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: Christy, 1967

Christy, by Catherine Marshall, 1967

In 1912, young Christy Huddleston is inspired by a sermon to move to one of the poorest areas of Appalachia to teach at a mission school. She faces danger, sickness, and ignorance, but also beauty, friendship, and love. The book is a love story, a mystery, a bit of (specious?) anthropology, and a coming-of-age story, but primarily it is the story of Christy's spiritual journey from an other-directed theology to a personal experience of a personal god.

In a way Christy is a classic governess story, in the same vein as "The Sound of Music" or a Phyllis Whitney novel. Ingenue travels to alien place to grow up and find love with the alpha male. Winning the trust of children is always a part of it. Marshall chose an intriguing setting, the fictional mountain area called Cutter Gap, set in the hollers and ridgetops of the Smokies. And she added the depiction of Christy's spiritual growth. Both of these decisions elevated the book above "summer paperback" status.

Christy is set in the fictional Cutter Gap, near the fictional El Plano in East Tennessee. The setting is near the town of Del Rio, Tennessee, which is right on the Tennessee/North Carolina border about 60 miles due east of Knoxville. In the 1930s, as happened in so many Appalachian communities, including the area of Ohio where I live, the federal government bought up land to create the national park system. Many remote communities were virtually dissolved at this time. If you can find the documentary "A Forest Returns," it will tell you this story as an oral history. View a short clip at http://youtu.be/pXNLh1K7Lmw or go to www.ohiolandscape.org.

I own this book and read it from the original paperback I have from 1968. I've read this book three or four times and always liked it. My old copy of it is fingerprinted and dog-eared. I don't think I read Christy until I was in junior high school, though, maybe between 1970 and 1973 or so. Several of my old friends from the "Bloomfield Mafia" Facebook group suggested that this book be put on the list, so many of us must have read it around the same time. My sister Judy Graybill read it, also. The paper was yellowed and the type was fading, so I read all 500+ pages with a magnifying glass--quite a two-handed chore. This is the first time I've had to read this way and it has spurred me to make an eye doctor appointment in the near future. Marshall's tight plotting of the story kept me reading despite the inconvenience.

Marshall's writing is clear and vivid and loving, in that the author is lovingly retelling the story of her mother's early adulthood, events that had taken on legendary prominence in Marshall's childhood. Marshall visited the mountain community and captured lively detail. Christy's sense of smell is almost a featured character in the book and led to the inclusion of odors and scents with almost every scene, which placed me right in the picture. In a grotesque scene in which Christy must change a teenage boy's diaper, which he has soiled with typhoid diarrhea, Christy's decision to put a clothespin on her nose provided just enough humor to get me through.

And, from my own experiences with the poor, I understand the odor thing. Many people I come in contact with have body odor, or the odor of unwashed clothing, or a miasma of cigarette smoke (stale and fresh) hugging them like a fetid cloak. Like Christy, I force myself to put my nose aside while I'm with the person. But I keep a spray can of Fabreeze on my desk and spray away the smell as soon as the person has left the parking lot (if I spray too soon, they always catch me at it).

Besides the smells, Christy must deal with people who speak almost a different language, and who follow a code of behavior that she doesn't understand. She has to conquer her own squeamishness and missishness and is led therefrom to really see the other person, with the veil of self interest drawn back. In other words, Christy grows up.

As soon as the doctor says, "It's typhoid," the book shifts into a higher gear. Christy and the people in her life are fighting death, looking it right in the face. This section of the book is grueling and painful and sad. I agonized over which beloved character was going to be announced next to be ill. Part of this being a great book is this awakening of compassion in the reader, how much I cared. I was right there.

The ending of this novel is masterful, full of impact, stunning, really. If you follow this blog, you know how many times I have felt that the author just didn't know where to end. Not Marshall. Her last sentence is the most exciting one in the whole book. Pow. I was left with a feeling of elation and beauty, even jaded as I am and having read and reread this book. Good job!

The themes in Christy range from the power of love to the need to accept the gifts/trials life gives you. On page 27 in Chapter 1, Marshall describes the wind in the mountains--Christy is on her train trip to the mountains and steps off the train for a minute. "Now the snow was beginning to fall again, with the wind rising. It was a strange wind, a whimpering sobbing wind, with pain in it....But there was something different about this wind. It was not a single note, but many notes playing up and down the scale, harmonizing at one moment, discordant the next, retreating, advancing." This passage is the first real statement of theme, that the book will be about suffering and possibly transcendence and that you can't have one without the other.

In terms of the depiction of Appalachia, I realized that this story is really Christy's and that Appalachia is the backdrop for her growth and development as a person and as a Christian. The Appalachian people played sort of the "noble savage" role, and we did not at all hear their side of the story. Christy could have worked against many an underprivileged background (and has--this book is well-done, but the premise is time-honored). She marvelled at the good qualities, like they were a wonder, against the backdrop of squalor. 

The theme that God's love is personal and transformational was beautifully drawn, but it was the non-Appalachians who got transformed by it. The doctor (who was from Cutter Gap but had been educated out of its backwards ways), Christy, and David the preacher all used the Appalachian people and mountains as sort of (unchanging) catalysts for their own spiritual journeys. The book is an outsider's portrayal of the culture and people.

I think one of the reasons I love this book so much is that it is a true hero journey for Christy and some of the other characters. The classic theme of quest literature is strong here, that you have to lose yourself to find yourself. A strong female hero journey is hard to find. Christy was strong, individualized, self-determining, and brave. She faced the dangers and hazards inside herself as well as the ones outside her. The Gandalf role is played by a woman also, the spiritually attuned Alice Henderson.

This could be (left to right) the doctor, the
preacher, Christy, and Miss Ida (the
preacher's sister in Christy.

The book presents a picture of Appalachia and the picture is not inaccurate. But please keep in mind that it is not a story of Appalachia. You could substitute Middle Earth or Shangri-La or Moonbase Alpha or Camelot or the Land of Oz and tell the same story. The book is unabashedly Christian, and it does it well. I don't know how people from other faiths would feel about the story. You can read the story substituting "love" for the word god, probably, but that kind of awkward translation would probably ruin the experience.

All of the stereotypes of Appalachia are in this book--feuding, ignorance, unwashedness, sourness, frequent pregnancies, hopelessness on the one hand, and on the other the idealization of the musicality, artistic/folk gifts, and elevated Scots-Irish ancestry. The descriptions of landscape are breathtaking. I have not much comment to make on this. But I do look forward to other books in which the Appalachian voice is itself heard. I want to know what that voice has to say.