Who we are, where we came from, what our ancestors did before us, and where and how we lived has much to do with what we might compose in verse and story.
Of English and Scotch-Irish stock, my ancestors settled in Virginia during pioneer days, the Lindseys at Berryville, the Stills near Cumberland Gap. A roadside marker at Jonesville, Virginia, denotes the birthplace of Alfred Taylor Still (1828–1917), who conceived the medical system of osteopathy. He was one of our “set.” On my mother’s side my great-grandmother was a Georgia Lanier. Tradition has it that some of my ancestors on both sides fought in the American Revolution and that wilderness land was allotted them as a reward, the Lindseys first settling in north Georgia, the Stills in Alabama. In my mother’s childhood the kitchen floor was beaten earth. Grandpa Lindsey mined enough gold on his land to fill his teeth. (The gold rush in Dahlonega, Georgia, predated Sutter’s Mill by twenty years.) The move to Alabama when my mother was sixteen was occasioned by a cyclone’s destruction of the family home. An often-heard account was the tale of Uncle Joe surviving burial under the rocks of the chimney.
When my parents married in 1893 they homesteaded in Texas, where two of my sisters were born. Papa’s farm is now a part of the Fort Hood military reservation. Moving back to Alabama, he ran a drugstore for a time and boarded the schoolmaster in order to be taught the requisite Latin. Papa always trusted he would return to Texas, though it never came about, for a sister died of scarlet fever and Mama would never agree to leave her. He generally wore “western” boots and hat, and we ate sourdough bread. I recall bits and pieces of Texas lore passed on to us, and I’ve always thought of Texas as a distant home. My collection of Texas writings reflects this nostalgia. I soldiered at San Antonio during World War II.
Papa undertook his life’s profession as a “horse doctor,” a veterinarian with little formal training, along with farming and horse trading. “Short courses” at what is now Auburn University fitted him for a license to practice veterinary medicine. He once told me, “I’ve never cheated anybody in my life except in a horse trade. That doesn’t count. It’s a game.” Papa appeared to know every equine in the county by their dubbing, having been present at their procreation or birth, or having ministered to them. Passing these horses, he always spoke to them and sometimes raised his hat. Papa was fair of countenance, eyes blue as a wren’s egg, redheaded, and he never lost a hair to his dying day. I recollect an aunt informing me, “Too bad you’re not good-looking like your daddy.”
I appeared in this world on July 16, 1906, on Double Branch Farm near LaFayette in Chambers County, Alabama. I was the first boy after five girls. Eventually, the count ran to five girls and five boys. Our black wet nurse, “Aunt Fanny,” helped Mama care for us. She diapered us, comforted us, and shielded us. We loved her with all our hearts. When my legs were long enough I would run away to her house, and she would let me sop syrup out of a bucket lid. When they came hunting for me she would hide me under the bed. Her unmarried companion was named Porter and was uncommonly white for his race. He had been struck by lightning twice and survived, and that we thought was the reason for his light skin.
Sometimes I tell folk I was born in a cotton patch. Some of my earliest memories are of running about with a small sack Mama had sewed for me; of picking a boll here and there; of urging my sisters to pick faster, as Papa had promised I could go to the cotton gin with him if we finished out a bale that day; of taking the wagon trip atop two thousand pounds of cotton; and of losing my cap up the suction tube. It was a memorable happening for a boy of four.
After Grandma Still’s death we moved in with Grandpa and Aunt Enore, a maiden aunt, on the farm between Pigeon Roost and Hootlocka Creeks, near Marcoot. I was five. A brother had long since kicked me out of the cradle—almost before I could walk. (I believe that was a deciding factor in my development.) About then I fell and stuck a rusty nail in my stomach and had to learn to walk a second time. In our family, once you learned to stand alone, you were treated as an adult. Although a quiet child, I’m told, I was independent—one who wouldn’t allow my aunts or my kissing cousins to “smack” me. I began early to think for myself. My father once told me, “You had a long childhood.” He meant that my youth was spent in a schoolroom instead of in the fields. Of his own schooling Papa said he got as far as “baker” in the Blueback Speller.
Grandpa Still’s homestead was antebellum with all the attributes associated with pre-Civil War architecture: gray, with sand mixed in the paint, large rooms, high ceilings. The kitchen and dining room were set back from the living quarters as a precaution against fire. There was an attic with a full measure of artifacts from the past. Clear in memory are the boxwoods crowding the front steps and the paths among Grandma’s flower beds. And the buckets of water thrown on the cape jasmines on summer nights to enliven the fragrance.
I was six when we moved to the Carlisle Place two miles from LaFayette on the Buffalo road. Within a year we were living in our own newly built and mortgaged home. Standing today in Chambers County are many dwellings of the same pattern: roomy, hall down the middle, veranda halfway round, a frosted pane distinguishing the front door. From a rise on our forty-acre farm a body could see the Talledega Mountains like a train of smoke to the north. To the south, out of sight, were the Buckelew Mountains where Joe Louis, the boxer, was born in 1914. Chambers County has several other historical connections. Woodrow Wilson’s grandfather taught school weekdays in the old Presbyterian church, and Stonewall Jackson’s father-in-law was a pastor there for a time.
The “Mark Twain” in my nature compels me to relate a story from Chambers County, one that Papa told me. Passing through LaFayette on a Sunday, he heard the Baptist congregation singing “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?” and the Methodist congregation singing simultaneously, “No, Not One.” Papa liked a good joke—such as when Grandpa Lindsey accused Papa’s bull in an adjoining pasture of “demoralizing” his cows. When Papa and my uncles laughed, they could be heard a half mile.
At the Carlisle Place in summer we children worked in the fields, Papa with us when not on call, Mama alongside when she could spare the time from cooking, sewing, laundry, preserving fruits and vegetables, and other household tasks. To ward off suntan and freckles my sisters greased their faces and necks with cream, wore stockings on their hands and arms, and covered their heads with wide-brim straw hats. My sisters would never work in sight of the road. While our main crop was cotton, we also raised sugarcane, sorghum, soybeans, and corn. The sun was hot, the days were long, and the rows of cotton seemed to stretch to the horizon.
One day, when I was hoeing cotton, my sister Inez began to tell a story from the next row—a true story, I thought. It continued for hours as our hoes chopped and pushed and rang against stones. Then I learned that her story was a fabrication. She had created it while she was working. From that moment my horizon expanded into the imaginary. I could make my own tales, and I did. Oral ones.
The boll weevil made an appearance in the South, and we walked the rows with a cup of kerosene and picked them off. We picked potato bugs as well and rooted out nut grass (chufas). An established colony of nut grass was considered the death of a farm, yet the bulbs are good to eat and taste like coconut. When we located a plant, we ate the enemy.
At seven years of age, I started school, walking the two miles to the “college” in LaFayette with my three sisters, bearing a lunch of two biscuits and slices of bacon. My first teacher, Miss Porterfield, wrote my name on the desk with chalk and handed me an ear of corn. My duty was to outline my name with the grains. A hands-on beginning. By day’s end I knew my name’s shape and could write it myself. Small for my age, I was the only pupil who needed to stand on a box to reach the blackboard. On Class Day I stood in chapel and recited Stevenson’s “Birdie with a Yellow Bill,” and I brought down the house. My knee pants were unbuttoned. We acted out “Hiawatha.” I was Adjidaumo, the squirrel. Hiawatha’s thanks linger: “O my little friend, the squirrel,/Bravely have you toiled to help me;/Take the thanks of Hiawatha.” Some thirty years later, Miss Porterfield was to tell me, “I can still call the name of every child in your class, but I never thought you would be the one.”
The two events that figure largely in my younger years were the American Civil War and the Great Depression. My grandfather Still had served in the Confederate Army and had a finger severed by a Yankee bullet. My maternal grandmother’s first husband lost his life in north Georgia attempting to head off Sherman’s march to the sea. Many veterans were alive when I was young, and sometimes they would sit on Grandpa Still’s veranda and reminisce. I recall vividly the account of the tunnel the Yanks dug under the Confederate trenches at Petersburg and the aftermath of the explosion. On Confederate Day we students were given small “bonny blue flags” and marched to the cemetery to decorate the graves of veterans. Although we harbored little knowledge of the cause of the struggle, we were certain it would be fought again, and the next time we would win. In later years I visited the major battlefields and the sites of many of the smaller engagements. Appomattox brought tears. I was readying myself to write a novel based on the prison at Andersonville, Georgia, only to be thwarted by MacKinlay Kantor publishing his own book on that subject.
Aside from the Holy Bible, we had three books at home: The Anatomy of the Horse; The Palaces of Sin, or the Devil in Society; and a hefty volume with a missing back, Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge. I learned from Palaces the sin of drinking gin and playing at cards. The author was one Colonel Dick Maple, who “spent his fortune with lavish hand, but awoke from his hypnotic debauch at Society’s shame”; the scene of action was Washington, D.C. A full-page drawing depicts “Jenny Manley of Alabama rebuking guests at table for drinking wine.” The Anatomy was beyond my comprehension.
The Cyclopedia was my introduction to a wider world. Subjects covered were eclectic—philosophy, physics, rhetoric, as well as such topics as the pruning of fruit trees, rules for games, social and business correspondence, the language of flowers, and capsule histories of nations. There were also many poems—by Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, among others. I memorized the haunting “Ozymandias” and Cleopatra’s swan song, “I am dying, Egypt, dying.” The Cyclopedia was my first stab at a liberal education. During those years I saw my first motion pictures, Damon and Pythias and The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin. With a ticket provided by a teacher I attended Chautauqua—a classical guitar performance and a lecture that I choose to believe was the famed “Acres of Diamonds.” Jean Webster read from Daddy Long Legs at the school, William Jennings Bryan came to town, and the warden of Sing Sing Prison lectured. Papa once pulled me through a crowd to have me shake hands with Governor Comer. A circus came to town and our class learned to spell elephant, lion, and tiger.
I remember the day World War I ended. A truck loaded with celebrants passed, shouting, “The war is over! The war is over!” One morning we hurried to LaFayette early to attend a hanging. We stood in the road before the jailhouse while this gruesome rite took place. On that day I became a foe of capital punishment. In my teens, witnessing a Ku Klux Klan initiation involving the burning of a cross with citizens in bed sheets taking the oath, my liberal instincts rose, and they have remained.
At school there was “Old Black Joe,” the janitor who befriended a generation of children. Such was his respect in the community that he was one of the two blacks allowed to vote. The other to share the privilege was the barber Green Appleby, who served only whites. Appleby’s advertisement in the LaFayette Sun listed him as a “Tonsorial Artist . . . Neat shop . . . Sharp razors.” Another black held in esteem was “Puss” Irwin, the wiry courthouse janitor, who dutifully held us youngsters up to the fountain for a drink of ice water. His assistant was Joe Barrow, the father of Joe Louis (Barrow). I recollect Joe Barrow usually dozing on the courthouse steps.
I was grown and in graduate school before I became acquainted with the writings of Johnson Jones Hooper, author of Some Adventures of Simon Suggs, Late of the Talapossa Volunteers—antebellum humor of the Old Southwest. Born in North Carolina he came to Alabama and founded the LaFayette East Alabamian in 1842, a newspaper with the motto: “It’s good to be shifty in a new country.” Later, while practicing law, he edited the Chambers County Tribune. In my first encounter with Hooper’s works I was put off by the rash of dialect—a briar patch of contractions, elisions, and apostrophes. Probably not aware that I had lived in the same geographical spot, critics have more than once suggested that Simon Suggs is the father of my character Uncle Jolly, who appears in both my novels River of Earth and Sporty Creek. Uncle Jolly, in fact, was my great-grandpa, with some of the attributes of a cousin, and that’s as near as I’ve come to using actual persons in my fiction. When I started writing about Kentucky, dialect was both a problem and a challenge. Edward Weeks, editor of the Atlantic, warned me early on, “Dialect is out of fashion.” My intentions are to evoke speech. Dialect too strictly adhered to makes a character appear ignorant who is only unlettered; yet, Simon Suggs has lasted and is a pleasure when read aloud by an apt interpreter.
We moved to LaFayette for a couple of years—something to do with the mortgage—and into the Judge Norman house, a dwelling of many rooms, spacious grounds, flaming crepe myrtles, and giant magnolias. The air was scented with cottonseed oil being processed in a nearby plant. Within earshot of the back fence lived “darkies,” as they were referred to in those days. We heard their laughter and singing and cheerful banter and mistakenly judged them as being without the cares that plagued white society. Our neighbor was “Cotton Tom” Heflin, U.S. congressman or senator for decades. The Heflins were rarely at home. The straw mat on our hall floor was a gift of Mrs. Heflin. A Heflin son once fired a shotgun in our direction, raining pellets on our roof. The Norman house, though it has been drastically altered, still stands, as does the white-pillared mansion of the Honorary J. Tom Heflin.
The “college” that I was to attend through the fifth grade had actually been one in times past and was in need of major repairs. A proposed three-mill tax was put on the ballot and defeated in the election. In talking to the editor of the LaFayette Sun the next day my father said, “The building will have to fall down for the voters to wake up.” The roof of the auditorium collapsed that night.
At war’s end the price of cotton fell. We had moved back to the Carlisle Place for two or three years when our long-carried mortgage on the farm was foreclosed. We moved to Shawmut, a textile town in the Chattahoochee Valley. Although we lived on “Boss Row” (Lanier Avenue), my father was not employed in the factory. The company wanted a veterinarian handy, since many townsmen kept a cow or horse in the backyard. On Christmas Eves we children hung our stockings by the chimney and were rewarded with an orange, an apple, peppermint sticks, and a handful of nuts. Once, I got a toy pistol. Our first Christmas at Shawmut, the factory gave every child a paper bag brimming with a variety of fruits, nuts, candy, and a toy.
Up to then the only fiction of value I had read was Treasure Island—not even The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Last of the Mohicans, or Robinson Crusoe. There was to be much catching up in the years to come. Against the librarian’s suggestion, I borrowed Balzac’s Father Goriot. It was a revelation. I can still smell the boardinghouse depicted in the early chapters. And I began to write my first novel, of boats and sailors and whales, even though I had never beheld a boat larger than a bateau, known a sailor, or viewed an ocean. I have no further memory of this venture.
I got caught up in the game of basketball, often playing from school’s end until dark. Our team was invited to the state tournament at Birmingham. Only one member of the team was taken along, the other players being “ringers” recruited from the factory. They attended classes a half-day to qualify. We were joyful when they were roundly defeated in their first game, probably by another team of ringers. Such affairs are better ordered nowadays. I won second prize in a Birmingham News essay contest on the subject of insect control in gardens. First prize went for chemical treatment. I plumped for birds.
I was in the ninth grade when we moved farther down the valley to Jarrett Station. I attended Fairfax High School in another factory town that was within walking distance. I joined the Boy Scouts of America, earned twenty-three merit badges and achieved the status of Eagle Scout; later, I published one of my first poems in Boys’ Life.
During my senior year I happened upon a catalog of Lincoln Memorial University, located near Cumberland Gap in Harrogate, Tennessee. The college–established after the Civil War by General O.O. Howard to reward the loyalty of the area to the Union cause–flourishes to this day and is in a natural setting probably unequaled in America. The opportunity to work my way through was the draw. In the fall of 1924, with sixty dollars earned as an office boy at the factory and as a door-to-door delivery boy of the Atlanta Constitution, I set off for this school of some eight hundred students drawn mainly from the mountain areas of the three adjoining states. I had made a genealogical circle. Up the road in Virginia was the site of the Stills’ pioneer home.
Most students at Lincoln Memorial worked for their tuition and keep on campus, on the farm, or at the hatchery, dairy, or rock quarry. I was assigned to the quarry, where I pried limestone croppings out of a pasture and sometimes operated a rock crusher. One Christmas vacation, lacking a ticket home, one nickel in my pocket, I shoveled gravel onto roads and crosswalks. I spent the nickel on chewing gum. Once, I put a hand in my pocket and found a silver dollar. An “angel” had put it there. My grades suffered during my freshman year, as I was too fatigued to study. They picked up during subsequent terms after a change of chores—I was now raking leaves, mixing concrete, mending roofs, painting houses, and working as a janitor at the library. I attended classes mornings and worked afternoons. As janitor I took over the library at 9:00 P.M.
A majority of the students had no money to buy extra food. My overriding memory of those years was of being hungry. We ate everything off of the tables. Walnut trees were plentiful on the hills around Harrogate, and we cracked bushels of walnuts. We raked our hands through snow under apple trees for overlooked fruit. The president of Lincoln Memorial spirited me into his house to try on a suit he could spare, and it fit perfectly. I broke into tears when he presented it to me–not from joy, as reported, but from humiliation. I never wore it.
The third and fourth year I kept the job of janitor at the library. At 9:00 P.M. I locked the door, emptied the wastebaskets, swept the floor, and rubbed up the tables, and until daylight it was my private domain. Many nights I became too sleepy to make it to the dormitory, so I slept in the stack room, a book for a pillow. I hardly knew what to take up first, what book, what periodical. Discovering the scholarly journal American Speech, I wrote two articles for that publication; H.L. Mencken was to quote from them in The American Language. I particularly noted the Atlantic, and it became a future target for my poems and short stories. The library became the recipient of many years of this periodical, and I was asked to check the files for missing issues and to dump the rest into the furnace. That summer I freighted virtually a ten-year collection of issues home, and with the Great Depression in full swing and work unattainable, I read every story, poem, and essay. During the next quarter century the Atlantic would publish three poems and ten short stories of mine.
At Lincoln the provider of the “work” scholarships was an elderly gentleman by the name of Guy Loomis, heir to a sash-and-blind fortune who was providing assistance to students in several institutions in the southern mountains. I managed to learn his address, and I wrote in my senior year to thank him and to invite him to the graduation exercises. He actually came, driving down from Brooklyn in a chauffeured Cadillac; he remained several days and attended class exercises. After I won the Rush Strong Medal and prizes in four other essay contests, Mr. Loomis offered to sponsor me for a year in graduate school, provided it was in the South. In extending the scholarship he said, “I’ll make it possible, not easy.” His warning proved correct. I chose Vanderbilt University and was off to Nashville in the fall of 1929.
I had my noggin inside one book or another throughout my year at Vanderbilt. Professor Edwin Mims picked the courses for me, which did not include one of his own. I did attend his lectures on the subject of evolution—the “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, being a sizzling issue of the day. At term’s end I presented my thesis for his approval and signature, and he said he would sign it after Dr. Curry and Professor Ransom affixed theirs. Mims did accordingly, without riffling a page. In a lecture at Alumni Hall, he introduced me to the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Mims had recently published The Advancing South, which was held in considerable disregard by some faculty members. They would shortly offset it with a publication of their own.
The “Fugitives” of Vanderbilt University were on the verge of publishing I’ll Take My Stand, a manifesto on Jeffersonian agrarianism that presented a sardonic view of industrial society (and that over the past seventy years has built up a literature of its own). Those present read their chapters to us. Robert Penn Warren, who later recanted his part, was at Oxford University, and Andrew Lytle was at nearby Sewanee University. Lytle read a play to us, not his contribution to the book. John Crowe Ransom with his book The New Criticism inaugurated a method for closely reading poetic texts that caught hold in English departments here and abroad. Ransom was one of the great teachers, according to the periodical The American Scholar. Quiet, kindly, a Southern gentleman of the old school, he stretched our imaginations beyond the subject at hand, which happened to be “The English Novel.”
During the first week in the American Literature class, Dr. John Donald Wade tested our familiarity with the authors of merit from the Civil War forward. I made a perfect score. Nobody else managed a passing grade. Dr. Wade called me to his office the next day, told me he was now my advisor, and said, “You don’t have to bother with my class. Just drop in once in awhile and learn what we’re up to.” I took him at his word. My contribution to The History of American Literature, the text that the class composed, was the chapters on Cotton and Increase Mather. Some twenty years later, when Katherine Ann Porter told me she was writing about the Mathers, I was prepared to discuss the subject.
The Chaucer class under Dr. Walter Clyde Curry, as we would say here, was a “horse.” I attended it with fear and trembling, as I suspect did others, and yet it was the most rewarding class of all. I once calculated that I spent seventeen hours in preparation for each of the two classes per week. And I chose to write my thesis under Dr. Curry’s direction: “The Function of Dreams and Visions in the Middle English Romances.” Why, given a choice, did I opt to do a thesis under this strictest of professors, who was unrelenting and a perfectionist, and who some said was cruel? Why did I select a subject that required overnight learning to read Middle English and wading through more than one hundred volumes of the Early English Text Society? Dr. Curry read each section of the thesis as I presented it to him during the year, yet gave no suggestions, never the slightest hint that I was doing acceptable work. At school’s end he remarked to me in class, “From where you started, you have made more progress than anybody in the course.” But how far did I get? I was never called for orals or to defend my thesis. The professor’s wife wrote to me at a later date after reading a story of mine and added the comment, “I understand that while you were at Vanderbilt you did not have a course under my husband.”
Shortly after I arrived at Vanderbilt, I spent a weekend in Wilder, Tennessee, where a strike had been in progress for more than a year. I had gone to this benighted mine camp along with two other Vanderbilt students to deliver a truckload of food and clothing collected in Nashville for the strikers. I almost rode in the truck with Barney Graham, who later was to lose his life in the cause. Barney thought it an unnecessary risk, as he was subject to being hijacked.
We found the people drawn and pale from malnourishment, though their resolve was strong and unshaken. They were held together by their common misery. The town was divided, the scabs living in the camp houses on one side, the strikers on the other. There was a “dead line,” and a person crossed it at his peril. On the strikers’ side, the water and electricity were cut off. It was my first inkling that folk could starve to death in the United States of America in plain view of a largely indifferent populace. At that time the Red Cross had not yet allowed flour to be distributed to these people.
I lodged in the home of Jim Crownover, president of the union that year, and caught “thrush,” an infection of the mouth, from which his children were suffering. We attended a gathering at one of the homes after dark, blowing out the light before leaving to avoid providing a ready target for a sharpshooter. Arriving men deposited pistols, rifles, and shotguns on a bed. The conversation was as gloomy as the light shed by a coal-oil lamp. When the meeting was over a banjo-picker provided music for a bit of square dancing.
Until the spring of 1930, when my benefactor increased my stipend a bit, my two meals a day consisted of a ten-cent bowl of cereal in the morning and a thirty-five-cent supper at a Nashville boardinghouse. I lived in the home of a widow at 1913 Broad Street, the only roomer in a house of heavy mahogany furniture and drawn curtains and silence. The widow considered it an aberration that I insisted on a hot bath every day. I blew the speckles of soot from the railroad yards off my pillow at night. The widow’s children were adults, rarely encountered. The son operated a nightclub by the river; the daughter, probably in her late twenties, had some sort of night work, presumably at the club. The few times I passed the daughter in the hall she was swathed in mink and her “Night in Paris” perfume lingered after. She never spoke. The nightclub burned in March, the son in it. I never set eyes on the widow again. I pushed the rent money under her door when due.
In December 1929, en route to Florida, Mr. Loomis stopped by Nashville and had me to lunch. It was raining, and he inquired, “Have you no raincoat?” Instead of saying no, I skirted the question with, “You said you would make it possible, not easy.” Although he didn’t provide the coat—I believe he forgot about it as we talked—he seemed impressed enough with my progress to mention staking me to another year in school so I might learn something practical with earning possibilities. He chose this time the library school of the University of Illinois. I had never considered being a librarian, yet the Depression was still with us, and library work was something to do. A force-put, as we say.
After a year at Illinois I had earned three diplomas; I had graduated three times in the same pair of shoes. And I had no prospects for employment. First, I applied to the Library of Congress for work in their reference division—they waited three years to suggest an interview. I was ashamed to go home to Alabama. I tried the Civilian Conservation Corps. I attempted selling Bibles in Lee County, Mississippi, for Nashville’s Southwestern Publishers. I picked cotton in Texas. I recollect a hungry night atop a lumber pile in Shreveport, Louisiana. I walked, thumbed, and rode the rails. An open freight car I jumped into as it departed a station bore a contingent of World War I veterans on the way to join the Bonus Army in Washington, D.C. I tried Sears, Roebuck in Atlanta, and I signed up with an employment agency. When I asked the boss of a stove foundry in Rome, Georgia, for a job, he burst into laughter. Nothing worked.
In Nashville I looked up Don West, a former classmate who at that time was preparing for the ministry. He informed me that he and his wife would be conducting vacation Bible schools in Knott County, Kentucky, during July and August 1931. He invited me to join his son-in-law, Jack Adams, in organizing a recreational program at three sites, creating three Boy Scout troops and three baseball teams. As a volunteer. So it came it be. We camped and played ball all summer, and I became enamored with the forested mountains, the valleys and hollows of this backwoods country, and with the independent and forthright folk. I began toying with the notion of moving into an abandoned log house and of trying my hand at writing. Then, the Hindman Settlement School at the forks of Troublesome Creek offered me the job of librarian, again as a volunteer—room, board, and laundry furnished. At that time the school was in severe financial straits.
Don West departed, and I was not to see him again for many years. He went on to found Highlander Folk School with a partner near Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they trained blacks and whites in social awareness and union organization. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks were among his students. West headed the National Miners Union in Harlan County, Kentucky, during the “mine wars” and suffered every indignity—jail, beatings, maiming, and visits from the Ku Klux Klan. When the Freedom of Information Act was passed and he had access to FBI files, West learned that his record covered more than four hundred pages. J. Edgar Hoover had stayed on his trail. Jack Adams joined the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and died in a trench in Spain.
Founded in 1901 by two Kentucky women, graduates of Wellesley College, the Hindman Settlement School evolved from a summer session in a pitched tent to eventually feature eight buildings at Hindman, the county seat. The instructors were mostly Wellesley graduates. Men on the Hindman Settlement School staff were usually locals. The students were drawn from adjoining counties and were rigidly selected. This boarding school could accommodate up to one hundred students, and there was no tuition. Hindman Settlement School was not church-related. Students worked in the vegetable garden or dairy, or they contributed to the upkeep of grounds and buildings. Outstanding graduates sometimes won scholarships for Wellesley and Harvard, though most students continued their education at Berea College. A member of the Hindman Settlement School’s first graduating class, Josiah Combs, obtained a doctorate at the Sorbonne in France.
Hindman was a village of some two hundred souls then, with a single blacktop road that originated in Hazard in Perry County and terminated abruptly in midtown at the creek bank where a bridge had washed out. Until another bridge was in place, a person had to walk a plank during low-water or resort to a jumping pole when there was a “tide.” You could cash a check in Hindman at 4:00 A.M., as the cashier was an early riser; and you could call for mail at midnight, as the postmaster was an insomniac. I was assigned Box 13 because nobody else would have it. I had come to the “jumping-off place.” The first week I witnessed a fatal shooting and admitted the fact, whereas several bystanders would not. There followed warnings to stay out of town, a court trial (which was an embarrassment to the school), and a sense of being in the “doghouse.” The murderer, sent to the penitentiary by my testimony, was pardoned and came to see me–an encounter too complicated to relate here. He lost his life shortly after in a shoot-out.
I remained at the Hindman Settlement School for six years. The library was excellent, the students were eager, and the staff was highly motivated. Aware that many one-room schools in the county were without access to a library, I began spending one day a week–my own undertaking-walking from school to school with a carton of children’s books on my shoulder; I would change the collections in these schools every two weeks. I could serve only four schools in this manner. Often as I approached a school I would hear the cry, “Here comes the book boy.” My first three years at the Hindman Settlement School I received no salary; however, the Depression waning, the school paid me a few dollars for the next three years. Averaged out, I worked six years for six cents a day. One summer I served as a social worker for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), and this experience sparked my novel River of Earth.
I began to take writing seriously rather suddenly when I was twenty-six. First came poems, which soon started appearing in national periodicals (Atlantic, Yale Review, Nation, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others) and were collected as my first book, Hounds on the Mountain, issued by Viking Press in 1937. The few dollars I earned kept me in razor blades, socks, and other necessities. I took up the short story, and my earliest appeared in the Atlantic. Several were chosen for the O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories–one winning an award–and for Best American Short Stories in the years following. Martha Foley, editor of the latter, commented: “A delight to read are James Still’s warm-hearted stories of his Kentucky neighbors whom he depicts in an English language as unspoiled as when Chaucer and the Elizabethan first made it into glorious literature.” A heady encomium for a novice.
I recall distinctly the Saturday morning I began writing a novel in the storeroom of the high school. I always retreated there for my one-hour break during the school day and on Saturdays when my duties allowed. The principal was to remark, “He goes in, bolts the door, and only God knows what he does in there.” I began writing River of Earth. It was time to move on.
On a day in June 1939, I moved nine miles over a wagon road and two miles up a creek bed to a two-story log house in an area of the Cumberlands known in pioneer days as the Big Brush. Erected in 1837 by immigrants from the Black Forest of Germany, the house is the birthplace of the noted dulcimer maker Jethro Amburgey, whose instruments nowadays are sought by collectors. (A mile away once lived Edward Thomas, whose dulcimers are rarer yet.) The dwelling faces east, bounded on one side by Dead Mare Branch and on the other by Wolfpen Creek. Wooded mountains rise before and aft. Mine was to be a domain of thirty-one acres, once a farm, now long lain fallow. I had found a home. I marked the day by an observation in a notebook: “A pair of black-and-white warblers teetered along the banks of Dead Mare and minnows riffled the glassy pools. Partridges called in the water meadow, and from a cove sounded an occasional e-olee of a wood thrush. A rabbit flashed a tail in the wild flax.”
A hedge behind the house reached from Dead Mare to Wolfpen, a distance of some 150 yards. By count, thirty-seven varieties of shrubs and vines formed a wall dominated by sumac, blackberry, and sawbriar, and crowned by wild cherry, hawthorn, and crab apple. Anchoring the row was an aged oak, at whose foot during the first warm days of spring I was to gather edible morels, locally known as dry-land fish. Along the creek banks flourished wild mint. The high ground before the house was to become my yard, garden, and farm; it drained into a marsh where frogs bellowed in spring and where red-winged blackbirds frequented in summer. Swamp violets reached up through the sedge on foot-long stems. Partridges nested along the drier reaches and sometimes exploded from cover like a shotgun blast.
Save for three broken chairs and a small table, the house was bereft of furniture. The back door was painted green to ward off witches. I slept on an army cot and cooked on a two-burner coal-oil stove until I could gather other furnishings. My work-table was two stacked steamer trunks supporting a portable typewriter. A neighbor, when asked who had moved into the old log house, had replied, “We don’t know yet. A man person. We call him ‘the Man in the Bushes.’ ” I was reported to be ancient with a two-foot beard. A hermit shunning human contact.
The second week in June was late to start a garden and plant a field of corn; moreover, the signs of the zodiac were not auspicious. I planted nevertheless, and, as hard frosts held off until the middle of October, I had vegetables aplenty, both to eat and to store for winter. Four apple trees furnished fruit for eating, canning, and drying. Following local custom, in the fall I heaped cabbages, turnips, parsnips, and potatoes in mounds and covered them with layers of leaves and dirt. They were unearthed as needed (for those without cellars, this was the alternative). And come March, when cornstalks were ritually burned at the break of winter, I had my own stack to set afire and greet the spring.
Log houses are not as warm as reputed. Not mine at least. My first winter there, a February blizzard dipped many degrees below zero. I pushed my bed as close to the fire as I dared; I heated a rock, wrapped it in a towel, put it at my feet. I wondered how my neighbors fared, many of them in less sheltered quarters. Spring came, and there they were, without complaint.
Toward the end of March there came a warm spell. The meadow greened, and buckeye buds swelled. I heard an early whippoorwill. A wren began a nest under an eave, and frogs bellowed in the swamp. Then, overnight frost nipped the buds and silenced the frogs.
I acquired two stands of bees. I never left home overnight without “telling the bees”–folk wisdom had it they would otherwise swarm and depart. Common superstitions often have psychological reasons. This one I believe–never leave home without checking the hives. I acquired a cat, sawed a hole in a door so it could come and go at will. Snakes don’t linger where felines are. One day I rescued a ground squirrel–despite having been told never to take anything away from a cat. If you do, the superstition had it, the cat will bring you a snake. My cat brought me four snakes in due course. Superstition has its limitations: one night a dulcimer hanging from a nail began to play, however faintly, but a struck match revealed a granddaddy spider walking the strings.
Before World War II, I called for my mail once a week at Bern Smith’s store at the foot of Little Carr. After the war the mail arrived on horseback from Bath, named for the oldest Roman town in England. I became the unappointed “Mayor” of Bath in that both postmasters added to my mail any addressed to His Honor. When I went for necessities—coffee, sugar, salt—to Mal Gibson’s store, he informed me, “If you’re going to start hanging out at my place of business, you’re going to have to learn two things: to chew tobacco and tell lies.” Mal was a trickster. He had a joke on every customer, or was working on one. A daughter went North to attend a modeling school and married a Broadway producer. We saw photographs of her taken at Lake Arrowwood, the Claridge in London, and the George V in Paris. And I began to keep an ongoing record of a traditional kind of community that hardly exists anymore in Appalachia. The folk I knew there then were living in the nineteenth century with the twentieth century threatening. More entries in my notebooks involve Mal than any other person.
It was said of me that I had quit a good job and had gone to the backside of Nowhere and had sat down. Well, I did sit down to finish River of Earth and compose in leisurely fashion an occasional poem and short story. Yet, if you are digging your living out of the ground, there is little time for sitting. Along with farming and gardening, I began experiments with the wild strawberry and the wild violet, an attempt by natural selection to discover superior plants. I began a study of the leaf miner, a tiny insect living a varied and fascinating existence—there are some two thousand known varieties. My evenings were spent reading by lamplight, and the library of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute supplied by mail any book I wished to borrow. After selling a short story to the Saturday Evening Post, I began to buy books. I subscribed to periodicals I hoped to appear in. And there was the Sunday New York Times to cope with.
River of Earth was published February 5, 1940. Time magazine called it “a work of art.” I was standing by a potbelly stove in a railroad station in Jackson, Kentucky, that frozen morning waiting for a train going north to connect with one heading south. The train was late. In walked a deputy sheriff, who warmed his hands a moment, then responded to a call from the door, “They need you across the road.” I followed, out of curiosity. The sheriff entered a building where commodities were being distributed and was shot dead.
The train came. I boarded and wrote a letter to Time to thank the magazine for the kind words and briefly stated what I had witnessed on this long-awaited occasion. Two weeks later I entered a barber shop in Florida and was handed a copy of Time to peruse while I waited. Leading the “Letter” section was my message bearing the heading, “Bloody Breathitt.” A touchy designation then as now. Breathitt County is the only one in Kentucky where nobody was drafted during World War I. Volunteers filled their quota. Stopping by Jackson on the way home to access the damage, I learned that citizens in high office were enraged and that it would be wise to cool my heels elsewhere. My guilt was that I had given a local matter national attention.
Three years went by. A great deal was happening out in the world, but nothing was happening to us. World War II was declared, and I was drafted among the first in Knott County. My age would have been a factor elsewhere. They were getting rid of the jailbirds, the riffraff, and those without families to protest. I belonged to the latter category. A recent operation to remove a bronchial cleft cyst would have given me an “out” had I chosen to call attention to it. The average age of the men in my squadron was twenty-two. I was thirty-six years old and subject to the same physical demands, no quarter granted.
I traveled off to Fort Thomas, where my rating on the AGCT test allowed me to choose the Army Air Force. Shipped out to San Antonio, I baked in the Texas sun for six months, then was staged at Fort Dix, before being sent off for the invasion of North Africa via New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Cape Town. My 99-percent Texas-born outfit, the 8th Air Depot Group, loaded onto barges on the New Jersey shore at night and headed for the SS Aquitania somewhere beyond. As we pushed off, the men began to sing a bawdy song—a not uncommon practice. Running without lights, we entered New York harbor. The towers of Manhattan were lost in mist. Suddenly the mist parted, and there, bathed in moonlight, stood the Statue of Liberty, the base hidden, floating in air as it were. The singing stopped, and only the breathing of hundreds of men and the slapping of waves against the hull could be heard. It was a solemn moment. With hand in air Miss Liberty seemed to be waving farewell. For some of the men it was their last view of America forever. The singing began again, and the song this time was “Shall We Gather at the River.”
There were some ten thousand of us on the Aquitania, which had served in World War I at Gallipoli and had been slated to be broken up when war erupted. Before us was a journey of twenty-six days to Cape Town. We poked along, changing directions every six minutes to thwart submarines, putting into Rio for a week, going in circles for days as we neared Cape Town until destroyers were sent to lead us in. The harbormaster at Cape Town turned out to be a German spy, which accounted for the sinkings of numerous merchant vessels in the area. What a prize we would have made, ten thousand putrid men who hadn’t bathed for nearly a month. Good for an iron cross.
We transhipped to the Antenor after a spell at Palls Moor, then joined a fleet of ships heading north, until we made a landing at Freetown, Sierra Leone. For an unforgettable hour we awaited the signal to board the landing craft, each of us a walking arsenal. The order rang out, “Let’s go, men!” We were excited but, I think, not afraid. We went. We hit the beach, but nobody was there. We had half-expected the Vichy French. We had no inkling of the vast movement of men investing that part of Africa that day. I subsequently learned that we had liberated Graham Greene, the novelist, who was serving with British intelligence and who was in hiding at Freetown.
My outfit settled down at Accra, Gold Coast Colony (now Ghana), our base for more than two years. I traveled to Egypt, to Palestine (Israel), and to Eritrea where I picked up a dysentery I was long in overcoming. I also survived a plane crash in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and endured two cases of blackwater fever, an often fatal form of malaria. In the Ashanti kingdom I collected some pre-Columbian counterweights made of hand-smelted ore and shaped by the “lost wax” method.
It is said that every soldier is glad to come home but that he comes home angry. I came back disoriented. For months I sat in the door of my log house and could not arouse interest in the things I had done before. Gradually I adjusted and again joined the staff of the Hindman Settlement School, with a modest salary. Next, I taught for ten years at Morehead State University, then resigned and returned to Knott County. Since 1970 I’ve spent fourteen winters in Central America pursuing an interest in Mayan civilization, and I’ve taken five trips to Europe to visit World War I battlefields.
I continue to have an irremovable reputation of being a hermit, but people have always fascinated me. For example, my neighbor across the creek from my log house is already up and busy with his saw and hammer, despite it being Sunday; despite his having worked in the mines all the other six days of the week, often in water shoe-mouth deep, as he tells me; and despite the fact that there is not one plank requiring a saw or a nail needing to be driven. He must be doing something, creating something, just as I must, propped up here against pillows on my four-post walnut bed, a creation of Jethro Amburgey, the dulcimer maker.
Today I find I’ve written seven pages in a notebook—hardly any page relating in subject to any other. These pages are looking toward books or manuscripts partially written that I will never complete given my age and biological life span. The lady who once asked me, “Do you do your own writing?” and to whom I replied, “No, I have seven dwarves,” has lately inquired, “Where do you get your ideas?” For me, ideas are hanging like pears from limbs, like gourds from fences. Ideas rise up like birds from cover. They spring from reports in the Troublesome Creek Times, from a remark in a country store, from a happening.
From childhood I’ve been a reader, when there was anything to read, and I suppose I’ve read an average of three hours a day for more than half a century. My reading jaunts include books on the Himalayas, the South Pacific, the American Civil War, World War I, Mayan civilization, and the entire corpus of many an author. Curiosity is like an itch that needs scratching.
I’m often asked, “Who influenced you to write?” Certainly it wasn’t handed down in the family, and I can’t think of an author I wish to emulate, though I have admired the works of many. I was already scribbling before the great books came into my hands. As an English observer of Appalachian folk in Harlan County, Kentucky, once said, “Not knowing the right way to do things, they did things their way.” I did encounter the novels of Thomas Hardy during college days, and the fact that I’ve always written about the common man may have been sparked by him. The only class I ever cut was when I was deep into Far From the Madding Crowd and could not put the book down. In college, the most memorable book I read was Alphonse Daudet’s Le Petit Chose, in French. I must grant some credit to a decade of issues of the Atlantic that I came upon during the late 1920s. Otto Jespersen’s The Philosophy of Grammar directed me toward “living language” as opposed to formal language. But I am more an autodidact than a classroom scholar.
“How did you avoid ‘hillbilly’ writing?” is another question I frequently hear. Those who ask that question have in mind the stereotypical representation of mountain people and their dialectical speech as rendered by several authors of fiction in the past. My answer is that I was hardly aware of those authors; I didn’t have access to their books. My experience was with the folk themselves. Dialect of any sort on a printed page has always bothered me. Peculiar spellings can’t account for the tone of voice, the body language, or the intent behind the statement. My aim is to invoke speech, to try to get the true sound of it to happen in the reader’s head. Aberrant spelling rarely accomplishes that. I try to preserve the “voice” of the speaker.
I answered a set of down-to-earth questions at Carmus Combs’ store the other day. A fellow inquired, “How many years have you lived amongst us?”
“More than half a century.”
“You’re the last ’possum up the tree. Everybody your age when you come here is dead. Hain’t that so?”
“I thought they’d live forever.”
“What’s your notion about dying?”
“Death is as natural as sleep,” I said, quoting Benjamin Franklin. “We will arise refreshed in the morning.”