Appalachia Project: Where the Red Fern Grows, 1961

Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls


This is one sweet book, Appalachian to its core, even though it is set in the Ozarks in Oklahoma. Our hero, Billy, lives in wooded hills above the Illinois River. The woods abound with critters--racoons, squirrels, birds, fish, skunks--and plants like ferns, white oaks, thickets of every description. And there are dogs--specifically two coon hounds, Old Dan and Little Ann. Appalachian people would feel at home there.

Where the Red Fern Grows is about Billy and his dogs. Only a few other characters even have names (Ma, Pa, and Grandpa don't count as names). In fact, the first line should be much better known than it is: "I suppose there's a time in practically ever young boy's [child's] life when he's affected by that wonderful disease of puppy love." And Billy (first person narrator) doesn't mean boy-girl love. He means "the kind that has four small feet and a wiggly tail, and sharp little teeth that can gnaw on a boy's finger."

The first part of the book is about how Billy gets his dogs. The second part of the book is about training, hunting, and competing with the dogs. The third part--get out your kleenexes--is about the sacrifices sometimes entailed by love, including human-human love, dog-human love, and the love of two dogs for each other.

All dog books are filled with pathos and high drama. And us dog lovers are suckers for them. Seeing or reading about a dog being hurt fills me with grief. My dogs have been all about love. They have adored me even though I pretty never much deserved it. To be loved like that is a sacred trust. To violate that trust is a heinous crime. One of the best movies I ever saw is one I will never watch again--Dances With Wolves--because an animal is killed in a way that broke my heart. I can never see that scene again.

Old Dan and Little Ann are the life of this story. Their happiness made me happy. Their frustrations frustrated me. And the coon hunting sequences were terrific. Rawls took me right out into those woods, taught me all about coon hunting just by inviting me along--there were no didactic passages to educate us ignoramuses. I caught on quick to the way the dogs communicated with Billy and he with them. The wily coons led all of us on several merry chases and a few gruesome ones.

Red Fern doesn't pull any punches. Awful things happen. However, the impact is softened by (1) the presence of Billy's parents and grandpa and (2) by Billy's evolving faith in prayer. The book is beautifully Christian, but again, never didactic. As with the hunts, Rawls simply takes us along on Billy's journey. It's quite beautiful. It's the spirituality of the book that makes it all bearable and very, very sweet.

The book makes reference to Appalachian-style stereotypes. Billy runs into the Pritchard kids, who come from a family that is known for its isolation as an extended family and its exaggerated independence. Ma says about them, "I would like to do something to help [them], but I guess there's nothing we can do. There are people like the Pritchards all over the hills. They live in little worlds of their own and are all alone. The don't like to have outsiders interfere." They even have their own private graveyard.

Rawls makes no attempt at all to reproduce any kind of dialect. Still, the book has a voice and it sounds Appalachian. The language is plain and direct. Billy is a heroic narrator and shares his humiliations, triumphs, happiness, and grief. The time with the dogs is a precious idyll in his life, a treasure.

You could imagine Billy's family living next door to the Waltons on Spenser's Mountain and the young couple from Gap Creek could be a distant neighbor. I'm gradually building an Appalachian neighborhood for myself, with a landscape that could easily be set into the hills where I now live. It's tight. It's a community.

Where the Red Fern Grows is, of course, a well-known Disneyesque classic movie. I know I've seen parts of it, but I'm eager now to order up some Netflix of the 1974 and 2003 versions and see what I think. I'm afraid of how sanitized and politically-correctified serious children's fiction can be when filmed. I wish the director of Hunger Games would film this book. It would be so vivid and alive.

This is a wonderful book, a fast read, and has great potential as a read-aloud. It portrays an Appalachian family in a positive light without the need for insulin to process the sweetness. Billy is a great role model as he shares his cowardice and bravery, his rejoicing and grieving. Tears fall down, but my thumbs are up.

Appalachia Project: Gap Creek, 1999

Gap Creek, by Robert Morgan

Gap Creek, by Robert Morgan, is a good read and it is interesting. And it is Appalachian. But it is also morose, grim, and glorifies suffering. Julie and Hank, the young couple who are almost the only characters in the book, face a range of biblical plagues--fire, ice, flood, poverty, injustice, famine, vermin, sickness, death, and even a wicked mother-in-law. Each chapter contains something horrible, except the chapter where they join the church, which is just surreal.

Morgan provided no resting places where the reader could gather herself together and reflect. It's a roller coaster with no uphills or else no downhills, depending on your point of view. I guess it was all uphills...always a battle against the gravity of crisis and disaster. Probably, this is realistic. But good fiction and realism don't always work together. That's why we have fiction...to lead us through a narrative experience, not to whack us over the head. When I have written most realistically, people didn't believe it, didn't believe in it. There is a special way to enter the heart of a reader. You have to get the key in the lock.

Perhaps the religious aspect of the book was meant to give meaning to Julie's suffering, to ennoble it. Instead, it felt self-delusionary, and a trap that kept her bound to frightening peril and a bad marriage.

OK, that's some of the negative stuff. Gap Creek tells the story of the first year of marriage of a teenage couple who married in 1899 and set off into the mountains to start their lives together. The heroine's age was the saving grace for her. I couldn't believe a mature woman doing some of the things she did, but I could believe a seventeen-year-old doing them. She copes with all the fantasies a teenager has about marriage and housekeeping butting up against a harsh reality. Each chapter is its own harrowing experience...but Julie doesn't seem to learn from them. Her weird optimism is indefatigable.

There is some foundation for Julie's doggedness in the story of her childhood. As the oldest, she was Dad's chief laborer on the farm. The second daughter became the housekeeper's helper. Julie was used to plowing, cutting wood, butchering...all sorts of heavy work. She was so used to labor that keeping house seemed almost silly. Labor is Julie's only coping strategy, as this quote describes:

"That evening I started cleaning up the house inside. I washed the floors and the walls and the windows. I polished the windows so clean they looked like they wasn't there. It seemed I didn't have control over anything in the world except the work I done. I couldn't make nothing right, but I could make the floor and the dishes shine...I thought, I want to make one tiny place as fit as it can be...By the time Hank came home...I had even washed the ceilings and the backs of the doors."

Julie was so used to labor that having a baby was just another episode. "This is my work, [she] 
thought. This is the work only I can do. this work meant for me from the beginning of time. And this is work leading through me in an endless chain of people all the way to the end of time. Other women had done their work down the course of the years, and now it's my turn. There's nothing to do but take hold of the pain and wrestle with it. It was not a choice to give in."

Gap Creek also depicts how poverty is continued across generations as Julie and Hank recreate the situations that trapped their parents. Scant education, narrow world, naive trust, rigid sex roles. The poverty depicted is as wearing on the reader as it is on the young couple. "We didn't have any money, and our clothes was wearing thin, and I kept patching Hank's overalls and mending his socks. His shirts was wore out at the elbows. But you can come to take pride in clean, patched clothes. You take pride in how you can keep things together with no money and just hard work."

The other bizarre thing in a book so dedicated to gritty reality is that, of course, certain harrowing parts of Julie's life were non-existent. It was clear that they had an outhouse, but Julie never once used it or even ever had to go to the bathroom. She never bathed or washed. She had no menstruation (partly because she became pregnant so quickly). And, she apparently kept her afterbirth inside. Her labor and delivery are described in excruciating detail but she never birthed the placenta...it was invisible. She was bedridden for days after she gave birth, but no mention was made of the heavy bleeding that follows birth, no mention of changing the sheets, although the baby's diaper was a major topic.

It's funny to me that gritty books still can't handle toileting issues. I'm listening to a Janet Evanovich book right now and she frequently has to shower and use the bathroom, thank god. A normal woman. At least doing laundry was shown as hideous work. And Julie was constantly trying to figure out how to keep them fed.

No serious thumbs-down on this book. I enjoyed reading it, despite all of the Issues I've raised. Most of my issues are ubiquitous and not particular to this author. Still, the afterbirth was a pretty big miss!

Appalachia Project: Missing May, 1992

Missing May, by Cynthia Rylant

This is the dingy discouraging cover
of the edition of Missing May that
I got from my library.

This is the dingy discouraging cover
of the edition of Missing May that
I got from my library.

"She understood people and she let them be whatever they needed to be. She had faith in every single person she ever met, and this never failed her, for nobody ever disappointed May. Seems people knew she saw the very best of them, and they'd turn that side to her to give her a better look." This was May, who adopted a sad little girl named Summer and gave her a home and then died six years later. Missing May. That's what this book is about.

It's a little gem of a book, only 89 pages, small in geography, large in spirit. The book is set in Deep Water, West Virginia, a poor mountain town. We meet Summer in the midst of her grief and it is her voice that tells the story in first-person narration. Her mother died when she was a baby and her life was a harrowing move from relative to relative until May and her husband Ob took her home for good. According to May, they recognized need in each other and also the filling of the need. In the one chapter that May narrates, she says,

"I used to wonder why God gave you to us so late in life....My guess is that the Lord wanted us all to be just full of need. If Ob and me had been young and strong, why, maybe you wouldn't've felt so necessary to us. Maybe you'd've thought we could do just fine without you. So the Lord let us get old so we'd have plenty cause to need you and you'd feel free to need us right back...And we just grabbed onto each other and made us [a family]."

This book gives a pretty clear description of a poor Appalachian home: a rusty, rickety trailer with weeds growing all around it; an old vehicle or two resting on blocks; a warm home with a fantasyland of sugary food; and strong family ties. Rylant dignifies these surroundings by describing the love of the people for each other, the love that is the glue.

Rylant's use of dialect is subtle--she uses few phonetically respelled colloquialisms, but still provides an authentic voice for Summer. It's in the syntax and in the plainness and in the marvel of describing amazing things with plain language. Describing a teacher who had the town's only facelift, "She just had this look on her, like she was going to spring loose all of a sudden and snap clear across to the other side of town." She gets it just right. She uses "set" for "sit," and other antique phrases with a light touch, keeping it readable, unlike Twain, whose use of phonetics in his dialect almost requires special training to interpret.

Ob and Summer are lost without May. The balance of need is gone and they both worry about being enough for each other. Ob believes that May is trying to communicate with them and experiences a visitation. This freaks out Summer. Fortuitously, a schoolmate of Summer's, named Cletus, comes into their lives and they latch on to him and he onto them and healing begins. It's Cletus's idea to visit a spiritualist preacher three hours away in Charleston. Maybe the preacher can help them contact May. Cletus's other agenda is to see something of the world--to see the magnificent, gold-domed state capitol.

The book turns into a quest, with references to The Wizard of Oz and heading to Emerald City to see if the wizard/preacher can give each of them what they lack. On the way, they pass the state capitol building.

"Then...there it was, and I know it was better than all three of us figured it would be. The capitol building sprawled gray concrete like a regal queen spreading out her petticoats, and its giant dome glittered pure gold in the morning sun. I felt in me an embarrassing sense of pride that she was ours. That we weren't just shut-down old coal mines and people on welfare like the rest of the country wanted us to believe. We were this majestic, elegant thing sitting solid, sparkling in the light."

The old man, geeky boy, and angry girl find out what Dorothy and her companions find--that you can search the world over, but the answers are at home. The quest itself fails, but in the going away and returning home, they get the sign they needed. May is free to go to her heavenly home. Summer says:

"I began to cry. I had not ever really cried for May. I had tried so hard to bear her loss and had swallowed back the tears that had been building up inside me...But nothing could keep them back once the owl disappeared from my eyes and I knew as I had never known before that I would never, ever, see May on this earth again. When I finally felt I could speak, I whispered to [Ob], 'It's been so hard missing May.' And Ob said, 'She's still here, honey. People don't ever leave us for good.'"

I highly recommend this book. It is beautiful, meaningful, and authentic. It deserves its Newbury Medal (1993) as much as any book that's ever received it--and more than many of those.