Appalachian Heart Wood Blogger Musings

Oh how I have neglected my blog! Many thoughts to write but I was dealing with illness and holidays. The holidays were awesome spending it with my family but very busy. I used all my energy with all my chronic health problems screaming complaints in the form of all sorts of crazy symptoms. But I made it.

We just had a cold snap. It was a balmy -28 degree wind chill at the house Monday night. It prompted my Ed to say sarcastically, "We should have a naked porch party. The weather's perfect!"  Just that thought made me extremely glad to be inside, not naked, and next to the wood stove, warm!

The hot water lines froze and are still frozen. We spent the day under the house trying to figure out where and how to thaw it out. First time in many years it has been frozen this long. I put water to heating on the stove in large pots to fill up the bathtub to bathe and wash my hair in the sink. That brought back some memories. At least the cold water is working and I didn't have to haul water from a spring. I'd like to have a quarter for every pail or jug of water we had to haul from a spring when I was young. I'd probably have enough to live on for a while.

I have been thinking about this blog, the writing I have to finish, the look of it all and where I want it to go. What I want to share and write about. I love history of our Appalachian mountains and our people. Having family from here helps to write about that history. I have so many family stories yet to write about.

But my profile says I want to talk about our place into the future. That is the conundrum I'm having. Should I write about more modern day issues? There are issues today that are so divisive and Lord knows we don't need to be divided any more than we are.

I am a Face book person. I love Face book. I keep track of my family that way.
Today I was on Face book and saw a couple of shared posts that set my mind to really thinking. If you are on Face Book you should follow Dave Tabler. He shares great articles about Appalachia. Like this one on hemp.  Also this one on on poverty and religion in Appalachia.

This last article just got my dander up. The reason why? It is written to "help" volunteers to the region understand the people here, it still places the Appalachian people in this mythical, we are in a world of our own, victim status.  I could not believe they were using Francis Asbury and Horace Kephart as a resource on how to think about and to converse with Appalachians!

I graduated from Emory and Henry College which is a Methodist college in Southwest Virginia that began in 1836. In college, I worked at the Holston Conference Archives of the Methodist Church. My dad's people were Methodists, my mother's people were Baptists, Lutherans and a few Presbyterians, but we don't hold that against them.

I know about Francis Asbury, because as a history buff of Appalachia, he was considered such an influential person in getting "an organized Methodist religion conference", in our area. The Holston Conference of the Methodist Church at one time spread from what is northern West Virginia today to Southwest Virginia, parts of Eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, Western North Carolina, South Carolina to Northern Georgia. Truly an Appalachian conference and its history is well written about.

Richard Nye Price wrote a five volume history of the Holston conference. The entire national Methodist church split in 1844 (long before the Civil War) into Methodist church South and Methodist Episcopal church North over the Bishop of the Holston Conference owning slaves and they did not reunite until 1939. The church split not over a Bishop from the lowland south, but from Appalachia! Doesn't that blow your mind? Did me when I first read about it.

Although Asbury converted many to Methodism he didn't have to convert everyone. There were Methodist, Baptists, Lutherans and Presbyterians already living here on the frontier.  Many times these groups in the early years of settlement shared meeting houses.

This is from an old postcard. It is an "artist concept of Page's Meeting House, situated 1 mile north of US 11 and 2 miles west of Radford VA., was built in 1773 by the Rev. Edward Morgan. It was the first Methodist house of worship west of the New River and thereby the first of the Holston Conference. Bishop Francis Asbury preached here in 1807 and 1805."  Pat Murphy

Asbury was really a little late to the party. When Asbury roamed these mountains it was still considered a "wilderness" with Indians fighting over the territory and his views I believe were ones of any minister in newly settled areas anywhere on this continent. Think of the Wild West. But for some strange reason...it's Appalachia and we are still considered a people set apart and this is the wild west.

So I am astounded that here is this article using Asbury as sort of an example on how to think about Appalachians training volunteers coming to the mountains to help our people. This one quote out of Horace Kephart's book really got me.
"One instructional text Morgan and the other VISTAS were not offered - but which would have benefited them - was Horace Kephart's "Our Southern Highlanders," particularly the chapter entitled "The Outlander and the Native." In it, Presbyterian minister Warren H. Wilson, known as the "Bishop of the Mountains," advised any missionaries, secular or religious, with ambitions to uplift the Appalachian mountaineers to proceed with caution - and respect. A mountaineer, Wilson cautioned, would "refuse even what he sorely needs if he detects in the accents or the demeanor of the giver any indication of an air of superiority." See more here. 

Yes, because it really pisses us off when you are told something that is not true and treat us as if we are children and think that we are in this shape due to ignorance. Instead volunteers should understand our way of life has much to do with geography, economics and politics as any other place on earth. We who live here understand that as much as anyone.

Please don't interview a drunk in the poorest county in Appalachia and say that represents Appalachia as this man did in this article published in the National Review! He even went so far to call the entire area of Appalachia the "Big White Ghetto".  You can go in any major city and any part of rural America and find these same people down on their luck he said comprised Appalachia. The finger is just being pointed this way. We have always been an easy target.

Photo of a homeless man with his sleeping bag over his grocery cart outside the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. several blocks from the White House when I visited a few years back. Should the journalist interview him and say that represents the majority of everyone in D.C.? 

In this article he also asks for directions from a lady to a town that is suppose to be very close by and she replies she doesn't know it. The man assumes she is so isolated and never been out of her own holler. But Ed and I have encountered the same problem and know about this first hand. About 10 years ago they put in 911 systems all over Appalachia....and they renamed places!! Especially areas known by two names locally. Usually renamed after some important person, coal or railroad person in their honor. But we have been here so long we still know areas by older names.

A 911 map renamed an area we called Craw fish to something I can't even remember now and Craw fish they put in the wrong place. Ed says he's not sure which of our "Einsteins" are responsible for that one but now it's written in stone because it's on a "new" map.

I went to several meetings on deciding the new maps for the 911 system. They encouraged public participation. For example in Bland County we have a place that was called "Rabbit Squat".  The people who lived in that area did not want that name, did not want their area to any longer be called by that name, nor have it on the map, so today the area is called something else. Today if you ask me by the new name where that is, I won't know what you are talking about. You ask me where Rabbit Squat is I can tell you where that is as well as "The Skillet" and "Pumpkin Center" (though I think they left the last two on the map and you can find it yourself).

Now I'm not sure if that is what happened or who this lady was but what we know an area as, if you ask what they call it on many recently revised maps, we may not know it by that name....it may be different. My grandfather used older known names for areas long since changed for years!!   The journalist should have shown her a map instead of assuming she had never been out of the holler...ever... and did not know her own local area. The man who wrote that article needs to be taken cow tipping and snipe hunting...he is that gullible.

So if you are visiting the new Appalachia and you have one of these new fangled maps, don't assume the names on it the locals are aware of.  Show us what you are talking about on the map and we might be able to help you get there.

It also angers us to be told that others know how we should solve our problems rather than funding and letting us take that initiative ourselves. Telling us that this is what we will do, without consulting or asking. That doesn't fit and usually never works here! God knows the money and resources we have watched going down the drain on that one!! It gave someone outside the region a job!

Then I read another article that hit me, about the coal industry from Appalachian Voices. This one is on the demise of coal. Though this article hits upon the "outsiders" of our region exploiting the resources, what we know is that it could not and would not have happened without powerful "insiders" and their interests in seeing that expand. We know people of our own communities have played a larger part in our economic history, our advances and our own problems. The outsiders could not have taken what they have without inside help.

It goes back to the memory I have shared before on this blog of my Aunt Florence. A missionary told her once, "We have come to save the Appalachian people." My aunt asked her, "From what?" She never got an answer.

We have always had issues to deal with in Appalachia just like the rest of the world. This perception and BIG myth that the mountaineers are so different and a peculiar people from the rest of the world has hampered not helped us at all. The fact they are still repeating it today is just appalling!! Our geography more than anything else is what is different. It determines our way of life, creates transportation problems, effects our infrastructure and how we economically develop.

Before the timber, coal and gas industries moved in Appalachia was once the bread basket of the lowland south. While the south grew cotton, we raised everything from hogs, sheep, chickens, cows to growing apples to buckwheat and traded that for what we needed. We had wineries in every community. That land is still here. With the internet our world is expanded even more with possibilities to develop a diverse sustainable economy.

We are not that different from any other area in the country. For example, I have always had family and friends I love dearly that are gay. My family always referred to it as being, "light in the loafers." The issue of gay rights and gay marriage has hit the mountains just like everywhere else. I have family and kin that are working on strip mines and mountaintop removal sites. It's alarming to them what is happening to the landscape but they have to make a living. It has some crying in their hearts to see the mountains flattened and know they are contributing to that.  You have to question our state, regional and national energy policies that even allow this. We also have to see that Appalachia is in transition. We have to look for more viable ways of sustainability for our people. Like this video proclaims.

So please forgive me when I get a bit aggravated when I read about volunteers willing to come to the mountains to help and folks advocating using untrue, stereotypical examples from Francis Asbury and Horace Kephart to train them on how to treat Appalachians today.

 The writers and photographers visiting the region writing articles and taking pictures whose focus represents people whose bad economic or health situation could be repeated in any area of the country does not help. We call it, "Poverty Porn". Usually portraying Appalachia in a really bad light by using a portion of our people in the most dire of straits. But then I guess misery sells a bit more than the good in people.

Do we need and want outside volunteer assistance? YES, we still have some of the most economically depressed areas in the country. Glad to have their assistance, but please get rid of this old notion that the reason we are in this shape is because Appalachians are peculiar, clannish, crazy, ignorant, people. Some of the most powerful corporate lobbies in the world have come against us and we have fought to survive. We may talk with a twang in our voice but we do have brains.

Bluefield Daily Telegraph March 1, 1905  Fits with the demise on coal article above.

Most folks write on their blogs daily or at least weekly. I am sorry I am just not that well to do that. But I hope to strive to write more in the future.  I have many stories to finish the drafts on. How far I will go into the modern day issues remains to be seen as to what gets my dander up again.

Took me so long to get this post written the hot water thawed out.

Thanks to you who read this and blessings to all in this glorious New Year of 2014.

Johnny Depp's Mother is Appalachian? What Does This Mean to Be An Appalachian?

All photos on this page are from my family albums. This is my mom.

I have been trying to write this blog post for months. Even the title I can not decide. Should it be, "Who is an Appalachian?," "What is an Appalachian?", or "Where are Appalachians located?" It is such an elusive broad topic for this Appalachian woman, I kept putting it off. But everyday something else pops up about Appalachia. In my mind, because we keep being labeled not in a good way, I think it is important to try to put it in some kind of perspective.

Then +Johnny Depp ,.... BLESS his heart....said something about his mother's Appalachian roots and a flood gate opened in my head. I will say I am a little upset with what he said, and I am a Johnny Depp fan, but now, however I say it, something HAS to be said.

This is not going to be some scholarly article. I can write on that level but scholars write for scholars and I'm of the opinion they like to use words that are mostly....well... for scholars. I am of the opinion also many need to be beat over the head with a dictionary.

Why worry with what is an Appalachian? Because my family has been located here in the Virginia/North Carolina/West Virginia mountains for many, many generations and that makes my grandchildren and my family, even those that live at a distance, of or pertaining to, or located in Appalachia, Appalachian. We deal with what ever that means every single day. Our history, our culture, the way we talk, how we live, are all effected by others perception of Appalachians but most importantly our own perception of ourselves.

Today what brought up my desire to write about this topic again was this article in the upcoming July 4th Rolling Stone Johnny Depp interview.   Where even Johnny Depp says, "My mother was raised in a shack, in the wilds of Appalachia, where the toilet was an outhouse."  He was using the reference to child rearing practices of butt whooping, which was a more universal common practice whose use has changed. The violence alone of "spare the rod, spoil the child" practice was in a much broader religious use than just in Appalachia, but I took what he was saying was his mother didn't know better because of where she was raised. I understand what he's saying about child rearing today is better and less violent but .... mentioning it with Appalachia, shacks and outhouses.....well hurt my feelings.

Sigh......I, for one, have a very different understanding of Appalachian outhouses. Always have. Given the modern problems we have with sewer systems sometimes it would be preferable to have an outhouse! I even argued at a meeting on museum displays that we should not downplay the existence of outhouses in our Appalachian story. I knew many a fancy house with an outhouse just because a septic system could not be put in. It wasn't just the shacks in Appalachia that had an outhouse. There are modern businesses today that have tanks in the ground that need a pump and haul system in Appalachia.

I spoke about that in another blog post. But those two words, "outhouse" and "Appalachia", automatically only "down trodden poor ignorant people" comes to mind. Perhaps his mother was from a poor family with an outhouse, but it seems like I have to defend this subject all the time to those not understanding the make up of the ground, especially in my part of Appalachia, with the nature of building sewer systems.

My grandfather in the 1960's lived in the Bluefield, WV city limits in a four room house he built himself with gravity flow water and an outhouse.  We really didn't consider ourselves "poor" but from the outside looking in I guess folks would think that.

All my life outhouses are just something we lived with and I was born in the 50's. In the 70's and 80's I was living in houses with an outhouse.  In the early 80's, I had a friend that lived in Floyd County, VA in a 1930's home. It had gravity flow water and an outhouse. The land would not "perk" to put a septic system in and it's remote location meant no town sewer service so that also was out of the question.

I took another friend to visit who had never used an outhouse in her life. But this one was quite made up. This outhouse had a regular toilet seat, a red fuzzy seat warmer, a red rug, a framed picture on the wall, a magazine rack, a toilet paper holder and it had electricity ran to it for a light and a heater. The one who had never visited an outhouse was quite impressed.

Today we just have a septic system on this 150 year old house. The problem for that system is we hooked the water up to a treated public water system and it's killing our septic system. Building a sewer plant in an area as rocky and winding in this part of Appalachia for a few people is quite costly. I had an engineer tell me that an outhouse would be more eco-friendly than our septic systems which are failing. Some of us Appalachians have always realized an outhouse can be the results of issues beyond anyone's control and know how to live with an outhouse as a resource. Today modern solar compostable toilets are a blessing in this area. Sorry Johnny, my point is we don't see ourselves in that same "poor" light for having to use one.

So what is an Appalachian and where is Appalachia?  Wiki gives this definition: Appalachia is a cultural region in the eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York state to northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.^[1] While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Canada to Cheaha Mountain in the U.S. state of Alabama, the cultural region of Appalachia typically refers only to the central and southern portions of the range. As of 2005, the region was home to approximately 23 million people.^[2] 

The Appalachian Regional Commission has a map of Appalachian Counties. From Maine to Mississippi the trouble really begins because there is such a great diversity of people within the Appalachian geographic region itself to even try to define what is an Appalachian.  Many don't take too kindly to say that the only cultural area is in the central or southern portions of the range. There is also a wide spectrum of the economic base from millionaires to miners as well as different ethnicities and races which are comprised in this area called Appalachia.

I have another friend that says he can beat me on the diversity issue of an Appalachian because first he's black, with Native American and an Italian grandmother!  He also says the being a black/Native American/Appalachian now days on the discrimination scale is a triple whammy.

Northern Appalachians say there is a different culture in Southern Appalachia. Many say the Southern Appalachian stereotype gives other Appalachians a bad name. I became very upset once in college because my professor said that the moonshining, blue grass music picking Appalachian was a myth or a stereotype perpetuated by Hollywood. Okay I can tell the difference but EXCUSE ME?  He just had told me my whole family history and experience was a myth? And that was not true!!

But in talking to him over the years what we came to understand is that it was a different history and experience for his Appalachian family. They lived in a town with water and sewer in a slightly northern area from my family. Which leads me to believe that even some Appalachians are discriminatory towards other Appalachians.

Another real bone of contention is "dialects". The way we talk in different areas especially the southern mountains.  Appalachian English of which my family and community in my part of Southern Appalachia still speaks is disappearing. We have always had a hard time dealing with this issue inside the area and out. We are told in order to communicate we need to change our language to "proper modern English".  Never mind some of the forms of the Appalachian English we speak are older than that!  The dialects are different in different areas but one of the most glaring obvious clues you have that you are talking to an Appalachian, especially a Southern Appalachian, is when we open our mouths and speak.

I have a relative right now who works for a very large international company in our area who was given English courses and diction courses to get the "twang" out of his speech in order to be employed by this company. There are also people who work at call centers in our area that have said they experienced the same thing. One lady told me you can get written up for speaking any of the old dialect.  I find it ironic that Samuel Clemons/Mark Twain made a career of writing southern dialects into characters of his books, yet we are wanting to eradicate those in our area from speaking in their own. Is it any different getting someone from India with a dialect when you dial a call center for computer service?

Some say we are winning the dialect war because of words that were ours making it into modern English speech especially in the south. That somewhat may be true but the old speech I grew up with is dying out quite rapidly. I don't say, "If' in ye a mind to", that often as my aunts did. Plus there seems to be this modern move to eradicate it from our children completely in school.

How do you explain that to your grandchildren? How do you save our culture and dialect or at least honor it? Especially when you come across articles like this: Appalachian Americans the Invisible Minority . The goal is to help our children understand today they have to be multi-cultural in order to survive.

Our problems over the years seem to be the perceptions of those from outside the area looking at our people through their own ideals of what life should be like. Many times in the past it was just to exploit our resources then automatically deciding they needed to modernize and change us. As if we could not figure that out on our own.

My Aunt Florence once was told by a missionary, "We have come to save the Appalachian People." At which my aunt asked her, "From what?" She never got an answer. 

Another time a lady came by for a visit during canning season. She was visiting homes in the holler giving out brochures about proper canning. Now my Aunt was in her late 60's and had been canning all her life and never poisoned anyone. I remember when the lady left she said, "Good Lord, they are trying to save us to death!"

We here in this part of Appalachia know the War on Poverty of the Kennedy administration, especially in reference to our area, was based on a very skewed view of Appalachia. At that time there were millionaires mansions right along side a house with an outhouse in the same area they were giving out food stamps. Poverty, any where in the U.S., when you focus on it and take a picture of it, looks the same. The economic systems and politics that create that poverty are prevalent everywhere not just Appalachia.

I am an Appalachian woman by ancestry and I guess definition. When I was growing up we never considered ourselves "Appalachians". That really is a new recent term for our family. We called ourselves, "hillbillies" and to us it was a badge of honor. A redneck was a striking union member. They wore red bandanas around their necks so you would know who was who in a strike. That could be miners or railroaders either one.  It was turned into something completely different from what I grew up with.

I can see where we were different in our speech, our traditions and our location of family history. We never thought of ourselves in the perceptions I am hearing now. We never thought of any of our family as backwards or poor. An outhouse in Appalachia could just mean bad location for a sewer system. Just regular hardships of life.

In all my study of our family history that goes back on the eastern shores of Virginia 100 years prior to the Revolutionary War, to 1750's on the frontier, the "isolated" Appalachian just did NOT exist in my family!! EVER!!! They had kinship ties all over the United States traveling far and wide! Our family reunions look sometimes like the United Nations.

So what is an Appalachian? I think that is for us to determine now. Is it just people tied to a geographical area? Is it a separate distinct culture? To change the bad perceptions we are going to have to tell our actual stories and our history with an understanding that there were moonshiners, outhouses and millionaires all in the mix.

And Johnny Depp? I am sure your mother will never ever have to use an outhouse again. But I can bet that if all the worlds systems go into a crisis and the sewer systems quit working....you'd be asking her how to build and maintain one and she would KNOW!!  Appalachians from the wild have that knowledge.

Please feel free to comment your thoughts on these subjects.  Yes, I know I was a little hard on Johnny Depp...but I have just about all his movies. To me he's one of the best actors of our times. I am a big fan but that doesn't mean he ain't above reproach. None of us are. His mother is Appalachian and that to me makes him Appalachian, though he may be a refugee from us. As such he has to come to terms to what that identity means to him and his family and question do the outside perceptions of what is an Appalachian really fit?

August 2016 UPDATE Condolences to the Depp family on his mother's death. There is a saying here in the mountains...as long as our children's hearts beat and our grandchildren's hearts beat, so does ours.

On another note I love this song about Appalachians.