State by State

by Matt Weiland

  Though 66 percent of West Virginians polled in 2004 oppose mountain-top mining, the practice continues, creeping farther north from the southern counties. They’re destroying the mountains, not just in West Virginia, but in Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. Central Appalachia, one of the most biologically diverse eco-systems in the world, is no longer paradise. Only the rocks, the land and rivers and gorges, the stone faces of the cliffs at Audra and the high glades of Dolly Sods, the towering silent mountains in the still pristine regions of the state, remember, as inchoate, molecular imprint, another world. Almost heaven? Almost. The glorious trees in the protected forests open and bud, impervious, beneficent.

  Back in the 1920s, mining was a growing industry strong enough to oppose the unions, but timber was still big business. A few of the wealthy lumbermen were home grown. My mother’s father, J. W. Thornhill, owned a mill along a river and a row of houses in which he housed his workers. This was fifty years after the Civil War, in Hampton, West Virginia, in what was just becoming an altered landscape. A widower, J. W. eloped with his second wife, Grace Boyd, a girl younger than his eldest daughter, and brought her home on the train that ran along the river. His workers lined up beside the tracks and cheered. Fourth of July bunting hung in the trees and the families and children waved small American flags made in America. He built her a small mansion with stained-glass windows in Belington; the sidewalk in front of the house is still imprinted with his name, as was every piece of wood in the house.

  Years later, after the births of six children and the deaths of three, J. W. moved one of his mill secretaries into a second-floor room. The place was his, he said, to do with as he liked, every stick of it. By then he was drinking heavily. Grace was kind to the girl but moved to Buckhannon, a larger neighboring town. There was no divorce, but she “locked her door against him.” He lived in both houses until he became too “eccentric” to live alone. He lost the mill during the Depression, and then he lost his mind. He was like a child, raging or dependent. The mansion was sold to an undertaker and is still a funeral parlor today. J. W. moved “to town.” The top floor of the house in Buckhannon became his refuge.

  My mother was a youngest child, born after the deaths of the three children between herself and a much older brother and sister. At fourteen, the only child at home, she was helping her mother run the Buckhannon house as a business, boarding college students from Wesleyan, the local Methodist college. They kept a cow and chickens, sold dairy goods, raised a garden, canned food to get them through the long winters, and managed to keep the house. One fall, they’d painstakingly raked the yard and back lot by the barn (in the late 1930s, there were still countless canopied trees in Buckhannon). J. W. picked up a pitchfork of blazing leaves and chased them around the fire. Grace called the Weston State Asylum, the same institution so beneficently granted Western Virginia just before secession. It was all she could afford. The day they came to get him, J. W. famously turned at the door and asked, “But Gracie, aren’t you coming with me?”

  The women in my family all had two names: Jocasta Andora, Margaret Lee, Jessie May, Martha Jane, Mary Price, Maud Ellen, Mary Lee, Amy Jo, Molly Jean. Both branches of the family had emigrated to America before the Revolutionary War. The Phillips family, in receipt of a land grant from the King of England, came from England and Wales to what is now Randolph County in the early 1700s. Sons, including my great uncle, my father, my brother, were called Randolph. The town that grew up around the farm, originally settled by Germans, was called Womelsdorf, but subsequent Anglo-Saxon settlers changed the name to Coalton. The family lived there for 200 years as the land was deeded to generations of sons, then sold, and so lost.

  In the 1870s, the family gave land for a church and graveyard still in existence: Phillips Chapel is a small wood frame sanctuary, rebuilt on the footprint of the original structure, minus the steeple it once possessed. The cemetery is beautiful and small, an enclosed level ground of lush grass and gravestones. The wooden fencing is white and the metal gates are silver, scrolled with ironwork, and wide enough to admit an automobile. Tall iron spires on either side bear the arched legend PHILLIPS CEMETERY. The silver letters, mounted on wire, seem to float in midair. I remember going to funerals there as a child, always in the snow, driving what seemed a long way from Buckhannon into the country, and standing with my father and his people as one of the old aunts, all of whom lived into their late nineties, was “rested.” Rough men in work gloves lowered the casket on hand-held ropes. The rectangular hole of the grave and the piled earth beside it were already white with snow. Snow fell on the oiled wood of the casket and slid away into the dark below. The flat graveyard was still, ringed with trees and the low fence. The only sound was snow brushing snow. The snowflakes touched their ice to the monuments and humped stones with the shushing whisper of sleet cushioned in air. Snow fell, constant, breathing its way.

  There was a secret at the farm in Randolph County, but family was family. They kept the secret, even from me, and from my father, whose life it blighted. The story was that Warwick, one of the four brothers, showed up at the farm with his wife, a woman no one knew. Her name is written as Icie Hoffman or Huffman on a framed family document from the 1920s; she stayed at the farm during her confinement, then “went back to her people,” leaving the baby with his father’s sisters. The aunts raised him, lovingly, on the farm until he was school age, then, as they married and the farm was sold, took him into their families, each for a few years; he was intensely loyal to them. Born in 1910, he went to high school in Buckhannon, then to work, learning construction, road building, paving streets for the city. He said of his father that he “never knew him,” but in fact, Warwick Phillips moved a town away, married again, and had a son. An obscure Internet site concerning Coalton, West Virginia, and Phillips Cemetery features old photographs of Randolph and Mary Phillips, parents of Warwick, his four brothers, and the four aunts. Photographs show Warwick and his second wife, and Warwick’s (second) son, Warwick Maurice Phillips, in WWII uniform. My father was nearly forty when he became a soldier; his half brother is ten or fifteen years younger. The pictures were posted in 2003 by a friend of Sarah Phillips, a young blonde who must be a granddaughter of Maurice Phillips. My father’s cousin, in her seventies now, remembers hearing that when Warwick died, my father, surprisingly, was asked to attend the reading of the will. He drove hours from a work site in the southern part of the state to find that his father had left him a cheap watch. Warwick’s other son was never in contact with the aunts, with the family; I never knew his name until I read it on the Internet. Was he my father’s brother? Why Warwick’s bitterness toward a child he left as a baby? On infrequent visits to the farm in my father’s childhood, he “paid not a damn bit of attention” to the son his sisters enjoyed and coddled as the only child among them. My father left the farm at six or seven. His early memories were hazy, but he remembered hiding in the field once as Warwick stood on the broad porch of the big house, firing a rifle repeatedly into the tall grass. The child crouched low, hearing the bullets zing well past him, over his head. I have one or two photographs of my father as a child in blousy clothes, blond, with one or another of the smiling aunts, and I think of him, holding very still in the summer field, sweating in the buzzing grass, the bullets whining over him.

  My father grew up rejected by his father, thinking his mother abandoned him. My parents divorced in the mid-1970s, and my father moved back in with the great-aunts. Retired, living on a small pension and veteran’s benefits, he stayed, driving them to the store and the doctor’s office, doing grocery shopping and errands. One died at home at 102. The other, the youngest of the nine children, lived on with my father. “We take care of each other,” she told me. Visits home, I stayed with my mother, and visited my father most days. In good weather we sat out back, on the porch with my great-aunt. Once, I asked if he’d ever tried to find his mother. Yes, he said, he’d asked after the family when he was down in that part of the state. No one had
ever heard of them. My great-aunt, still vigorous at ninety, said nothing, her eyes magnified behind the thick lenses of her glasses. “Strange you never heard from her again,” I said, “in all that time.” “Why,” my aunt interrupted, “we did hear from her. She came and tried to take Russell, but we wouldn’t let her have him. By then he was used to us.” My father, hearing this for the first time at seventy, only raised his brows, tilted his head inquiringly. I asked how old he was then, when Icie came for him. “Two or three. Little. He didn’t know her.” I wanted to press her. I wanted the whole story, and the truth, but the weight of the secret, some sense of its nature, stopped me. “She saw you were taking good care of him,” I told my aunt. She nodded affirmatively, dismissively, in her red sweater. She wore it even in the summer. Like all of the aunts, she was tall and bone thin in old age. I never once heard her raise her voice in irritation or anger. She treated the men in the family with deference, but shook her head at human nature, at folly, at the stories that made the rounds in town. “Did you ever?” she’d marvel. “Well! The Lord bless us and keep us.”

  If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true—not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist, in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own. The sad stories live there too, but in that country, we know what they mean and why they happened. We make our way back from them, finding the way through a bountiful wilderness we begin to understand. Years are nothing: Story conquers all distance.

  In West Virginia, you are your people, your home place. Your town, your county. People have one home, and home is where you come from. West Virginians are a less mobile population than almost any other in the country. It’s beginning to change, but the bulk of those living in West Virginia are descended from generations who’ve stayed in place, stayed home, made a living despite the vagaries of economy, history, politics.

  The Thornhills and Boyds, my mother’s people, emigrated from the “thorny hills” of Derbyshire, in England. They were blue eyed, fair skinned. Nevertheless, my mother, her mother, my Boyd grandfather, were olive skinned and brown eyed, Black Irish, most likely, descended from the survivors of the Spanish Armada sunk off the coast of Ireland during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. A stranger, an elderly man, once appraised me knowingly in a Chicago elevator. “Black Irish,” he said. “Excuse me?” “Oh yes, with that jawline and chin. Was your mother darker than you?” I shrugged and he smiled, pointed to his own face. “Black Irish,” he said, as though words settled the matter.

  On both sides, there was unacknowledged Native American blood, faces with pronounced high cheekbones, narrow, almost Asiatic eyes, children who looked like changelings. My Boyd grandmother, a DAR member who resigned when the organization prohibited Marian Anderson from singing at Constitution Hall in 1939, traced her line back to the Revolutionary War through one John Goodwin, born 1762, who served as “Indian Spy in Captains William Lowther and Joseph Gregory’s Companies in the Virginia Troops” from Harrison County, “six months of each year,” 1776 to 1782. Goodwin would have been an adult fourteen-year-old, moving in woods he knew, in the county adjacent to that occupied by his descendants three hundred years later. He ended his service at twenty, and filed for a pension fifty years later, perhaps to benefit the nine children who survived him. The frontier was another country then, in 1832, firmly governed by a colonial power, the Indians vanquished, the settlers themselves doubly oppressed by England and Virginia.

  A hundred years hence, at the beginning of World War II, my mother fell in love with a high-school classmate. He was the youngest of five brothers and a sister; there are photographs of them all dressed in morning coats at their mother’s garden party, the mother and sister in long black-lace dresses. His father was a minister and college professor whose heart had failed when the boy was twelve; the older brothers all became doctors, helped the mother manage until she, too, died. The boy was sixteen then, another adult child. His sister still at home turned the house into a girl’s dorm for the local college; he moved into a rooming house with his best friend. The summer after high-school graduation, he complained of chest pain as he walked my mother home from a date. The doctor said he had heartburn; he was eighteen years old, take some Tums. My mother was worried and phoned one of the doctor brothers, who set off, driving from Chapel Hill. Tell him to keep still until I get there, the brother said. The boy died in the bathroom of the rooming house, having gotten out of bed to wash his face. The brother stayed for the funeral. All the brothers came in, too late. Their sister asked my mother to plan the service. The boy’s name? William Goodwin, a descendant of that same long-lived Goodwin who linked my mother’s family to Revolutionary-era western Virginia. Somehow, the line had weakened: the Goodwin men, all the boy’s stalwart doctor brothers, died young, of heart attacks.

  My mother married Russell Randolph Phillips five years later. She met him at a Veterans of Foreign Wars dance. He was thirty-eight, a man about town. He took one look at her and said, “I’m going to marry that girl.” It sounds like fiction, but all stories are fiction.

  In the late 1960s, Buckhannon is a football town. The relatively small high school has claimed the AAA State Championship three times in a decade, and the white wooden scoreboard on the courthouse lawn is kept up to date, Wins and Scores painted on each Saturday morning. Game nights, on Fridays, boyfriends steer their dressed-up girls into the bleachers, touching their shoulders. The girls have hair like pretty dogs, bright brown or blond, shoulder-length silk. A smoke of haze chars the air. The band mills around at field’s edge in their blue-and-white uniforms, turning the brass bowls of awkward tubas. The plumed hats nod or swing, carried by their straps like lunch pails. Pep Club mothers open up the soda stands, stacking tires of waxen red cups printed with the Coca-Cola legend. Hot dogs in the grills are already shiny. The mothers dump ice into coolers from big clear bags, standing with their legs apart, braced to support the heavy bags in their laps. They pound at the plastic covered surfaces to get the ice moving and rake it with their fingers, the flesh of their hands reddening and their platinum rings wet. The majorettes stand for first cokes, casual as off-duty movie stars. Their thighs are gold with pancake makeup and subtle glitter, their white boots spotless, their waists impossibly small in tight blue satin sashes. They dangle silver batons in one hand, occasionally turning them in nonchalant demonstrations of skill. The girls walk away biting ice, sipping carbonated syrup as numbers light up on the broad electric score-board above their heads. Their clean hair ripples perfectly, reflecting the illumination of the field in yellow tones. White pom-poms swing at their boot tops with a sound like the swish of long hair against leather. Their taps crunch on the gravel track and their white short-shorts are a white wool called “winter vanilla,” identically sewn by a hired seamstress. Their jackets are double breasted, trimmed in gold braid and military buttons, and the long tails of the jackets move in mock tuxedo fashion on the curves of their hips. The majorettes hold their shoulders straight. They are girl gentlemen, unwittingly androgynous, and the boys, the tall broad-chested cream of the town, suiting up in shoulder pads, helmets, knee guards, cleats, and tight laced pants, will be giants.

  Small-town pride is a given. There is still a thriving Main Street. Families around town own the men’s and women’s wear stores, the hardware stores, the restaurants, the bookstore that sells mostly newspapers and magazines. There are two large grocery stores, Krogers and the A&P, and local people work the same jobs in the aisles for thirty years: butcher, manager, check-out clerk. Giant oaks lift their branches over traffic driving up Kanawha Hill, teenagers go to first-run movies at the Colonial on Main Street, or the Kanawha on Kanawha Hill: The marquees are edged in pink and blue streamers of running neon. There are churches, steeples in every quadrant of the town: Presbyterian, First and Second Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, and one Catholic church and hospital. Public schools serve fish on Fridays. The town is tamped do
wn; there are no Holy Rollers or snake handlers, no speaking in tongues. Nearly everyone is white.

  Buckhannon, a town of six thousand, is the county seat of Upshur County; settlements fanning out along the macadam and gravel or dirt roads are called by the names of streams and runs of water: Brushy Fork, Mud Lick, Sago, Rock Cave, Spall Run, Lost Creek. School buses bring kids in from the runs and hollows, dirt roads, sometimes, places verdant and green in summer, cold in winter, in those houses that heat with coal fires. My friend, a dentist’s daughter, has a canopy bed I much admire; I sleep in a high walnut spool bed my mother refinished by hand and fitted with pink gingham shams, skirt, coverlet. Kids out in the deep country roads sleep together to stay warm. Some of them eat their main meal of the day in the school cafeteria: corn bread and kidney beans, spinach from cans, cling peaches. The elementary school children arrive at school hungry, their skin pale as porcelain, their fingers tinged blue. Their hair is uncombed; their wrists and ankles ringed with old dirt, and it’s nobody’s business. Many of them, held back year after year, drop out before high school. The town kids are one world; they’re another. My mother, a first-grade teacher when I was growing up, gave her students our outgrown coats and boots, and bought gloves and hats at half price every spring, for the next winter. Some kids from the rural hollows are bright; they persist; they stay in school. They sit together at football games, girls mostly, and boys too small in stature to be wooed away by the military, or sent to the mines. The athletes and cheerleaders are mostly kids from town, kids whose parents can pick them up after practices, cheer them on, supervise the cheerleaders’ routines, sell drinks and concessions at home games.