“A ridgerunner is a man who does the best he can, with what he’s got, according to his lights.”
Old Appalachian Proverb
“To the Appalachian the outsider is ignorant of all the simplest, most basic things.”
40 Acres and No Mule
JOHN F. KENNEDY turned the spotlight of national attention upon Appalachia in the 1960 presidential campaign. For fifty years before it had been a provocative subject for study but since 1960 the region has been surveyed, studied, researched, measured, charted, polled, tabulated, photographed and televised intensely and almost continuously.
The cause of all this study, the Appalachian, is always found to be irritating, frustrating, stubborn, inflexible and poverty-stricken almost beyond hope. After all the measuring, charting and surveying, he is still the cause of uneasy bafflement. He still remains almost totally incomprehensible to the average American mind.
In this plethora of material, I have hoped it would be possible for someone to explore in depth the most informing thing about the Appalachian, his religious concepts. I have hoped it would be recognized that he is who, why and what he is because he is a member of one of the most legalistic, primitively biblical societies ever formed. But as more and more material has been published, it is impossible not to realize that even in this modern day the Appalachian has not opened more than a chink the closed wall of distrust, resentment and dislike that stands between him and all “outsiders.” Someone from the “inside” must therefore speak up.
The latest of the Appalachian studies to be written is by the Reverend Mr. Jack Weller, a Presbyterian minister who has lived and worked among the mountain people for the past twelve years. He has summed up their structure and habits, their dependence upon socially approved patterns of behavior and the pervasiveness of their religious concepts. Both the Indian tribal society and the Appalachian family society have many characteristics common to all primitive societies.
Primitive societies are markedly similar in being closed and tribal, the members (by western standards) inarticulate, naive and childlike, emotionally immature, impulsive, easily bored, lacking in self-discipline, unable to maintain interest over long spans of time. They are characterized by family and group orientation and loyalties. Harmony within the group or tribe is essential and any singularity or individuality is frowned upon. Leadership within the tribe is achieved in accepted ways within the framework of tribal approval. The members of the tribe are apprehensive of change, suspicious of strangers; they have their own codes of honor; they devotedly love small children, are permissive with them, but they expect youth, at puberty, to enter the adult life. Their religion is personal and central to life, highly emotional and characterized by noise and action. Death is marked by loud weeping and ritual mourning.
These things have been accepted for years in other primitive societies. Because it is not understood that Appalachia is also tribal and primitive they cause anger, irritation, frustration and contempt in those who come in contact with the Appalachians, or try to work with them. The fact that the Appalachian is who, why, what, when and where he is rightfully and inevitably as a result of his place in his own society has largely escaped study and reflection.
Without understanding this, the approach to a study of Appalachia has several built-in factors that lead to error. First, the researcher is as inevitably a product of his own culture as the Appalachian is of his. He brings to his study the inbred assumption that the molds that turned him out are the right molds and his own culture the right culture, and the Appalachian is a part of that same culture and can be measured by the approved measuring instruments. He comes into the area from the outside and he observes, views, questions, interviews, surveys, analyzes, and he assumes that the results he gets are accurate. They may be and they may not be.
Let me use just one illustration to show how unrealistic some kinds of statistics can be for the Appalachian. Suppose an opinion poll is taken to determine how many Appalachians value education. Now, an opinion poll is about the most meaningless kind of survey that can be taken in Appalachia, but the surveyor is not aware of it. From long training in the importance of tribal harmony and approval, the Appalachian has developed an immense respect for all social approval. He has an extremely sensitive antenna for sensing what the approved attitude and reply will be.
He has also been exposed to civilization long enough now to understand that outside values are placed upon many things that have been relatively valueless to him. So the very fact that an opinion poll is being taken gives him his first clue to the kind of replies he should give. The questions in this survey are important or they would not be asked. The way the interviewer looks, his tone of voice, what he unconsciously stresses or does not stress, all give the Appalachian further directions. He is now asked if he values education. Many Appalachians do, but the man who does not knows he is expected to, so he gives the expected reply.
When the researcher has finished, he tabulates his results and he arrives at a figure. Out of so many people questioned, 80 percent, say, replied that they valued education. Seeing the figure, the sociologist concludes that interest in education in Appalachia is rising. Actually, the figure means nothing of the sort. It means only that 80 percent of the people interviewed said they valued education. Nobody knows how many truly value it. Nobody knows how many, sensing the approved reply, gave it. You have a meaningless statistic — if you know Appalachia.
The researcher can compile thousands of tables of statistics. They are easily obtained. But an interpretation of them is something different altogether. When all the statistics are in and tabulated there is a picture of the Appalachian. But it is like a still photograph. The life is missing.
Second, the only valid measuring sticks, the Appalachian’s religious concepts and his family life, are very difficult to obtain because of the Appalachian’s inherent dislike, distrust and resentment of the outsider. Nearly every Indian speaks of his tribe as “the People.” His ways are the “right” ways; his mores, norms, standards are the “right” ones. No Indian wants, either, to be a white man. So with the Appalachian. It would amaze the outsider, probably, to learn that the Appalachian feels superior to him, considers him inept, more than a little ridiculous and foolish. The outsider, to the Appalachian, is ignorant to the point of ridiculousness of the simplest, most basic things. He comes breezing in, too hearty, too familiar too soon. He is ill mannered. He is “talky” and “pushy” and “nosey.” He is “braggy” and always showing off. He rushes around and makes a complete idiot of himself. With the outsider, the Appalachian is courteous. He opens his doors and is hospitable. But not for one minute, so long as an outsider is present, is he himself. All the time the outsider is present the Appalachian is sensing, feeling, reacting as he thinks the outsider expects him to. He approves or disapproves according to the leading he obtains from the look, the voice, the mannerisms of the guest. When the guest has left, the family commune together laughingly. “Ain’t he got the foolishest notions? But I reckon we done all right. Told him what he wanted to know.” They have done precisely that. As best they could sense it, they have told him not what they truly believed, but what he wanted to hear.
Appalachia is made up of many parts, regions and subdivisions. It is not one amorphous mass. Much of it is coal-mining region, much of it marginal farm areas, much of it ridge-and-saddle, much “up the holler,” much spur and fringe. Each subregion may have a few individual characteristics because of its own peculiar conditions, but anyone who has traveled through the whole vast network, worked in it, visited, studied it, as I have done, with the entrée of an Appalachian husband who is at home with any other Appalachian, is impressed with the consistency of certain traits, characteristics, mores and norms that run through all the counties and the various states like a common cord. Indeed, it is the very consistency of these traits in all of Appalachia that enables anyone to speak at all of “Appalachia.”
I am not an Appalachian by birth, but I have been married to one for twenty-eight years and have lived as a member of this primitive society within the family, the religion, the economics and the politics of the society. I have had an excellent workshop in which to study and what I have learned has been learned in the intimacy of acceptance within the society. I have not, however, limited my study to the immediate environment. What I have learned has been checked against all the other regions of Appalachia, West Virginia, North Carolina, upper Georgia and our own Cumberland plateau counties. I have found everywhere the same religious concepts and the same close family loyalties and traditions.
In the north end of Adair County in Kentucky, we are not the deep mountains or the coal-mining regions. We are hill-and-holler farm and timber people. We live in the intricately tangled hills and hollows of a broad, long, fingering mass of spurs and foothills of the Cumberlands. Here there is a pocket of pure Appalachianism, without the admixture of foreign blood prevalent in some of the mining areas. We have had slight influxes of West Virginia and North Carolina Appalachians since the 1920s. These people are perfectly at home among us, with religious beliefs and family ways entirely like ours. My husband’s father used to go into West Virginia to work in the mines in the winters. He was perfectly at home there. My husband’s people have lived in this community for seven generations. We live within two miles of the spot the first of his people settled in 1803.
It was almost totally inaccessible country when my husband first brought me here. It had no road system, no electricity, no telephones. One graveled road led in. Dirt roads, creek beds and logging slides were used to get about up the ridges and down the hollows. The mail was carried by jeep, and when a creek that had to be forded three times was up, it did not arrive. I remember one snowbound time when there was no mail for a week. Supplies were brought in by a “huckster” — a sort of traveling grocery store. His schedule was once a week but in the winter we were lucky if he got through once a month. And in winter the only way we could reach the county town was by a logging slide down the back side of the ridge, on down a creek bed, then around devious dirt roads. A jeep could do it but a mule would have been better.
Less than five miles from us was even more rugged country in which one big family-clan lived, intermarried and bred for generations. To drive down their ridge, when you could, was to see with only a few exceptions the same last name on every mailbox for ten miles. The last killing in a fifty-year-long intrafamily feud had occurred as late as 1930.
I groped and fumbled in this new environment and the first few years caused my husband and his people much embarrassment. But slowly, within the family, with much patient, gentle, courteous guidance, I was instructed in the right ways, the right language, the right behavior. I was told not to talk so much, not to ask questions, never to dispute, argue or correct. I was taught never to offer advice. I was told if I did not agree with someone to keep quiet. I was told I must never act as if I took pride in anything I had done or owned. I was taught that it was all right to tell news but that gossip was frowned on. The difference between news and gossip, I learned, was in the expression of personal opinion or judgment. To my chagrin I learned that allowances were made for my ignorance because I had not been properly “raised up.” I could not be expected to know much.
I could behave discreetly enough, but my “ways” caused considerable consternation. I had brought with me the furnishings of a four-room apartment in the city, which included a piano, rugs, walls of books, my desk and typewriter. The way I cooked, the way my home was furnished, the way I kept my house, the way I occupied myself within it could not be hidden and all were conclusive evidence that I was “proud” and that I “put myself above other people.” The entire family-clan rallied loyally to apologize. Admittedly I was “quare,” but it was to be remembered I was from “off.” I had had these things in the city. I could not be expected to discard them. An apology also had to be made for the fact that I “wrote books” and did not tend chickens, cows, pigs or even the “garden patch.” A good neighbor, a woman I came to love dearly, could not believe that any woman could be happy without “something to tend.” She furnished me with a dozen baby chickens shortly after we had got settled in.
Slowly, very slowly, I realized that nearly everything the Appalachian is proceeds from his religious concepts. The Bible was quoted to me so constantly as the basis for all behavior that it was impossible not to understand eventually that in everything that matters the Appalachian actually lives in Thessalonica, Philippi, Corinth and especially in Ephesus and Galatia. The apostle Paul writes letters to him. He tells the Appalachians what they should believe and down to the minutest detail how they shall behave. No aspect, no intimacy, of their life escapes his instruction. He admonishes them, chides them; he grows impatient with them; he warns and encourages them; he guides and directs; and he promises them the kingdom of heaven if they are faithful. They strive to understand him and to obey him, and they wait for the chariot to swing low and carry them home. In the whole pattern of his life the Appalachian is an early Christian.
This did not tally at all with what I had always read, that the Appalachian is irreligious. There were even statistics to prove it. Only 10 percent to 15 percent of all Appalachians belonged to churches. But no society is entirely irreligious. In the whole recorded history of man no society has ever been found in which there were not religious concepts of some sort that bound it together, informed and furnished its habits and customs. Why, then, was the Appalachian, so biblically religious that his entire society was based on it, considered irreligious? Because he did not join churches! And the facts were incontrovertible.
In almost a hundred years of effort, the established and organized churches have made so little impression on him that the percentage of those belonging to churches in Appalachia has risen only a meager amount — from around 5 percent to 10 to 15 percent. And if that final figure were broken down it would undoubtedly show that fully half of it is concentrated in the towns — that 5 percent would be a truer figure for rural and village Appalachians. Why? There had to be a reason. He was religious, rigidly religious, but he would not join churches.
The truth was slow to unfold as I pursued this study, but it finally became clear. The Appalachian is a Pauline Christian, a biblical Christian, but he is not only nondenominational, he is violently antidenominational. He will have nothing to do with organized churches, that is, the established churches with a central organization, church membership rolls, a literature and an educated ministry, because the organized churches are “denominations.”
Many Appalachians believe the denominations had their origins at the tower of Babel and have been scattering confusion over the face of the earth ever since. To him, the denominations not only have no scriptural authority, but far, far worse, they have “added to” the Bible and thus are actually guilty of “going against the Bible.” To many Appalachians it is a sin to belong to a denomination.
The only “denominations” he will have anything to do with are those that claim not to be denominations — such as the splinter groups that have broken away from the established churches, the many Baptist splinter groups, the various primitive groups that have also arisen from rigid Bible interpretations. These groups rarely have a central organization, do not insist upon church membership rolls, do not have an educated ministry.
Every census year, therefore, for generations the Appalachian has replied to the question concerning his church affiliation, the denomination to which he belongs, “I don’t belong to none.” This was my mother-in-law’s reply in the census year of 1950, which she made in my presence and set me to thinking and studying. She had added, “I don’t hold with the denominations.” There is no more deeply, devoutly, truly religious person in the world than my mother-in-law. She is the purest example of the Appalachian Christian I know, yet all her long life she has replied to any question concerning her church affiliation, “I don’t belong to no church.” Multiply this by hundreds of thousands of Appalachians, over the generations, and there is the statistical assumption that, because so few belong to churches, the Appalachian is irreligious.
The early Appalachian brought at least some vague denominational concepts and theology with him into Appalachia. Because he was largely Scotch-English in origin, they were mostly Calvinist. But separated from society he slowly developed his own Bible-based religion and he largely based it on the remembered scriptural basis for the doctrines of Calvinism.
Harry Caudill in Night Comes to the Cumberlands tells how for so long the doctrine of infant damnation anguished the souls of the Appalachians. But slowly this denominational concept, too, was abandoned. Using the Pauline epistles mostly for guidance, interpreting them as best he could for himself, the Appalachian became wholly nondenominational.
There was no ministry. Paul enjoined him that any man led of the Spirit should be heard, so he raised up his own lay ministry. Paul had taken no pay except hospitality in his ministry; he had earned his living in other ways as other men did. Therefore a preacher should not be paid for preaching. He should be given hospitality, a collection might be taken up to pay his expenses, but he should never make his living by preaching. To this day the Appalachian has an in-built dislike for the educated minister who has made of the ministry a paid profession. Preaching is a grace, added to man by the Spirit, and he should not cash in on it. The educated, denominational minister has a harder row to hoe in Appalachia than almost any outsider because he violates so many of the Appalachian’s long-held, traditional religious concepts.
The Appalachian’s religious concepts dictate the social patterns for him. Much of his social behavior is grounded specifically in the apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians. He is told here not to indulge in backbiting, and that all works of the flesh are to be avoided. They are spelled out in detail. He is to avoid adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such like. He is told not to be desirous of vainglory, provoking one another, and that if a man thinks himself to be something when he is nothing, he is deceived. The Appalachian strives to avoid all these things.
He is also reminded here to love his neighbor as himself, to honor his father and mother, to do good. He is told that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, and that if he lives in the Spirit, he must walk in the Spirit. He is promised a place in the kingdom of heaven if he is faithful. He believes these things and he strives to abide by them.
The outsider coming in thus finds a society in which a man does not seek leadership, in which individuality is sunk and any singularity is frowned upon. These things would be desiring vainglory. The Appalachian would be thinking he is something. He would be putting himself forward; he would be elevating himself above others; he would be acting as if he were better than others. He would be walking proud.
The outsider finds men who will not engage in free debate. It is argument and variance. It is provoking one another. It generates wrath, hatred, strife. It is troublemaking. Feelings get stirred up. People are hurt and there is general unpleasantness. Except in matters of religious and biblical interpretation, so important to the Appalachian because it concerns his immortal soul, he is not disputatious. He strives in all ways to be pleasant, agreeable, to give no offense.
The outsider finds a people who are remarkably honorable, good and decent personally and in their dealings with each other. In a day when all the corruption and evil of which mankind is capable seems to be coming like pus out of its pores, it is healing to find an entire people, still, who so honor the commandments that they do not, generally, lie or cheat or steal. Even a white lie comes hard to an Appalachian, and stealing is held in such abhorrence that it is not necessary to lock one’s doors.
In Appalachia a man’s word, in personal dealings, is as good as his bond, quite literally. Thou shalt not bear false witness is taken seriously. From the sale of a cow or a car, to the sale of a tract of timber or house and land, the Appalachian does not knowingly misrepresent anything about it. Every trade or sale is concluded with, “Now, if it ain’t just like I’ve told you, let me know and I’ll make it right.” He does make it right if some error has crept in.
The outsider will find a society where men and women honor their marriage vows and the divorce rate is very low. He will find a people who honor their parents. Not even an adult Appalachian will argue with, quarrel with or speak disrespectfully to his parents, and in their old age parents are cherished and cared for in the home of a married son or daughter.
Not organization-minded, the Appalachian does not channel his good works through the church or the community. He is personally committed to being a good neighbor. With his own kind he is generous to a fault, his hospitality is boundless, and no call for help goes unheeded. The opposite of more sophisticated people who do not like to be personally involved, the Appalachian feels he must be personally involved.
The outsider coming in will find a people so courteous, in whom courtesy is so practiced and ingrained, that it has become almost the gentle Oriental custom of saving face. Never do you expose a man to ridicule or humiliation and embarrassment.
The Reverend Mr. Jack Weller in his book, Yesterday’s People, cites one of the most beautiful examples of this type of face-saving I have come across. It went awry because Mr. Weller did not know his role. He tried to get the opinion and decision of a church committee to repair the church driveway with mine slate, which could be had free. No one would venture an opinion. Thinking the men were shy of speaking up, Mr. Weller went ahead with the project and the inevitable happened. The first hard rain turned the mine slate into mush and mire and he had to have it bulldozed off.
Every man on that committee knew what would happen, but not one spoke up. Mr. Weller says he was later told they did not want to oppose him. True. But the rest of the story they could not tell him. They were embarrassed by Mr. Weller’s ignorance, made extremely uncomfortable by it. But to tell him he was wrong would have been to show up his ignorance and make him look ridiculous. This they were too courteous to do.
Unbelievably sensitive to any loss of face himself, the Appalachian could never have comprehended that Mr. Weller would not have felt ridiculous, that he would have laughed at his own ignorance, that he would have been grateful for their advice.
I wish Mr. Weller had known his Appalachian a little better, for he would have known that by the lack of comment the project was unworkable and he would have dropped the whole matter. For if the Appalachian cannot agree with you, he will in no way explain further. He will simply keep silent. Had Mr. Weller known this he could have saved his committee’s face. As it was, he did the worst thing he could have done. He persisted and in his failure he not only made a ridiculous figure of himself before the entire community, he made a ridiculous figure of all his church people. Their preacher had been foolish.
But this is the kind of intimate, intricate interweaving of thought and action that is so mystifying to the outsider and so wholly understood by the Appalachian that he could not, if he would, explain it. It would require an explanation of the entire social structure. It has been the pattern of his behavior for generations; it is the only pattern of behavior he knows, and he can only assume it will be understood.
As a woman, I have often wished the apostle Paul had not been a bachelor and, I strongly suspect, a dyspeptic one at that. He might not have made a wife’s place so lowly had he been a husband. But the place assigned to wives, accepted and practiced by generations of Appalachians, is found in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, in particular the fifth chapter:
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.
In all ways a husband is the head of the house. He makes every decision; he does not share his opinions with his wife or ask hers. His will is the only will. A wife is silent, obeys her husband and serves him. She does not ever in public dispute him, cross his wishes or in any way cause him embarrassment or humiliation, with her tongue or with her actions. She does not eat at table with him, not, at least, until recently. This habit has changed. She and her daughters used to serve the husband and sons. When the men had finished, the women ate. In church she sat apart from him, with other women. In walking together, a wife walked behind her husband.
I have vivid memories of my first years on “the ridge,” when I watched my husband’s old uncle — the patriarch of his family-clan, walk down the dirt road to “meetin’ ” every Saturday evening. It would be “first dark” — dusk. In one hand he carried an unlit lantern to be used going home. In the other was his Bible. He walked exactly in the middle of the road. Behind him, six paces perhaps, dutifully followed his tough little knot of a wife.
He was the only one left on the ridge, the last of a long, long line to adhere so rigidly to the tradition. But to the day he died, four or five years ago, he and his wife followed the old way.
Slowly the Pauline conception of husband-wife relationships has been ameliorated, but there are still holdovers of it. Appalachian wives still wait on their husbands more than most wives, still defer to them publicly, still teach their children to honor their father as the head of the family.
In the early days, struggling to interpret the Bible, to determine the right ways and the right behavior, the recognized most purely religious man, through his long study of the Bible, its portents, prophecies and admonitions, and through his own conduct, became the most respected man. To this day the man most respected, most honored, most admired in Appalachia is not the man who acquires the most education, riches, possessions. He is the man who, according to Appalachian concepts, is the most religious man — the best Christian. There are no upper, middle and lower classes in Appalachia. There are only two classes — sinners and Christians. A man is a sinner until he has the mystical experience of being “saved.” He is then a Christian.
We have one evangelist in the state, one voice crying in the wilderness, one conscience crying shame. If Harry Caudill’s Southern Mountain Authority could have become a reality, a federal project as was the Tennessee Valley Authority, a long step would have been taken toward solving the Appalachian problem. Since Appalachia is being supported largely out of the public purse already, it is difficult to understand why an enlightened government did not move in this direction until one remembers that it is Bethlehem Steel, U.S. Steel, Ford Motor Company, International Harvester and others who are so entrenched in the area. Perhaps the federal government flinches, as do the state governments, from antagonizing these industrial giants. One also remembers that through the enlargement of T.V.A. the federal government, ironically, has a vested interest in Appalachian coal.
President Kennedy enjoined us, “Ask not what your country can do for you . . .” But the Appalachian must ask, and he deserves a better reply than he is getting.