Appalachia Project: A Parchment of Leaves, 2002

A Parchment of Leaves, by Silas House, 2002

"Then I noticed the new leaves on the redbud tree. The purple buds were being pushed away to make way for the leaves. I walked out to the tree and put my finger to a leaf, smooth like it was coated with wax. I could feel its veins, wet and round. I had always found comfort in the leaves, in their silence. They were like a parchment that holds the words of wisdom. Simply holding them in my hand gave me some of the peace that a tree possesses. To be like that--to just be--that's the most noble thing of all." (page 218)


The redbud tree is a key symbol in A Parchment of Leaves, by Silas House. The book tells the story of Vine, a Cherokee, as she negotiates divergent worlds and worldviews. Her family had settled in Kentucky after eluding the Trail of Tears (during which Cherokee people were removed from North Carolina to the reservations in the west), so she was always a displaced person of a kind. Her marriage to the white man Saul was equally a displacement, into yet another set of values and aesthetics. Vine experiences yet another disruption when her birth family is forcibly removed from their home when a white person purchases the land they lived on for generations. The family returns to North Carolina, where a Cherokee settlement has survived, but Vine is left on her own to hold onto her sense of identity as a woman, wife, mother, Cherokee, friend, and child of god.

Vine's father tried to be as "normal" (non-Cherokee) as possible in raising Vine. After the return to North Carolina, we learn that he has restored himself to his native identity. I was hoping for a depiction of this, and for Vine to take part in it, but the author wisely stopped the story when he should. I want a next book that tells this story.

Place and Time

The book is set in the mountains of eastern Kentucky and the land is beautifully described. Vine cannot see herself as separate from the land, the streams, the soil, the rock. She grew up among and in them. The book takes place between about 1913 and 1920 and encompasses World War I. The war plays a role in the plot, as Vine's husband must live away from home to work in a job that keeps him from going overseas.


Like Christy, A Parchment of Leaves depicts a spiritual journey. But Vine's god is not up in heaven or in a book. Vine's god is in the wind and in the trees and all of the other living things. Vine's god is in the yearning she has to comfort her children, make love with her husband. The paragraph I quoted at the beginning of this post, in addition to explicating the title of the book, is one of the clearest statements of Vine's relationship to the most sacred--the earth and the life upon it. She brings the redbud tree from her birth home when she gets married and its fragility, peril, and growth and beauty parallel her own. The tree recurs as a source of strength for Vine. (And makes me want to plant one in my yard next fall.)

Please see below for a poem I wrote called "Strong Like a Tree," that expresses a sentiment similar to the one stated by Vine at the beginning of this post.

Parchment starts and stays slow until about two-thirds of the way through. It's almost like the author doesn't have enough confidence in our understanding of Vine and so he goes out of his way to establish her goodness and credibility. Several times I felt like the other shoe was going to drop, my heart beat faster as I turned the page, and then nothing big happened. Honestly, if I hadn't committed to reading the book for this project, I don't know if I would have stuck with it. Now, I'm so glad I did. I guess the author's strategy worked, because I feel absolutely committed to Vine now and shed tears for her and felt pain for her.

Matriarchy

The book starts out as a story of a courtship and marriage but evolves into the story of a group of women. These are Saul's mother, Esme; Saul's brother's wife, Aidia; and the divorced (gasp!) midwife, Serena; as well as Vine. As is still common in Appalachia, good men go away to work wherever they can find a job and bad men drink too much, get in trouble, and wander off. This leaves a family group of women, a matriarchy. Esme is the matriarch. Vine is sort of matriarch-in-training. Each woman has one child.

The story of the friendship and mothership that evolves among these women is beautiful. They support each other through so much. And over and over again, they put aside opinions and judgments to reach out to each other. The children are part of their mothers, always referenced, always on the hip, under the kitchen table, wrapped in a quilt. It was striking and yet subtle, as it is in real life, that once a child is there, it is always there, a constant. The relationship of the women to each other and to their children, in addition to a spouse, makes them rich.

I did think that the author left the women an inordinate amount of time for pursuit of their own interests, for roaming around, and resting. A huge unspoken absence was laundry. When you have a family and have to carry and heat water, you work on laundry all the time. Even "modern" women with kids do wash almost every day. Cooking also seemed to be a snap. These women would have been bone tired most of the time, although their informal cooperative did allow for shared labor. There was a golden glow where housework and farm work was concerned.

Striking Images

• Vine returns to the village of her birth to find all of the houses destroyed. She locates her family's homesite by the orientation of the trees and finds the slab of rock that was the front stoop. She sits there remembering until she is run off by the owner of the mountain, who thinks a piece of paper lets you possess something.
• Vine setting out on a horse to cross the mountains to find her people in North Carolina, carrying with her the lock of hair of her great-grandmother who first left North Carolina to live in Kentucky.
• Marvelous depiction of a pentacostal church service, where Vine is amused and terrified. She was raised as a Quaker, very quietly worshipful. The singing, speaking in tongues, flailing on the floor, and general chaos were outside of her realm of experience and unlike anything she had ever considered to be worshipful.
• The combing of hair, Vine's by her mother; daughter Birdie's by Vine.
• The washing of the bodies of the dead--a woman's duty. All four women perform this task.

Cherokee People

Author Silas House, who is part
Cherokee

When I decided to read novels of Appalachia, I did not think about native Americans. One of the reasons I chose to read this book second was that I was curious about the role the Cherokee played in the region. They are one of the few native groups that still reside in the land of their ancestors, even if they had to reclaim it after the Trail of Tears. In Ohio, the native Americans were moved out before large-scale settlement occurred; they have not been part of my personal experience of Appalachia. Because of earlier studies, I at least am aware that a strange void existed where there should have been people. We whites were able to envision the land in our own way, impose our values without interference from people who had actually lived there and knew the place.


Strong Like a Tree, by Joy Dickerson

I want to be strong like a tree

With a sturdy wooden trunk,

A crown of dancing green.

I want to feel sap rise,

Hear leaves shake,

Grow back broken branches.

I want to sway in the wind,

Capture the light of the sun,

Taste rain.

I want to be strong like a tree,

Roots making love to the soil,

Holding fast,

Bounty of earth

In my grasp.

I want to be strong like a tree,

To know in my heartwood

That spring will come

And, with it, bring

A warm time.

Conclusion

A Parchment of Leaves is excellent, as a depiction of Appalachia, but more so as a story of one woman's struggle to hold onto meaning and love. If you've read this book, I'd love to hear from you about your response to it.

Appalachia Project: What Is Appalachia?

For the purposes of my reading project, I am using the political definition of Appalachia as formulated by the Appalachian Regional Commission, the ARC (www.arc.gov) (see below). The county I live in, Vinton County, Ohio, is in red, distressed. The classications are based on economy, population, education levels, employment opportunities, and other factors.

I am not an expert on Appalachia. This blog post presents my own private conceptualization of the region.




Geologically, the Appalachian mountain ranges stretch in a broad curve from eastern Arkansas through western New York and into eastern Canada. And, if you take plate tectionics into account, they extend into northern Ireland and Scotland. You can see from the map to the right how North America and Eurasia were neighbors earlier in Earth history. The tectonic idea is cool when you realize how many people from those areas moved so far only to settle in the same mountains. Thanks to author Sharyn McCrumb for introducing me to this idea.



A cabin at Niches, McArthur, Ohio,
 where I reconnected to Appalachia.

My personal definition of Appalachia has evolved to include emotional, genetic, and economic factors, in addition to geology. I was the one in my family who was called back, called to return. I began by camping in this region and ended up by moving in permanently. It just felt like home. My ancestors were fully established in southeast Ohio by about 1840--and I mean on both sides of my great-grandparents' families. Their gravestones are gradually disintegrating within about 40 miles of my house.


THIS land is my land. Can ya' hear me?

To me, Appalachia is poor, slow to embrace change, suspicious of authority (in the schools and government), and slow to trust outsiders. It is also beautiful, resourceful, generous, funny, and rich in family and history. People feel tied to the land in a different way than in more urbanized areas. I feel tied to the land in a way I never imagined. When I sing "This Land Is My Land," I really mean this land, right here, right under my feet. "This land" is not an abstraction to me anymore. Some things about Appalachia drive me crazy. Some things make me cry. Some things fill me with gladness and Joy (myself).

Tourists don't usually see
the slum side of Jamaica.

Conceptual Models
Third world model. I often view Appalachia, and particularly the place where I live, as a third world country. We are largely dependent on extractive industries (timber, coal, natural gas) that we sell wholesale. Our raw materials are made into products and sold retail and the profits do not return proportionately to our region. Further, people keep trying to tell us that tourism is the salvation of our economy. But tourism is low-paying for the boots on the ground. Again, the real money often leaves the community. And, it is still other-centered, not a development of us for us. Like many third world countries, there might be a prosperous looking tourist "strip" masking neighborhoods of great poverty.

Matriarchal model. The key unit of community in Appalachia is the extended family, often overseen by a matriarch and supported by female breadwinners (at a lower rate of pay than male breadwinners). Men come and go out of this system, sometimes providing only sperm. People socialize within the family and do not build relationships outside it. Part of this stems from historic isolation of families (see density model below). An interesting part of a federal jobs program I have been working with is that the workers have been forming non-family community relationships. I think the results from this may be more revolutionary than the income generated by the jobs. The matriarchy is a key strength of Appalachia, but it can also deaden opportunity and stifle new ideas.

Poverty model. The characteristics often listed for Appalachia continguate with poverty characteristics. The problems of Appalachia are the problems of poverty, but spread out, diluted over many hundreds of square miles. We are hard to reach. The health and education issues are the same. Teen pregnancy, alcohol and drug abuse, and epidemic tobacco use are prevalent. That's why I'm an anti-poverty crusader as well as an Appalachia booster.

Density model. As mentioned above, we are spread thin. Vinton County, Ohio, is the most sparsely populated county in the state, in terms of people per square mile. This makes service delivery and transportation to services difficult and expensive. It also allows for privacy in a gruesome sense--no close neighbors to look out for methamphetamine labs, abused or hungry children or spouses, living standards. No gossip, in other words, which is amusing because in town (the tiny town of McArthur, population about 1,000) there are NO secrets. Everybody knows everything. I sometimes try to imagine what would happen if my county were simply closed. Move out all the people. Let it all go fallow. It's so empty anyway. It's just an idea I toy with. And, it demonstrates the parallel between the current treatment of Appalachian people and the historic treatment of native Americans. Move them off their land and disappear them into society as a whole. Get hands on land.

From ARC website:
ARC's mission is to be a strategic partner and advocate for sustainable community and economic development in Appalachia.
The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) is a regional economic development agency that represents a partnership of federal, state, and local government. Established by an act of Congress in 1965, ARC is composed of the governors of the 13 Appalachian states and a federal co-chair, who is appointed by the president. Local participation is provided through multi-county local development districts.
ARC funds projects that address the four goals identified in the Commission's strategic plan:

1. Increase job opportunities and per capita income in Appalachia to reach parity with the nation.
2. Strengthen the capacity of the people of Appalachia to compete in the global economy.
3. Develop and improve Appalachia's infrastructure to make the Region economically competitive.
4. Build the Appalachian Development Highway System to reduce Appalachia's isolation.

The Appalachian Region, as defined in ARC's authorizing legislation, is a 205,000-square-mile region that follows the spine of the Appalachian Mountains from southern New York to northern Mississippi. It includes all of West Virginia and parts of 12 other states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Forty-two percent of the Region's population is rural, compared with 20 percent of the national population.

The Region's economy, once highly dependent on mining, forestry, agriculture, chemical industries, and heavy industry, has become more diversified in recent times, and now includes a variety of manufacturing and service industries. In 1965, one in three Appalachians lived in poverty. Over the 2007–2011 period, the Region's poverty rate was 16.1 percent. The number of Appalachian counties considered economically distressed was 223 in 1965; in fiscal year 2014 that number is 93.

These gains have transformed the Region from one of widespread poverty to one of economic contrasts: some communities have successfully diversified their economies, while others still require basic infrastructure such as roads and water and sewer systems. The contrasts are not surprising in light of the Region's size and diversity. The Region includes 420 counties in 13 states. It extends more than 1,000 miles, from southern New York to northeastern Mississippi, and is home to more than 25 million people.

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.

Peace Poem 4

Peace Breeze

by Joy Dickerson

Peace recedes
Wreathed in weeds
Beaded in seeds
Swathed in sweet
Ebullient breeze
Peace leaves

Peace heeds

Scented sweet peas
Riffling reeds
Veeing geese
Leaves of three
Let it be

Peace sheathes
The honeybees

The gleaming wheat
With rain in sheets
Summer heats
Moonbeams

Peace leaves
Wreathed in weeds
Beaded in seeds
Swathed in sweet
Ebullient breeze

Peace recedes

Appalachia Titles Request

For my next reading project, I would like to develop a list of novels that truly reflect the Appalachian experience in all its glory, vainglory, and ignominy.

Here are some of the books already suggested:

• The Dollmaker
• Prodigal Summer
• Christy
• Out of the Redbrush
• Hunger Games
• The Song Catcher
• Rosewood Casket

I want to know what book titles you would put add to this reading list.

Please respond in the comments section of this blog or message me (Joy Dickerson) on Facebook.

Thanks.

Joy

Peace Poem 3

Dona Nobis Pacem

by Joy E. Dickerson

Darkness lengthens. Shadows
Outline bare branches.
Nest lies broken on the ground
As if birds never again return.

Now the winter peace has come.
Oak leaf shivers brown.
Blackbird caws.
Icicle shimmers like glinted peace.
Snowflake falls crystal-quiet.

Pull down a blanket of silent snow so
All be peaceful on the eastern front and south and north and west.
Capture peace like snowflake on the tongue.
Embrace it as you would a crying child.
Murmur, "peace has come."

Peace Poem 2

Second in a series of poems about peace to celebrate the holiday season.

Peace: A Fantasy  

by Joy E. Dickerson

We cannot find it if we cannot imagine it. 

Here is my imagined gift for you,

For birthday,

Christmas,

Hanukkah,

Anniversary,

For graduating from eighth grade:

You will receive true peace on earth.

All fighting shall cease

All weapons and violent acts will disappear

Coercion and propaganda

Will shimmer like heat over a fire

And vanish.

Love will fill every heart and we will

Weep for all of the potential we have destroyed.

Then through the weeping will come a great quiet

And through the quiet will come a voice singing

And then another, and then a million voices, 8 billion voices.

No more, no more, will be the refrain.

No more Nagasaki, no more My Lai

No more Hitler, no more Charles Manson,

No more bullying,

No more hatred,

No more poisoning of the spirit,

No more, no more.

The singing will swell into a great healing

And eternity will begin.

We cannot find it if we cannot imagine it.