if Mother Nature were cradling me, protecting me from all that is "out there," all being defined as a world hurtling toward an uncertain future and caught in an all-consuming spiral of urgency. I'm not the only one who feels that way. And for that reason, the Southern Appalachians provide a comfort that the world now appears eager to embrace - and be embraced by. That may explain in part the success of such novels as Cold Mountain, Gap Creek and Look Back All The Green Valley. Only a handful of years ago, this region was largely perceived as the land that time forgot. Civilization pressed forward, but Appalachia remained, in people's minds at least, a dark incestuous backwater of a place where the locals were suspicious of, and even hostile toward, locals. The 1972 film "Deliverance" perpetuated the perception that Appalachia was a dangerous place where outsiders were not welcome and where those who lived in the backwoods were too weird to be understood. Few outsiders, in fact, tried to understand them. Before the early 1900s, the outside world scarcely knew of Appalachia, even though George W. Vanderbilt had already opened his four-acre, 250-room mansion in Asheville, and E.W. Grove, a Tennessee pharmacist who made his fortune on Grove's Tasteless Chill Tonic, was preparing to open what newspapers would hail as the "finest resort hotel in the world," Asheville's Grove Park Inn. But while preparing for his trip to the Southern highlands in 1904, Horace Kephart, a professional librarian, could find nothing about the region. He searched the public libraries but failed to find even a magazine article that described the land and its people. "Had I been going to Tenerife or Timbuktu, the libraries would have furnished information aplenty," Kephart wrote in Our Southern Highlanders, an account of his coming to live in the Southern Appalachians. "But about this housetop of eastern America they were strangely silent. It was terra incognita." The opening
of Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934, which Kephart helped
establish; the Appalachian Trail, which became a continuous footpath
from Maine to Georgia in 1937; the Blue Ridge Parkway, which welcomed
its first visitor in 1939; all served to open the Southern Appalachians
to outsiders. And while today cities like Asheville enjoy a thin veneer
of cosmopolitan sophistication, five ridges over, visitors still can
find the Appalachia that has been mythically perpetuated, though even
it is now vanishing. But even
as the masses were discovering Southern Appalachia, the region remained
in literary obscurity, with few exceptions, of course: the notable one
being Asheville resident Thomas Wolfe. Writers struggled to bring visibility
to the area, but few enjoyed great commercial success. "A New York
editor told me five years ago that you couldn't sell Appalachian fiction,"
says Robert Morgan. "Then along came Cold Mountain." For his part, Frazier had doubts that Cold Mountain would sell. He told his wife there might be a few thousand people who might be interested in reading his book. The book has since sold 3.5 million copies, and not just in America, but worldwide. Frazier says he believes the success of his book and others like it is based on a "desire to look back." He and others believe that the more people become pressed by modernity, the more they long for a "sense of continuity," something to fix them in this ever-changing world. "We're such an unrooted culture these days that a book about home, about place, about being rooted and what that means and the kind of reimbursements you get from knowing a place real well and belonging there, that kind of book connects to people," Frazier says. Though
the region has only recently emerged from literary dimness, Southern
Appalachia has always had fine writers, Wolfe, among them. Asheville's
Wilma Dykeman has been writing about life in this region since the authors
of the now-popular books were young men. Two of Dykeman's books, The
French Broad, published in 1955, and The Tall Woman, published in 1962,
are still being snapped up by readers. But had the mother of Southern
Appalachian literature written her books 40 years later, they may have
topped the best-seller lists. Which raises the question? Is part of
the success of Cold Mountain and other recent Southern Appalachia books
due to the increased visibility provided by such forces as Oprah and
Amazon.com? Frazier thinks perhaps so. "It may partly just be a
matter of visibility," he concedes. Today,
Southern Appalachia is one of the least-homogenized regions in the world.
Fully 22 million people live in the 200-000-square-mile region that
follows the spine of the Appalachian Mountains from New York to northern
Mississippi; 40 percent of those inhabitants live in rural regions,
compared to 20 percent of the national population. And an
increasing number of outsiders are moving to the green valleys. Venture
off the beaten path onto a rural mountain road, and you're just as likely,
perhaps even more likely, to bump into Florida retirees as hillbillies.
Even Frazier,
who lives in Raleigh, vows to return to live here soon. Morgan will
return to his native North Carolina from New York to teach at Appalachian
State University this fall. Like the others, they come because the Appalachian
Mountains remains a place with a there still there. They come because
they feel as if they are coming home. "Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain, and the mountain will keep it, folded." - Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek BIO: At home in Asheville, North Carolina, Ralph Grizzle is the author of a new book and companion web site honoring Charles Kuralt, www.rememberingcharleskuralt.com.
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Grizzle, 28 Kenilworth Road, Asheville, North Carolina 28803 |
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