by Robert Coles
The woods, its earth and its bushes and its grassland were meant to grow things and receive things, she believes, and there is no reason to become worried and self-conscious and fussy. Yet, I do not mean to imply that a mother like Laura Workman doesn’t have some very definite and explicit ideas about cleanliness and order and personal neatness, about the way a day should go and the way a child should look and arrange his things and the way, for that matter, a whole hollow should appear: “I try to teach my children to be good to each other and to anyone they meet. They shouldn’t be fresh; and they shouldn’t speak unless spoken to, not when there are grown-ups around. By themselves, that is different. The important thing for a child to know is that he’s reflecting on his mother and his daddy and himself, too; I mean, if he’s a mean one, and he doesn’t act to help the next person, then it’s all of us — the Workman family and the Taylor family, I guess — who’s going to pay for it. The minister says the Lord sort of keeps his accounts on how we’re behaving, yes; and if we think we can slip by His big net, then we’re kidding ourselves real, real bad. I told Danny the other day that there’s no reason for him to spill his food on his shirt, and he shrugged back at me. Then I told him it was going to mean that the shirt would look bad on him, and soon I’d be washing it again, and each time, you know, the poor shirt gets fainter and fainter, and pretty soon you won’t be seeing the colors, and it’ll be thinner, and the holes will come.
“Now Danny’s daddy is no millionaire, and he’s got to know he can’t be causing us to go down to that store and be buying extra shirts, more than is necessary, and trading off the jars of food I’ve put up. In February we’ll miss that food bad, real bad, and they’ll be eating it, Mrs. Campbell and her brood at the store, and Danny will be hungry. I’m not going to let all that happen, because if the child learns to mind you, then he’ll be doing right, and none of us will be suffering. Every day I have to tell the children that if they don’t act more careful about something — there’s always temptation around here, like in the Bible — then they’re going to pay for it later on, because you just can’t help suffering if you go and make mistakes.
“There’s a God in Heaven, and He gave us this hollow, and it’s the nicest place in His Kingdom, it must be. I want the children to remember that in addition to us owning this, it’s God’s, so they must not misbehave. Their daddy makes them help with the weeding and we make sure they carry all they pick over to the pile over there. A lot of the trash we’ll bury or burn right up and there’s no problem. I’ll admit the creek down below looks awful bad. The kids will throw things in, and they expect the water to carry everything away. I tell them no until I’ve about lost my voice, but it’s hard; they see the mess all over, and they see the other kids adding to it, and I’ll be honest with you, their own kin, right down that hollow, they do the same. Mr. Workman went and spoke to his brother, and they agreed, but his wife, my sister-in-law, she’s — well, she’s no good at keeping her kids in line, she just can’t do it. She’ll raise her voice on them, and they’ll turn and laugh. Their daddy, that’s a different story. One look from him and anyone, no matter the age, would go along and do what he wants. The trouble there is he drinks up too much of his corn liquor, Ken’s brother does, instead of selling it, like he ought to do.. If we didn’t sell what we make, there’d be all that less money and it would be harder than it already is.
“If I was to compare my kids against others in the hollow, like you say, then I’d have to call mine more of their own mind than a lot of the others. Maybe it’s because we’re just about the last one up here, before the hill reaches the top, so we do things more by ourselves than some below, lower down there in the hollow. Maybe it’s me. I think most of the kids in the hollow are God-fearing boys and girls, and if there’s differences, they don’t amount to much, because we’re more alike on most things, I’d say. You go and ask any mother in this hollow, or any of the others in Wolfe County, how their kids are turning out, and they’ll say, ‘Pretty good!’ That’s what I’d say about mine. I like for them to obey, and when they’re called to do something, to snap right to it, and go ahead. A lot of the time I’m too busy, or I’m not feeling good, and they go ahead and slip up, and they make their mistakes, I know; but I guess we all do. I try to teach Danny to wash his face when he goes swimming in the creek. He’ll forget, though. It’s only natural. I try to tell little Dorothy that she should act like a lady, and not be always fighting, but I did the same when I was her age — I can even remember doing like her, fighting and raising Hell all day long, to be honest about it. I’d never admit that to her! Most of all I want for my children to be good, and work hard, and like I said before, they should be God-fearing.
“I’ve sent a lot of children down to our school, and they may not always have the best clothes on, and they may behave real foolish-like some of the time, but I think the teacher would tell you that every one of them is proud of his mother and his father, and proud to be born here in Deep Hollow, and proud of what they’ve tried to do, small though they are, to be of help to us all — even if they’ve each given us trouble, as a child always will. Don’t you believe they all do, when they’re growing up? A child who doesn’t give you trouble, there’s really something wrong with that child. I think, to be real open now with you, I really think I could have been stricter sometimes with them. I’ll talk as strict as I can, but I’m not doing like I preach, and our minister says that’s the worst a person can do. Their father, he’s as bad. He’ll go and tell them to do things for him, then he’ll forget, and sometimes he’ll ask them why they’re doing a chore, when it was he that told them to go do it. Another thing: he’s been too quick to give the boys that whiskey they make. Our son Alan and his wife — she comes from right near the store, a mile or so, and there’s a little money in her family — they both are too independent and full of themselves, and it’s telling on their babies, if you ask me. She keeps a poor house, she does. She’s spoiled; and he makes it worse with the liquor he takes, and he feeds it to her.
“There will be a time I take some liquor, to ease the pains I get. I get them all over — my chest and my shoulder and my knees and my fingers. I’m getting old, it must be that. But I’ve got my children to raise up, the last of them, and I don’t want them to turn out bad. I’d like them to be sober and know how to take their liquor, so they don’t go falling all over and forget the things they’re supposed to do. I’d like them to learn the most they can in school, even if there’s not much point in spending too much time there, you know, because if you keep your eyes open and your ears, too — well, then, you’ll learn most of what you have to know right here, doing the work that you should. My son Tim — you’ve only met him a couple of times — is probably the best of the children; I mean he turned out best. He has a good job working in a garage over in Campton. It’s hard not having him here with us, but he has a car, and it’s a good one, and he drives over with his family a few times a week. They have a good place to live, right outside of Campton. He learned how to work on those cars from when he was a boy; I never could figure out how he learned it all so fast. No, he never went beyond the school there near the hollow, but the teacher had him fix her car, and she recommended him to the garage in Campton, and I let him go. He said they’d give him a place to stay a few days of the week, and he could come over and work for them. Then he met a girl over there and the next thing we know that was our second son married, and now we’ve got grandchildren and they’re nice to have, just like your own are.
“Tim disappointed a lot of his kin here in the Hollow. They kept on asking him why did he want to leave us, and aren’t we good enough for him. I told them to stop, but I’ll admit it, I miss him, too. We can’t drive over there to Campton, but he’s here in half an hour — maybe less, I think. He’s a loyal son, don’t get me wrong, but he always was the one who wanted things his way, and not ours, and I had a real fight with him more than one time, oh did I! I told him to stop being so all-certain of hims
elf and listen to me and his daddy. He said I was always telling them, the children, to be sure of themselves, and don’t let a soul turn your mind around from what you’ve made it up to be — so that’s what he was trying to do; but you can carry a thing too far, that’s what. But he’s all right, and we’re proud of him. He’ll often bring us some money we sorely need, too; and we sure have to be grateful for that. We don’t get all that much money, and when your son comes over and gives you five dollars and says there it is, all for you, and not to pay any back — that’s a day to go and celebrate, you bet.
“I think we find our times to celebrate anyways, yes. You can’t just sit and stare and worry, even if you know you have plenty of reasons to. I’ll wake up some of the time, and I’ll be scratching myself, asking myself what am I going to give those children when they come and expect a good breakfast, and we don’t have the eggs, because there’s a limit to what even good chickens can lay, and we’re down to the last of the bread and I just don’t have one single penny in my house, not one, and I need the biscuits for later, because there’s two more meals coming up that day, not to mention the next one. I can’t go and catch a little liquor, like Ken does. I have to do the best I can. Most of the time I’ll persuade everyone to have some coffee we have and wait until the sun is in the middle of the sky and they’re all really hungry. You see what I’m doing, don’t you? I’m fooling them and I’m coaxing them to be nice and help me and not ask for breakfast; and they know it, but they’ll never say they do. The only one that did — I guess it’s true — was Tim; he would get himself worked up and tell his father we ought to go and see the county people and demand our rights. Well, what rights, their father would say.
“Then they’d start their fighting — Tim would be ten or more, I guess. Tim would tell his father we could do something, and his father would tell Tim to stop looking for trouble, and besides we have the best place in the world up here in Deep Hollow. Ken sometimes would say to Tim that he has a real bad disposition, and he always looks at the black side of the world, like the minister will describe, and that’s bad, because you lose your faith that way — in God — and you get sour with people, and Tim could be that a lot, sour. I was fearful for his wife, how she would find him, but she says he’s always in real good spirits, and maybe it’s because he’s got that job he likes so much, over there in Campton. He told his brother Alan to come on over and maybe he could learn to do the work, too; but Alan said no sir, you can have your job, because who wants to go and live in Campton, even if it is in Wolfe County, like you say. So, they never agree with each other. I guess everyone has his different moods, and people see things different, real different, and that’s always the case, I believe that — though I think all of us here in this family, and the others in the hollow see eye to eye on most things, if you get right down to it. I’ll bet there’s not one person here who wouldn’t walk up the hill there and look as far as he could and come back and say we’re the luckiest people that ever was, to be here; and yes, I’m including Tim, him too.”
Everyone in the Workman family, including Tim, does indeed love Deep Hollow; but they all have their doubts and misgivings about the hollow, too — and they naturally would, because they have a tough life, a fact they both recognize and strongly deny. I am not writing about the Workmans in order to show how hurt and impoverished they are, nor to prove them the strongest, proudest, most self-reliant and self-possessed of people. The truth of their lives, as the flow of Mrs. Workman’s remarks suggested, can only be found in a mixture. Families like the Workmans are proud, yet feel weak and vulnerable. Such families can be faultlessly neat, yet succumb to disorder and even chaos as they try hard to deal with very concrete and painful circumstances, like hunger that goes unappeased by food, and freezing temperatures that enter and take over a house with only one fireplace and no heating system.
People like Kenneth and Laura Workman struggle with other contradictions, too. They struggle to affirm themselves and not fall victim to despair. Put a little differently, they feel at times energetically ambitious and anxious to accomplish this or that; at other times they feel defeated, so that there seems no point to much of anything. Within the same day, even the same hour, I have heard one or another member of the Workman family insist upon the urgent need to do something, and do it right away; but then declare in a tired voice that whatever is done really means very little, not only in the long but even the short run of things. Then, there is always the hollow, and the dozens and dozens of kin who live in it. One moment I will hear a mother like Mrs. Workman compare what she thinks and does with what others think and do, those relatives (primarily) and neighbors who may live even miles away, yet breathe heavily on each other and make for a collective social conformity, easily noticed by an outsider and stoutly defended by mountaineers themselves. At other times, she and other Appalachian mothers and fathers sound very much like political anarchists or rebels of a more individualistic or idiosyncratic kind.
Even more striking with these individuals is the fluctuation in mood or outlook between seriousness and cheerfulness. I refer not to something called “manic-depressive” swings, nor indeed to anything psychopathological. Nor do I simply mean that the Workmans and others in places like Deep Hollow, Wolfe County, Kentucky have their ups and downs; of course they all to, and of course we all do. I want to point out that in Appalachia a certain kind of living generates a particular kind of grim but also lighthearted frame of mind that comes to expression again and again in the speech and habits of the people. By the same token, Appalachian mothers demonstrate, as a result of a certain sensibility one meets in those hollows, an equally ironic and at times unnerving mixture of firmness, even sternness with children, which is tempered with a generosity that borders, occasionally more than borders, on indulgence — all logically incompatible, all of it seemingly inconsistent, but all of it still there, to be figured out, I suppose, by those whose fate it is to do so.
Again, I have not set up six polarities, six sets of opposing traits to deny each mountaineer his or her particular fate, which is to reconcile the conflicts in his or her life — and do so in his own way, in her own way. These contradictions or ambiguities are concretely and specifically rooted in Appalachian life and in the traditions that mountain people call their own. They assert themselves consistently, persistently and confusingly — to a visitor, and maybe even to people like the Workmans themselves. Perhaps the word is themes, ones tied to a special history, a very definite kind of experience within and outside of the family. I believe Mrs. Workman’s remarks reveal those themes; and I believe those themes go to distinguish the Workmans and other mountaineers described in this book, from the sharecropper families and migrant farm families that also live close to the land, yet under rather different circumstances.
In the case of the Workmans, none of all this was ever explicitly stated or discussed by them, and when I spent time with them I was in fact not myself of a mind to analyze what they said, to break it down into ideas voiced or assumptions held or whatever. I do believe, however, that I can now listen on my tapes to Kenneth Workman or Laura Workman, or I can read the notes and questions to myself written down years ago and see the point of having those themes around in my mind: they help make a little sense of matters that do indeed seem puzzling. Thus, when Mrs. Workman at the end of the long passage above talks about her son Tim’s psychological characteristics she is talking about more than one apparently different or unusual child, who has left Deep Hollow, but also comes back. Tim, as presented by her, is only a slightly exaggerated version of everyone else in Deep Hollow. His preferences are theirs; his values theirs; his purposes or goals certainly very much theirs. Often it takes a generalization or a slight overstatement to make the ordinary or the usual a little clearer. Freud knew that patients mirror the rest of us, a bit sharply and even bizarrely, but still recognizably. What they visibly suffer with and from, the rest of us (to varying degrees and in varying ways) manage to hide from others a
nd of course ourselves, too; all of which is necessary — and hardly surprising. An analysis of Tim’s struggle to be loyal to his family, yet to remain his own man, should be offered as an effort to understand Tim and others like him as somewhat different from other Americans of their age, but also somewhat the same. No doubt as the “variables” or polarities or ambiguities pile up, we begin to recognize a distinct kind of person, a member of one or another “culture” or “subculture.” But there is a danger that we may become so intoxicated with our theoretical exuberance that we allow our formulations to become islands, upon which we settle and isolate a given “group” of people.