Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  If the legend represents a parable of man versus machine, of tradition over modernization, then Sutter sees himself caught in a parallel dilemma in a postmodernist era. If John Henry was consumed by—indeed a martyr to—the Industrial Revolution, then Sutter can be seen as a casualty of the Digital Age, where he is a mere pawn whose vapid writings only add to the vast stockpile of information doled out to cyberspace consumers who have been swindled into believing it has some worth. As Sutter wonders what the modern equivalent for John Henry’s martyrdom might be, he remains unaware that his own destruction—in the book’s all-too-melodramatic conclusion—will provide the answer.

  So what does all this tell us about the racial legacy of either John Henry or the efforts by a seemingly all-white community to celebrate that legacy more than a century later? And what does it add to our understanding of that cultural legacy within the context of Appalachia? Ultimately, place seems to matter very little to Whitehead once he has grounded his protagonist in Talcott after moving him along the winding and ever more ominous back roads of West Virginia in his opening pages. Appalachian residents appear only as marginal characters, and locals appear to be of far less interest than the variety of outsiders who find themselves thrown together in this remote mountain town with little regard for or sense of relevance to the region.10

  But if place and people in Appalachia seem peripheral to what ultimately interests Whitehead, his commentary on image, legend, oral tradition, and the powerful hold all three continue to exert does speak to central concerns for those of us in Appalachian studies. One is reminded of Allen Batteau’s thesis in The Invention of Appalachia, that the region has meant very different things and served very different agendas generated by individuals and groups far removed from the southern highlands.11 Just as these outside forces shaped the region’s image and played on its stereotypes for a variety of purposes, so it is that an array of people, past and present, black and white, insiders and outsiders, have seen meanings that serve their own needs in the story of John Henry, who just happened to be the product of a particular place and time in Appalachia’s history.

  Pamela Street quotes her father, the obsessive collector from Harlem, as she and Sutter are burying his ashes on the site of John Henry’s own grave. Commenting on the many versions of the ballad, she recalls his observation: “Passed between work gangs and families and friends in the old days of folk music, on record, on the radio. You could split the song into so-called official versions, her father used to say, the ones made by established singers and put on vinyl, cassette, and CD, and the songs of the people, entirely different, the mis-sung versions, belted out by people who misremembered the lyrics and supplied their own haphazard verses.” For those parts one couldn’t recall, “her father used to say that what you put in those gaps was you—what you inserted said a lot about you. . . . Then you’ve assembled your own John Henry” (373).

  This is a novel of many such John Henrys created by many perceived gaps, both racial and regional, past and present. If the full work never quite rises to the level of several of its multiple parts, John Henry Days offers challenging and often profound commentary on memory, on history, on heritage, and on identity in a postmodernist age. All of these loaded terms take on new significance and mixed meanings as New Yorkers and Washingtonians, government officials and journalists, performers and collectors, all converge in search of themselves for three days in West Virginia.

  Notes

  1. Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (New York: Anchor Books, 1998); Whitehead, John Henry Days (New York: Doubleday, 2001).

  2. Colson Whitehead, “I Worked at an Ill-Conceived Internet Start-up and All I Got Was This Lousy Idea for a Novel,” http://www.randomhouse.com/whitehead/essay.html.

  3. Guy B. Johnson, John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929), 27; Louis Chappell, John Henry: A Folk-Lore Study (1933; rpt., Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1968), 61–69. For a useful bibliography on the literature on John Henry and Appalachian race relations, see the “Resource Guide” in Blacks in Appalachia, ed. William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 267–74.

  4. Here Whitehead draws from Brett Williams’s coverage of Roark Bradford’s adaptation of his novel John Henry (New York: Harper and Bros., 1931) as a musical and why it failed, even with Robeson in the title role. See Brett Williams, John Henry: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 81–84.

  5. Ibid., 59.

  6. For a thorough discussion of the rivalry between Johnson and Chappell, and the source from which Whitehead obviously drew, see Williams, John Henry, 59–62. Williams concludes, “The two books complement each other very nicely, with Johnson’s perhaps more useful to the artist, and Chappell’s most helpful to those seeking substantive information on the Big Bend Tunnel community” (61). Both Johnson’s and Chappell’s work has been superseded by a far more sophisticated and definitive account of John Henry’s life and legacy. Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). I have resisted the urge to overhaul this essay to incorporate Nelson’s book into it, and will limit to the notes acknowledgment of its contributions, one of the most significant of which is the detective work by which he has established, once and for all, the reality of John Henry’s existence.

  7. Whitehead acknowledges that five of the quotes in his prologue came from Johnson’s book, six from Chappell’s, and one from yet another folklorist of the era, John Harrington Cox, “John Hardy,” Journal of American Folk-Lore (October–December 1919), 505–20.

  8. A University of Georgia chemistry professor has recently claimed to have evidence that the John Henry contest took place in Leeds, Alabama, in 1887. “Challenging the Legend: Professor Driving Home New Evidence on Life of John Henry,” Athens Banner-Herald, February 4, 2002. Scott Nelson concludes the Lewis Tunnel, several miles east of the Big Bend Tunnel, was the site of John Henry’s death. Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man, 81–86.

  9. Colson Whitehead interview, Houston Chronicle, September 14, 2001; and Daniel Zalewski, “Tunnel Vision: An Interview with Colson Whitehead,” New York Times Book Review (May 13, 2001), 8, 15. For a listing of some films and filmstrips (mostly brief and produced for classroom use), see Williams, John Henry, 138–39.

  10. Allen Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991). It is revealing that neither this book nor a more recent book on Appalachian identity and imagery makes any mention of John Henry, which suggests that his story has never been integral to perceptions of the region. Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford, eds., Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999).

  11. Nor does Scott Nelson in Steel Drivin’ Man provide much of an Appalachian context for his account of John Henry’s life and death, although he provides a meticulous geographical description of its West Virginia setting (pp. 10–18) and describes Edward J. Cabbell’s efforts to use the John Henry legend to draw new attention to the African American experience in the region (p. 167).

  17

  In Defense of Appalachia on Film

  Hollywood, History, and the

  Highland South

  One of the courses that I most enjoy teaching is a freshman seminar called “Appalachia on Film.” As an academic exile from the region (though I occasionally take comfort that Athens, Georgia, is only one county away from official Appalachia, according to the Appalachian Regional Commission’s skewed reasoning), I rarely get the chance to teach Appalachian history at the undergraduate level. I thus jumped at the chance to develop this course when freshman seminars were added as a curricular option at the University of Georgia a few years ago. Many faculty members take this opportunity to bring to the classroom interests that are sometimes far afield from their home disciplines; it has been fun to see a
microbiologist offer a course on Wagnerian opera, a physicist take on Tolstoy and his philosophy of war, and a mathematician teach baseball statistics (sabermetrics). Many of us in the History Department seem to be film buffs. Although we don’t seem to stray very far from our areas of historical expertise, my colleagues have designed seminars focused on screen depictions of scientists, the French Revolution, the civil rights movement, and the Middle East.

  Perhaps too predictably, I focus on the region I know best, Southern Appalachia. I have built my course around nine films:

  • The Journey of August King (1995): a well-received production of a yeoman farmer in frontier North Carolina who aids a fugitive slave girl at great sacrifice to himself, based on a John Ehle novel

  • Cold Mountain (2003): the big-budget version of Charles Frazier’s best-selling saga of the Civil War among Carolina highlanders and its protagonist’s odyssey home to the woman he loves

  • Songcatcher (2000): an independent film based loosely on Olive Dame Campbell’s discovery and documentation of English ballads and folk music in the Blue Ridge Mountains at the turn of the century

  • Sergeant York (1941): Gary Cooper’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Alvin York, the homespun Tennessee pacifist who became the most celebrated hero of World War I

  • Matewan (1987): John Sayles’s meticulous re-creation of a West Virginia coal-mining community and the strike that led to an infamous “massacre” in 1920

  • Wild River (1960): director Elia Kazan’s story of a TVA agent’s struggle to remove a determined old woman from her island home on the Tennessee River just before it’s to be flooded

  • The Dollmaker (1984): Jane Fonda playing Gertie Nevels in a faithful, if much compressed, adaptation of Harriett Arnow’s classic novel of Appalachian displacement during World War II

  • Deliverance (1972): a wilderness horror story of Atlanta canoers who find themselves in “hillbilly hell,” based on James Dickey’s best-selling 1970 novel

  • Foxfire (1987): a television adaptation of a Broadway play based on the clash between real estate dealers and an elderly widow clinging to her right to live out her life on her north Georgia farm

  These films cover a broad spectrum of types: three are major studio productions and box-office hits (Sergeant York, Deliverance, and Cold Mountain; the first two were Hollywood’s biggest moneymakers of 1941 and 1972); two were more modest studio productions (Wild River and The Journal of August King); two were independent films (Matewan and Songcatcher), and two were television productions, both part of CBS’s “Hallmark Hall of Fame” (The Dollmaker and Foxfire).1 Four were adapted from novels (August King, Dollmaker, Cold Mountain, and Deliverance), two were original screenplays that adhered reasonably close to historical events (Sergeant York and Matewan), and the other two (Songcatcher and Foxfire) are heavily fictionalized stories based loosely on real characters or situations.

  I cannot claim any overarching rationale for these selections— other than that they are all films I very much like and thus enjoy teaching; in different ways, each engages students at some, often multiple levels, and as such, they easily evoke discussion or debate; and perhaps most important, each offers some element of “truth” regarding the historical realities of Appalachia.

  We spend the first week discussing major themes in Appalachian history and the reasons behind the many misconceptions and stereotypes to which the region has long been subjected.2 I have found particularly useful as a working theme for the course a statement by David Whisnant explaining Olive Campbell’s mission in the 1920s in his book All That Is Native and Fine: “Popular understanding of the Appalachian South at the time [early 20th century] reflected every shade of opinion. While for some, mountain people were ‘backward,’ unhealthy, unchurched, ignorant, violent, and morally degenerate social misfits who were a national liability, for others they were pure, uncorrupted 100 per cent American, picturesque, and photogenic pre-moderns who were a great untapped national treasure.”3 This vast range of perceptions applies to far more than the early twentieth century; it encapsulates to varying degrees nearly all the depictions the students will see on-screen.

  Hollywood has never been known for its historical accuracy, and yet it has been too easy for historians to throw out the baby with the bathwater, dismissing any value in cinematic treatments of historical subjects. In a recent study, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood, Robert Brent Toplin urges his fellow historians to take a more open-minded view of cinema; he argues that movies can communicate important ideas about the past to students of history. The very nature of the medium prevents it from presenting factual realities in the same way one would expect of a written work of history, or even a documentary film. Nevertheless, Toplin insists, “in many important respects, the two-hour movie can arouse emotions, stir curiosity, and prompt viewers to consider significant questions.”4

  I admit that I originally conceived this course as one that would examine these films in terms of how they perpetuate misconceptions, stereotypes, or clichés. Yet early on I came around to Toplin’s perspective. Most of the films have plenty of stereotypes and distortions to discuss; more important, though, each of these stories depicts the human struggles that arose in real historical situations, which skilled writing and often great acting bring to life. As such, I see these films as appealing and accessible means of drawing students into discussions of the historic realities conveyed—or at least suggested— on-screen. Students are certainly astute enough not to accept what they see on-screen as literal truth or documentary filmmaking, and thus we don’t spend much class time separating fact from fiction, which is what I had anticipated when designing the course.

  I show and discuss the films in chronological order by content, rather than by their date of production. For all but the last two, Deliverance and Foxfire, we have specific dates in which each is set: 1815, 1864–1865, 1907, 1917–1918, 1920, 1935, and 1944–1945. The last two are contemporary depictions of the times in which they were made—the 1970s and 1980s. There are merits to both chronological approaches. In a freshman seminar I teach on southern race relations on film, the order in which the films were produced is far more integral, as we use those films to explore the changing racial attitudes of Hollywood itself and how it reflected—or failed to reflect—such attitudes in the rest of the country and in the South. For my “Appalachia on Film” course, the films’ production dates are less integral to my purposes than their historical subject matter. Six of these nine films were made since 1984 (only Sergeant York, Wild River, and Deliverance were not), so they do not lend themselves to an assessment of changing views of Appalachia over the course of the twentieth century.

  The class meets twice a week. On Tuesdays, we view a film after I offer fairly brief and basic introductory remarks. Based on notes made during the screening, students write a three- to four-page analysis, which they turn in on Thursday. I ask them to respond in some way to a set of questions centered on the tone each film takes toward Appalachian life (contemptuous? respectful? romanticized? satiric? etc.); the virtues and vices of the characters, major and minor; the narrative techniques that shape viewers’ attitudes toward the region; what aspects of the film—music, speech patterns, location shooting—contribute to or detract from its regional authenticity; and what impact the movie likely had on how American filmgoers view Appalachia.

  On Thursdays, when we convene again, I provide far more historical context on the film, and then we spend most of the class period discussing the issues the students have written about. Discussions grow richer and more rewarding over the course of the semester, as each film builds on those seen earlier, and students are able to assess the films in increasingly comparative terms. It was only as I taught the course for the first time that I came to fully appreciate this cumulative effect: that the juxtaposition of these particular films offered far more insight into both realities and perceptions of Appalachia than one would have any right to expect from southern California’s “dream fa
ctory” or than any one or two of these films alone could offer. And I took great satisfaction that, more often than not, the students themselves picked up on these parallels and comparisons, and in so doing, often drew their own conclusions about the region and its depiction in film.

  The most obvious commonality shared by all but one of these films is the interaction of southern highlanders with outsiders—either through the incursion of outsiders into the region, or through Appalachian natives’ movement elsewhere. (Only August King is regionally self-contained, with all the characters and conflict limited to Appalachian residents, though its plot is centered on the efforts of one native—a slave—to move beyond the region.) The intentions of the strangers coming into the region vary greatly in these films, as has indeed been the case historically, particularly over the course of the twentieth century. Academic field-workers, union organizers and company agents, government officials, tourists, and the developers who cater to those tourists—all serve as catalysts who drive the story lines of Matewan, Songcatcher, Wild River, Deliverance, and Foxfire. In each, it is the reactions of local highlanders to these individuals or groups and their various agendas that provide the dramatic tension, conflict, and emotional weight that propels the plot.

  For those highlanders who move beyond the bounds of home and region, it is usually larger historical forces that push them away; none leave willingly. It is war that takes Inman, Alvin York, and Gertie Nevels far from home and into alien environments. They carry with them skills honed in the mountains—whether shooting prowess or woodcarving—that have much to do with their survival in hostile circumstances far from home. Yet all are profoundly troubled by their displacement and seek desperately to return to the comfort and security of their highland households and communities—or merely the natural world. (Inman, in particular, seems drawn back home by the aesthetics of the mountains themselves—oh, and by Ada Monroe.)