FOREWORD

JAMES STILL completed River of Earth in an ancient log house on a small eastern Kentucky farm, green and flowering, between Wolfpen Creek and Deadmare Branch in Knott County, where he continues to live and write, at ease among a valley of neighbors who often sound as though they have stepped out of his stories.

A descendant of pioneers who settled early in the southern mountains, Still grew up in the Appalachian foothills of northern Alabama. When he moved to eastern Kentucky in 1932, the machine age in the hills was less than thirty years old; and of the millions of people whose lives it had affected perhaps no one, even the coal-mine owners, sincerely believed it was a blessing.

For two hundred years the people of southern Appalachia had been independent and relatively self-sufficient. Each family obtained from the land it owned practically everything needed to feed, clothe, and shelter its members. But within a period of less than twenty years this agricultural society of small farms was virtually destroyed by industrialism. Families sold their farms, or abandoned them, or lost them to mine operators, and flocked to the mushrooming mining camps: three-roomed “shotgun” houses, a commissary, a school, and a church, all of whitewashed board and batten, clustered near a driftmouth.

At the height of the coal boom—around 1920—a farmer who seldom had owned a dollar bill could earn from $20 to $50 a day and buy more from the commissary in one week than he could grow on a farm in a year. Then, in the late 1920s the demand for coal decreased. Some mines closed permanently, and those that continued to operate worked from one to three days a week at reduced wages, and then usually only during the spring and summer months to stock coal for the winter demands, forcing the few men who owned land to choose planting and harvesting or digging coal.

The result was a landless, jobless, hungry, perplexed people. Ruined for a way of life they could control, they were betrayed by this new, quicksilver promise that left them idle much of the year.

The sureness with which James Still weaves his patchwork of light, shadow, and colors into this drab, joyless landscape surely creates one of the presences of artistry that we can recognize and appreciate in all the arts but cannot isolate and define. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings had this quality in mind when she referred to Still’s work as “vital, beautiful, heart-breaking, and heart-warmingly funny,” as did poet Delmore Schwartz who called River of Earth “a symphony,” and the Time reviewer who considered it “a work of art.”

Still’s “secret” lies in his ability to use language so that it performs the functions of both music and painters’ pigments. Whether the individual words are strange or familiar, it is the manner of expression that gives them conviction and demonstrates that Still is a creator as well as a listener, and that he sees and hears with the senses of a poet.

His words can create a picture filled with the brilliance of an impressionist painting:

Morning was bright and rain-fresh. The sharp sunlight fell slantwise upon the worn limestone earth of the hills, and our house squatted weathered and dark on the bald slope. Yellow-bellied sapsuckers drilled their oblong holes in the black birch by the house, now leafing from tight-curled buds.

And a sound: “January was a bell in Lean Neck Valley. The ring of an ax was a mile wide, and all passage over the spewed-up earth was lifted on frosty air and sounded against fields of ice.”

His scenes can be filled with factual knowledge, as in the account of the father removing a cob from a calf’s throat. And he can give an idiomatic translation of the Old Testament that retains the rhythm and power of the original, as in Brother Mobberly’s sermon:

I was borned in a ridgepocket. ... I never seed the sun-ball withouten heisting my chin. My eyes were sot upon the hills from the beginning. Till I come on the Word in this good Book, I used to think a mountain was the standingest object in the sight o’ God. Hit says here they go skipping and hopping like sheep, a-rising and a-falling. These hills are jist dirt waves, washing through eternity. My brethren, they hain’t a valley so low but what hit’ll rise again. They hain’t a hill standing so proud but hit’ll sink to the low ground o’ sorrow. Oh, my children, where air we going on this mighty river of earth, a-borning, begetting, and a-dying—the living and the dead riding the waters? Where air it sweeping us?

Published within a year of each other by the same publisher, River of Earth and The Grapes of Wrath are the only books chronicling the demoralizing Depression years that have continued to gain readers in more affluent ones. The major difference between them is that Steinbeck’s story deals with a calamity that has struck America only once in its lifetime, while Still is writing of the struggles that have plagued the mountain people since the country was settled.

Although the Joads travel halfway across the country and the Baldridge family moves only the few miles separating the coal camps from the farm, both books are equally an odyssey of a people in search of a promised land. With the coming of each spring and each fall Brack Baldridge announces that the mines are going to open soon—this time for good. And the mother’s continual refrain is: “Forever moving yon and back, setting down nowhere for good and all, searching for God knows what. . . . Where air we expecting to draw up to?”

And when the mines close and the crops fail there is little complaining. They simply pack up and move again, accepting, hoping, laughing to make their misfortune bearable.

More than twenty years before the region was labeled a “poverty pocket” and prior to the surprised reactions of experts and government officials to the problems of destitution, as though they had encountered some recent wonder, James Still had presented the heartbreaking account of what it means for a human being to live out his life hungry and cold. His is not a socioeconomist’s collection of figures, causes, and possible cures, but the dramatized plight of human beings accepting poverty without accusations or judgments or rantings against outside institutions.

That fiction for Still obviously is a scenic art is evident in the visual clarity with which he creates scenes and develops characters and in the deceptive ease with which he keeps the author out of the story. Most any section of the novel reads like a mini-play that could be transferred to the stage with a minimum of directives, for the narrative is continually pushed forward by credible action and by dialogue designed more for hearing than for silent reading. And though the reader may insistently remind himself that the story was set down on paper by James Still, he will have to search for overt signs of the author’s presence. It would be ridiculous for a playwright to circulate on stage giving cues and interrupting the action to inform the audience of the thoughts of the actors, Still seems to be saying, so why should I muddy the story for the reader by intruding my directives, commentaries, and evaluations? Using the first person point of view of a young boy as his “center of consciousness,” Still has achieved a fine balance between erasing the author and creating the impression that the story moves of its own volition. And however far in the background he may be, he is there in the form of a magician busy with one hand entertaining the audience with anecdotes, echoes of folklore, and mountain dialogue while with the other hand he is unobtrusively shaping incidents, bridging-in poetic interludes, and disguising signs that direct the story toward his intended climax.

Still is a writer of constricted lives, valid desperations, and victories that seem small reward for all the patience and hurt they exact; but in his most successful scenes he creates a world whose resonances echo beyond the last word to the fullness of the reader’s capacity to understand. His work reflects a compassion, insight, and objectivity remindful of Katherine Anne Porter (“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” “The Downward Path to Wisdom”) and of Bernard Malamud (“The Loan,” “The Magic Barrel”).

With each “discovery” and each exploitation of Appalachia, River of Earth assumes new meaning and increasing significance both as a chronicle of change and as a work of art. Read today with the strip-mined region as a map—the scalped hills and gashed mountainsides, the ruined farmlands, the dead streams, the flash waters the earth can’t contain—even the title assumes a prophecy of doom undreamed of by Brother Mobberly.

An emotional response is the one quality above all for which Still works. There are no games, no literary or historical allusions, no puns, no symbolism, sentimentality, didacticism, or redundancy. He gives no motives, airs no theories, states no beliefs. He simply sets down the experiences of a few human beings during a season of change in a certain place. And he does it in a manner that is simple and unposed and with the perception and restraint that denote an imagination as honest, as controlled, as the needle of a compass. And the emotion is present as certainly as the leaf is in the bud. In giving order to “a handful of chaos” Still has created a new and fresh view of a range of mountains seventy million years old and of a people that promise to survive all industrial upheavals.