Appalachia Project: Knockemstiff, 2008

Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollack

Knockemstiff is a collection of short stories written by a Ross County, Ohio, author about a Ross County, Ohio, town. I have been through Knockemstiff. My dad and indeed many of my ancestors were born and raised in Ross County. I've been on a genealogy quest lately and am surprised, truly, by how many of my forebears lived in this very part of Ohio where I live now as early as the 1790s. One of the key towns in many of the Knockemstiff stories is Massieville, in whose cemetery many of my relatives are buried, including my paternal grandmother, Bessie Ann Grow Burns Dickerson. So, the landscape of these stories is very much my own landscape and many of my relatives followed the life path of the characters.

There are 18 stories in this 200-page book, so they really are short. (Nothing like long short stories...) And at first, I was repelled by them. The content and characters are both pretty ugly. Thieves, murderers, drug dealers and abusers, sexual deviance, family violence, grizzly pasts and grimmer futures. Knockemstiff is a dying town (and could, in a negative region-view, represent dying Appalachia itself) where the underclass is what remains...people who, unlike Gertie in The Dollmaker, just can't make the transition to an acceptable life.


However, Pollack succeeded in making these people real to me, and awakening not sympathy, but at least a bit more understanding. By the middle of the book, I could see that the stories formed an arc of some sort, tracing the pathologies of generations mutate and transmutate in expected and unexpected ways. He also records a street history of drugs abused over time, culminating in the current prominence of prescription painkillers.

The people in these stories are people I am very interested in. How do you offer hope and help to the people I work with when the world they know is so stark? How do you offer hope and help with respect? I often think that help is often a slap in the face, a belittling action, a judging action. It's my favorite butter on cold toast analogy coming up again. How does alcohol and drug rehab work when people get clean but return to a town where there are no opportunities?

I was interested in Pollack's portrayal of how prescription painkillers invaded the Knockemstiff area. They became a way of life. In one story, a couple drains the woman of blood every month (visiting several plasma centers in a single day) to keep stocked with painkillers. By taking these people seriously Pollack gave them some dignity.

I was reminded a lot of Faulkner when reading these stories. He, too, dignified the ugly, the profane, without mocking. In one of Faulkner's books a character falls in love with a cow. And you don't laugh.

Knockemstiff is not for the faint of heart or the over-sensitive. It is graphic and grim. The writing is terrific, though. Vivid descriptions, settings painted on the screen of the mind, smells, sounds. I don't think I was aided much by having driven through Knockemstiff, because these stories took place off the highway, inside barricaded homes, in caves, in trailers, in cars, in hollers, creek beds. The bleak inner landscape of the characters was recorded in their bleak structures. They could only live within what they knew. You can't really do anything else.

The people in the Knockemstiff stories are my neighbors, relatives, and friends. I must honor even their squalor, somehow. These stories help.

Appalachia Project: Back Roads, 2000

Back Roads, by Tawni O'Dell

SPOILER ALERT: Spoilers contained herein.

Back Roads is the story of Harley, a 20-year-old boy-man coping with becoming head-of-household because of the murder of his father and his mother's conviction for it. He is nominally in charge of his three sisters. All four of the siblings struggle with the losses they have sustained and the secrets they individually carry. The book is told first person from Harley's point of view and presents his psychological process in harrowing detail. Harrowing is the word I keep using for this book. It's a great book, but harrowing.

O'Dell makes no claim that this is a book of Appalachia. Facebook friend Katrinka Walker recommended it based on its setting and perhaps on its content of extreme family disruption. The book is set in the current day (of 2000) and takes place in western Pennsylvania, where abandoned coal mines are a major feature of the landscape. When the coal was deemed too dirty and the coal-mining process too hazardous, companies just walked away from their operations. Key scenes of the book take place in an abandoned mining office. The old people in the town remember the heyday of the mines as they cough up coal dust laced phlegm and die off from black lung.

I hear all the time where I live this longing for the coal. It supported families even as it killed them off. It's a regional obsession, rather like the obsession with farming in children's literature, which I've commented on before. If only we went back to family farms, we'd all be alright again. No mention of the stink and the severed limbs and the debt and the sheer crushing labor of it!

Harrowing. I'm only on the third book of my Appalachia reading project and the bane of Appalachia has come upon the scene: incest. Although O'Dell doesn't identify this book as Appalachian, she sure hit the nail on the head. I swear that incest is no more frequent in Appalachia than it is in the general population (and any incident is tragic). I think in Appalachia it is both easier and harder to hide--easier because of isolation but harder because everybody knows everybody's business. We all know who the "baby daddy" is. Maybe Appalachians are just more frank about it. Life is often pretty crappy for everybody. 

Anyway, unraveling the truth about his father's murder leads Harley to unraveling the thread of incest that inhabits his family and grieves him to his breakdown. As the story gets grimmer for Harley, it gets grimmer for the reader. I felt at times like I could not get my breath. I put the book down suddenly and walked around the house. A couple of times Harley vomits before he sobs, and I felt that. The worst thing for me was the heaviness of grief that families ever suffer in this way.

Books like A Boy Named It I think sensationalize the experiences of abused children and teenagers. They get off on it, to a degree. It's not a genre I care for. In Back Roads, O'Dell puts you right into Harley's shoes and into his head, into his confusion and delusion and fear. It is one of the most real portrayals of psychic pain I have ever read. I long to reach out and take away the suffering...but I can't. People just have to work their own way out of it. Offering material help is about the only way to demonstrate caring. One woman in the book brings food. That means something. Harley's court-ordered therapist offers patience and helps cut through red tape. At one point, she offers a safe place to sleep. That means something.

There is sex in this book, and not just incest. Harley is just experiencing his sexual awakening and thinks and talks about sex a lot. There are scenes of masturbation and sexual violence. There are scenes of incest. A part of me is truly sorry I had to read those scenes, but for another part of me, this book allowed me to process this experience vicariously in a way that I hadn't before.

And, as with all behavior, the incest behavior makes sense in the context within which it occurs. That doesn't make it right, but you can see how it happens. Here's an exchange between Harley and his therapist Betty. In her responses, she describes the various paths taken by Harley and his siblings. Harley has cut his hands.

          "Okay, there's something I want to talk about," I said to get her mind off my hands.
          She gave me a look of surprise like she had discovered a bud on a plant she expected to die. "Go on," she said.
          "How can a kid like someone who beats them up? You know. How can they like hanging out with them?"
          "Well," she began... "every child reacts to abuse differently. Some become withdrawn. Some openly hostile. Some self-destructive. But some embrace the abuse. They thrive on it. It's what they get from their abusive parent instead of love and they come to need it."
          "So you're saying a kid can actually want to get hit?"
          "In a sense."
          "Can they think that it's Okay? Morally okay?"
          "Did you think it was okay for your father to hit you?"
          "I didn't think it was okay," I said bluntly, "but I thought it was normal."

That's when I start crying. Nobody should endure it. But really nobody should think it's normal.

Blighted hope turned into mindless violence. Mindless violence turns into blighted hope. The cycle goes round and round. Maybe the murder in this book was the murderer's way of stopping the cycle, making something different happen. I wish for every child to have better choices than that.


Catcher in the Rye
Back Roads made me think about the classic adolescent novel Catcher in the Rye. Both Holden and Harley are on lonely journeys through their home turf, reassessing, realizing, recognizing. Harley lacks Holden's sardonicism, but his self-mockery is just as brutal. Both boys end up in mental institutions. In both books, the reader is engaged by the hero and then taken along through his disintegration.

When I read Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, it was so cool. Holden's self-mockery was so cool. His cursing was so cool. His self-destruction was cool. When I read the book as an adult, I felt mostly that Holden was sad. As sad as Harley is. Just sad.

And please don't tell me that boys like Holden and Harley will come out of their mental illness, that it will make them more valuable adults. I deal with Holdens and Harleys all the time. They are damaged and they most often stay damaged. The magic constituents of resilience elude us and them. If you know the recipe, please post it. Our kids need it and those of us who work with them need it.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith

     Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. More bizarro literature from Seth Grahame-Smith. Wait, let's change the word literature to writing. I'm not sure how this book, or Grahame-Smith's Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, will hold up over time as literature or that they are literature at all. They are amusing novelties, for sure, but awkward and a bit profane, if the truth be known. What sacred cow will Grahame-Smith take on next, Sue Barton: Plague Spreader Nurse?
     Still, I have to admit that AL:VH was a fun read, blurring the lines between history and fantasy, and really goring it out with beheadings, axings, gunshots point blank in the face. I couldn't wait to see how the plot device would play itself out--turns out that the Civil War was started by vampires who wanted to enslave not just Africans but everyone in America to insure a steady supply of fresh blood. The scenes of vampires preying on enslaved blacks were among the most gruesome and profane.

     Young Abe, growing up on the frontier, comes across vampires early and often. He sharpens his wits along with his trusty ax blade while his career is shaped by divine and vampiric intervention in a giganto conspiracy of "good" vampires (northern) vs. "bad" vampires (southern).
     Imagine the staid and conservative Biographies of Great Americans you used to read in your elementary school library. Now imagine one of those books ripped apart and infused with vampires. That's this book. It's like the classic girl's biography of Abigail Adams turning out to be about a guerrilla abortionist midwife rescuing women from unwanted pregnancy or something. (Now we find out why she kept trying to get John to send her more "pins.")

Abe Lincoln's weapon of choice

     I found AL:VH funny and compelling for all the wrong reasons. The distortion of reality disturbs me, because I know Colbert's concept of "truthiness" by which the thing which seems most important or truthful becomes the accepted actual truth. I was laughing at the absurdity of the concept while worrying about this book being the only exposure to Abraham Lincoln's life and work that some people might ever get. And don't get me wrong, Lincoln is portrayed heroically; he is not lampooned. Alas. There is nothing I can do about it. I think this is a plague of middle age--to worry about people not getting the past right, wanting to carry the past along into the present and the future.

Front and back cover of the book--inspired!

     What I really like, though, is that Grahame-Smith has taken his concepts and run with them. He has asked the great "what-ifs" and insisted on answers. What if Hitler was a direct and secret descendant of Thomas Jefferson from his liaison with a Jewish-African slave? What if...what if. It's an outrageous game.
     I'm alarmed that the last several books I have read (the eight Redwall books and the two by Grahame-Smith) all involved incredible violence against dehumanized enemies. Once you call someone a vampire (or a zombie, or a fox, or a rat) you can do anything to them. And that dehumanizes you/me. We want the thrills of senseless gore and violent action, but we don't want the emotional baggage. I don't believe that this reading material necessarily would lead to acting out, but I just think it bears noting.
     But, hey, it's a puff piece. Read it at the beach and wonder about every single person who comes by wearing sunglasses. Have fun with it. I did.