by Robert Coles
In point of fact Mrs. Allen is usually rather silent with her children. She almost uncannily signals them with a look on her face, a motion of her hand, a gesture or turn of her body. She doesn’t seem to have to talk, the way so many mothers elsewhere do, particularly in our suburbs. It is not that she is grim or glum or morose or withdrawn or stern or ungiving or austere; it is that she doesn’t need words to give and acknowledge the receipt of messages. The messages are constantly being sent, but the children, rather like their mother, do things in a restrained, hushed manner — with smiles or frowns, or if necessary, laughs and groans doing the service of words. Yet, there are times when that cabin on the side of a mountain will become a place where songs are sung and eloquent words are spoken. Once, after a series of winter storms had worn them all down, Mr. Allen spoke to his wife and children, at first tentatively and apologetically and then firmly: “It’s been a tough winter, this one, but they all are until they’re over, and then you kind of miss them. You don’t get a thing free in this world, that’s what was handed down to me by my father. He said if I knew that, I knew all I’d ever have to know. I heard some of you kids the other day wondering if we couldn’t go and live someplace else, where maybe there wouldn’t be so much snow and ice, and us shivering even under every blanket your mother made and her mother and my mother, and that’s a lot of blankets we’re lucky to have. I’m sure there’s better land than this, better counties to live in. You could probably find a house way off far from here, where they never get any snow, not once in the winter, and where there’s more money around for everyone. Don’t ask me where, or how you’ll get there. I don’t know.
“I was out of here, this county, only once, and it was the longest three years of my life. They took me over to Asheville, and then to Atlanta, Georgia, and then to Fort Benning, and then to Korea. Now, that was the worst time I ever had, and when I came back, I’ll tell you what I did. I swore on my Bible to my mother and my father, in front of both of them, that never again would I leave this county, and maybe not even this hollow. My daddy said I shouldn’t be so positive, because you never can tell what might happen — like another war — and I said they’d have to come up here and drag me off, and I’d have my gun out, and I couldn’t truthfully say right now if I’d use it on them or not, but I believe the word would get down to them that they’d better think it over very carefully, if they decide to come another time and take me and others who’ve given them three years already. Why do they always want us to go and fight those wars? It wasn’t only the fighting, though. It was leaving here; and once you’re over there, you never see this hollow for months and months and then you sure do know what you’re missing, Oh, do you!
“When you ask me to say it, what we have here that you can’t find anyplace else, I can’t find the words. When I’d be in Georgia and over in Korea my buddies would always be asking me why I was more homesick than everyone in the whole Army put together. I couldn’t really answer them, but I tried. I told them we have the best people in the world here, and they’d claim everyone says that about his hometown folks. Then I’d tell them we take care of each other, and we’ve been here from as far back almost as the country, and we know every inch of the hollow, and it’s the greatest place in the world, with the hills and the streams and the fish you can get. And anyone who cared to come and visit us would see what I mean, because we’d be friendly and they’d eat until they’re full, even if we had to go hungry, and they’d never stop looking around, and especially up to the hills over there, and soon they’d take to wishing they could have been borned here, too.”
Mr. Allen never stops saying such things. That is, every week or so, sometimes every day or so, he rises to the occasion — when his visitor is still recognized as just that, a visitor. A year or more later Mr. Allen still will talk affectionately of the hollow he loves, the county he loves, the region whose hills must be, so he once told me, “the most beautiful things God ever made”; still, he has his rough times, and if he bears them most of the time in silence and even pretended joy, he can slip and come out with urgent and plaintive exclamations, once he knows a visitor reasonably well: “Why can’t we have a little more money come into these hills? I don’t mean a lot of tourists coming around and prying, like you hear some people say we need. I mean some work we could get, to tide us over the winter. That’s the worst time. You start running out of the food you’ve stored, and there’s nothing you can do but hope you make it until the warm weather. We all help each other out, of course; but there’ll come times when we none of us has much of anything left, and then it’s up to the church, and the next hollow. Once they had to fly in food, it was so bad, because of the snow and the floods we had. I can’t find the littlest bit of work, and it makes you wonder sometimes. They move factories into every other part of the country, but not here. I guess it’s hard, because of the hills. We’d be good workers, though. I was taught to work from sunrise to sunset by my folks. You might think this little farm we’ve got is all that we need, but it isn’t. We’d have nothing to eat without the land we plant, but it’s money we lack, that’s for sure, and you can’t grow that. You can pick up a little money here and there — for instance they’ll come and recruit you to do work for the county on the roads or cleaning things up. But it’s not very much money you ever make, and if we didn’t really love it here, we might have left a long time ago. I’ve been all set to — but then I can’t do it. When my kids will ask me if I ever thought of leaving, I’ll say no, and why should they ask, I say to them. I guess they know I don’t want much to talk about some things, so they never push me too much. I wouldn’t let them. They’ll find out soon enough — about the misery in this world. The way I see it, life’s never easy, and you just have to choose whether you’ll stay here and live where it’s best to live — or go someplace else, where you’re feeling sad and homesick all the time, but they’ve got a lot of jobs, and you can make good money. I hope my kids think it over real hard before they decide — when they get older.”
His children love the hollow, and maybe they too will never really be able to leave. They are unmistakably poor children, and they need all sorts of things, from medical and dental care to better and more food; but they love the land near their cabin, and they know that land almost inch by inch. Indeed, from the first days of life many of the Appalachian children I have observed are almost symbolically or ritualistically given over to the land. One morning I watched Mrs. Allen come out from the cabin in order, presumably, to enjoy the sun and the warm, clear air of a May day. Her boy had just been breast-fed and was in her arms. Suddenly the mother put the child down on the ground, and gently fondled him and moved him a bit with her feet, which are not usually covered with shoes or socks. The child did not cry. The mother seemed to have almost exquisite control over her toes. It all seemed very nice, but I had no idea what Mrs. Allen really had in mind until she leaned over and spoke very gravely to her child: “This is your land, and it’s about time you started getting to know it.”
What am I to make of that? Not too much, I hope. I was, though, seeing how a particular mother played with her child, how from the very start she began to make the outside world part of her little boy’s experience. What she did and said one time she has done and said again and again in that way and in other ways. All of her children, as one might expect, come to regard the land near their cabin as something theirs, something also kind and generous and important. In my conversations with Mrs. Allen I gradually realized just how important the land was to her and her children. I could argue that the land around the cabin helped her mind achieve a certain order or pattern to what I suppose could be called motherhood. From the first months of her child’s life right on through the years, she as a mother never lets it be forgotten what makes for survival, what has to be respected and cared for and worked over if life is to continue. And so more than once she fondles her little boy on the hill’s earth and tells him how familiar he should get to feel about the little fa
rm, and on other occasions, how fine it is to be where they are and have what they have.
Are such gestures or words nonsense, in view of the hard life the Allens live? Is a mother like her whistling in the dark, and trying to teach her children to do the same? “The first thing I can remember in my whole life was my mother telling me I should be proud of myself. I recollect her telling me we had all the land, clear up to a line that she kept on pointing out. I mean, I don’t know what she said to me, not the words, but I can see her pointing up the hill and down toward the road, and there was once when she stepped hard on the earth, near the corn they were growing, I think it was, and told me and my sister that we didn’t have everything we might want and we might need, but what we did have, it was nothing to look down on; no, it was the best place in the whole world to be born — and there wasn’t anyplace prettier and nicer anywhere.
“To me, your children have to respect you, and look up to you. My daddy never let me talk back and get fresh. My mother was easier with us, but you could go so far and not a step further. She would tell us that we come from Scotland, way back, and we should be proud that our name was McIntosh, and she was one of the Mclntoshs too, and we might be having poor times, but we were a large family, and we had neighbors and uncles and aunts and cousins, and we’d stand up for each other. Most of all she’d tell us about the hollow, and who came there first, and who lives in this house and the next one. That was the first learning I got — how to leave the house and walk down the hollow a bit and come back. We were high up, and a little further along there was no more hollow, just woods and the hills. I guess they go on for miles. Once I must have gone in the wrong direction, because I was going higher up and suddenly I could see more than I ever saw before in my life. Now I know what I’d done. I’d gone clear to the top of that hill, and there I was, in that little bit of meadowland there, looking over toward the other hills. The first thing that came to me was that God must be someplace near, and I looked and looked and right then, you know — I’d say I was four — I was sure all I had to do was call on Him, like we’re told to do in church, and there He’d be. Instead, a big bird came down, right near me. Oh, it was probably a crow, but to this day I can hear the ‘caw-caw-caw,’ and he come right at me. He’d probably never seen a child like me wandering up there by herself.
“I guess I thought the bird was preparing the way for God himself, because I got down on my knees and I said, ‘Please God, be good to me,’ just like I have my kids say now, every evening they do. Well, when nothing happened after a few minutes, I must have figured that something was wrong. I started crying for my mother and my daddy, and when they didn’t come I started crying even more. But near the side of the meadow — I’ll never forget — I saw a large rock, and I went and sat down beside it, and then I climbed on to it. I must have climbed down and fallen asleep, because the next thing I remembered, my daddy was standing over me, and I was waking up. I thought he was going to be real cross at me, but he wasn’t. He said I was a good little girl for not going real wild-like and wandering all over and getting so far away they never could have found me. He carried me home on his shoulders and I can see me now, riding high on him — he was about six foot four, I think. And I can see my mother coming out to ask me if I was fine or if I was hurting anyplace. After I told her I didn’t hurt in a single place, and I just wanted to have a Coke, because I was thirsty, she said I’d been real good and learned my lessons. ‘Trust the woods and the paths there. If you ever get lost again, sit someplace, just like you did, in an open spot, and well get to you.’ She must have said something like that, because that’s what I seem to hear her telling me even now.
“I think I try to go along with my folks, the way they used to look at things when we were kids. My daddy, he’s seventy and as strong as can be, even if he gets his dizzy spells. My mother died a long time ago, giving birth to my youngest brother — yes, right here in this very room it was. She started bleeding real bad, and it just never stopped. My folks taught us all to be respectful to them and to anyone else we met who was grown up, and I hope my kids will always be like that. I never try to fool myself or the kids, though. I tell them there’s a lot of bad people in the world, some of them right here in this county. I don’t believe anyone living up this hollow is bad, no sir; but I know for sure some of the people we see in church, they’re crooked as the day is long — and that’s what my father would say, and he’d point them out to us. I tell the kids they’ve got to know that the world’s not so good, and there’s a lot of trouble going on, and you can’t be sure of someone until you know him pretty good. But you can be polite, and you should be, that’s how I feel. You ought to behave yourself with someone, even if you don’t much like him. The other thing is, never forget who’s your kin, and who you always can trust. When one of my kids starts getting all teary, and there’s something bothering him, you know — then is the time for me to help as best I can; and there’s nothing that’ll work better than getting a child to see if the chickens have laid any new eggs, or to count how many tomatoes there are hanging on the plants, ready for us to pick. I’ll take the child up the path and we’ll pick a few berries, or do something; it don’t make a difference what, so long as I can say how lucky we are to be here, with the land we have. And God forbid a son of mine will be taken overseas to fight like my husband was. But he saw the world, all over he did; and he couldn’t get back here too soon, that’s for sure.”
She loves her children and she loves her property. When she holds an infant in her arms she often will sing. She sings songs about hunting and fighting and struggling, songs that almost invariably express the proud, defiant spirit of people who may lack many things, but know very clearly what they don’t lack: “I tell the kids there’s more to life than having a lot of money and a big brick house, like some of them have down towards town. Here we’ve got our chickens and we’ve got good land; oh, it’s not the best there ever was, and we could use twice its size, but we get all you can from it, the vegetables, and with the preserves I put up, I make sure we have something right through most of the year. The other day I was trying to get my oldest boy to help me, and he was getting more stubborn by the minute. I wanted him to clean up some of the mess the chickens make, and all he could tell me was that they’ll make the same mess again. I told him to stop making up excuses and help me right this minute, and he did. While we were working, I told him that the only thing we had was the house and the land, and if we didn’t learn to take care of what we have, we’d soon have nothing, and how would he like that. He went along with me, of course. But you have to keep after the child, until he knows what’s important for him to do.”
Mrs. Allen’s attitude toward the land is by no means rare among the families I have worked with in the Appalachian Mountains. In fact, an observer can make some generalizations about how children are brought up in, say, western North Carolina or eastern Kentucky and West Virginia if he looks at the land as a sort of unifying theme. From the first months of childhood to later years, the land and the woods and the hills figure prominently in the lives of mountain children, not to mention their parents. As a result, the tasks and struggles that confront all children take on a particular and characteristic quality among Appalachian children, a quality that has to do with learning about one’s roots, one’s place, one’s territory, as a central fact, perhaps the central fact of existence.
In Wolfe County, Kentucky, I became rather friendly with a whole hollow of Workmans and Taylors, all related to one another. There were one or two other families, whose names sounded different; yet, I came to find out that the wife, in each case, was also a Workman or a Taylor. The Workmans had followed a stream up a hill well over a century ago and are still there, in cabins all along Deep Hollow, so named because it is one of the steepest hollows around. They were the family I lived with the longest there and observed more intensely and casually — in a mixture I can’t quantify — than any other. All the time I was there Mr. and Mrs. Kennet
h Workman wanted me to be doing something, to be a worker — true to their name — as are all Workmans in that hollow. They asked me how things were going, how I felt about the mountains, and how my spirits were now that I was so high up and so near to God. They wanted to know whether one day I might move nearby and give my wife and children “a taste of good living.” Yet, I had come to Deep Hollow warned about suspicious, withdrawn people who wanted no part of strangers.
Kenneth Workman is forty as I write this. He is now a small farmer. He used to dig for coal in the mines down in Harlan County, Kentucky, but he was lucky enough to lose his job in 1954. Many of the older men he worked with also lost their jobs around that time, when the mines were becoming increasingly automated, but they came back to Wolfe County sick, injured, often near death. Their lungs were eaten up with “black lung,” with pneumoconiosis as doctors call it when coal dust gets into the sensitive fragile organ and progressively kills one section after another. The men were sick on other counts too: their backs had been injured in mine accidents, or their necks, or the muscles and bones of their legs and arms. Some of them had not only “black lung” but tuberculosis too; and years of fear and anxiety while working underground had taken a heavy toll on their minds. Kenneth Workman talks with little prodding about the mines and his fellow miners and Harlan County and Wolfe County — and also about his children, especially if he has a shot or two of the moonshine that he and his brothers and uncles and cousins make out of the corn they all grow: “I never made so much money in my life and I never will again, I’m sure of that. I’d stay there all week in Harlan County, and then I’d drive home to be with Laura and the babies. I was twenty when I got the job; it was in 1950 I believe. They suddenly needed all the men they could get, because the government was building up the Army again, to go fight in Korea, and there was a big demand on the coal mines. The draft people called me, and they said I’d be doing Wolfe County and the United States a bigger favor if I stayed a miner and not go into the Army, and I said that was all right by me — yes sir, it was. My daddy said he was real sorry to see me go down into the mines, but up this hollow we don’t see much money. We keep going, and we’re not going to be pushed out of here by anyone; but when you get a chance to bring in some money, a lot of it, and regular, each week, you don’t mind leaving — and I came back every Friday night. I got a car and paid for it, and I got us things, like the radio and the furniture and the television and the refrigerator. If it hadn’t been for those four years, we’d be living a lot poorer, Laura and me and the children.