An Exultation of Appalachia
/Lonormi Manuel
I’m more than a little tired of the word elegy. One online thesaurus gives 183 synonyms for that word, most of them sad: requiem, dirge, lament, threnody, plaint, knell. Words that mourn. Words that weep over a much-loved corpse. I’m also a whole lot tired of hearing that word applied to the region that I call home. If you believe much of what has been written in the past half-century, Appalachia is terminally ill, teetering on the verge of becoming nothing more than the dried husk of a once proud and independent people. The ubiquitous and opinionated “they” say that we have lost our way, slipped into apathy, foundered upon the sandbar of social welfare.
One of the antonyms offered for elegy is exultation. The august Oxford English Dictionary defines exultation as “a feeling of triumphant elation or jubilation; rejoicing”. Those are victory words, words used by and for and applied to winners. A defeated people are not jubilant; a dying culture does not rejoice.
That wellspring we call home is more than just a landscape. The houses, churches and schools where we make our memories are transient constructs. They are sold to those who know not, and often care not, for their histories; they collapse beneath the twinned weights of time and decay. Land, too, is impermanent, as we’ve learned to our sorrow; more devastating than the auctioneer’s gavel is the bulldozer’s blade. The hills we climbed as children are scraped, raped, and reshaped to put money in someone else’s pocket, then flattened and “reclaimed” to make airports, golf courses, game preserves, football fields, and up-market subdivisions.
What transforms a place into a home is its community of people: family and neighbors, friends and acquaintances, coworkers and coworshippers, champions and opponents, allies and enemies. And every single one of those people, whether we recognize it or not, influences who we are and how we write our own stories.
One online thesaurus gives 183 synonyms for that word, most of them sad: requiem, dirge, lament, threnody, plaint, knell. Words that mourn.
My Sunday school teacher taught me that you never have the whole truth of something until everyone involved has had their say. So let me add my say to the many voices that speak of Appalachia; but I will speak in exultation, not in elegy. Let me introduce you to someone who had a profound influence on my life, although neither of us knew it at the time.
But first, you need to know how we came to meet.
In the dark morning hours of Tuesday, October 29, 1974, my mother jerked the covers off my restless, feverish body and shook me awake. “Get up,” she said. “We’ve got to take your daddy to the hospital.”
“Why?”
“Hush. Just get up.”
My teeth chattered as I crawled out of my warm bed-nest and swung my feet to the floor. My mother thrust my coat into my arms. “Don’t I need clothes?” I asked.
“Socks, shoes and coat,” she snapped. “Be quick.”
I pulled on my socks, shoved my feet in my shoes. Stuck my arms into my coat. Looked around for something to take with me. Dog tags jingled as my mother snapped the leash to our poodle’s collar and handed it to me. She pushed us both down the hall toward the back door. Behind me, I heard her murmuring to my father, encouraging him as she helped him walk.
I knew right then that something was terribly wrong. My daddy had never needed anybody’s help for anything. He was a landscape architect, a man who drew plans and then spent long hours out in the sun and rain, making those plans come to life. He played the guitar. He sketched like an artist. He printed in neat block letters, the hand of an engineer. He signed his name with a flourish.
And now he leaned on my mother’s arm, struggling for breath, his face gray and twisted in the fluorescent glare from the bathroom light.
The world I’d taken for granted had begun unraveling.
My mother, usually a careful driver, threw caution to the winds that morning. She flew through the stop signs in our neighborhood. She took the narrow shortcut down Chestnut Ridge Road, flinging the Buick around the curves, tires squealing.
“I think I’m going to throw up,” I said.
“Well, you’ll just have to throw up, then,” she answered. She didn’t slow down.
My dad began talking to me in a tight, tearful voice, telling me to always be a good girl and to look out for my mother. I’d never seen him cry. I started crying, too, and clutched the dog until it whimpered.
A white Buick Wildcat was parked at the entrance to the hospital emergency room. We lurched to a stop just shy of its bumper. The door of the Wildcat opened and my Uncle Joe unfolded from the driver’s seat: Mom’s next-youngest sibling, tall and lanky with cornsilk hair, a golfer’s tan, and my grandmother’s milk-blue eyes. He ducked between the cars and opened my dad’s door.
“How you feeling, Lonnie?”
“Not too good, Joe, not good at all.”
My mother bent her seat forward to let me and the dog get out. “Uncle Joe’s going to take you to your Granny’s,” she said. “Joe, tell Mom I’ll let her know something as soon as I can.”
Uncle Joe held out his hand. “Come on, girl, let’s go.”
I took his hand and looked back over my shoulder. My father’s face, contorted by pain and wet with tears, looked back at me. “I love you, honey,” he said. “Don’t you ever forget that.”
I wanted to say I love you too, but I could only sob.
My dad began talking to me in a tight, tearful voice, telling me to always be a good girl and to look out for my mother.
Uncle Joe isn’t, and never has been, a man who had time for small talk. But he tried his best that morning as we crossed into Virginia, driving through the still-sleeping town of Weber City and turning east on Highway 58. He talked about who of our faraway family might come in for Christmas, and did I think Gate City could win the football championship that year? I don’t remember what I answered. I don’t remember if I answered.
Uncle Joe is also a man who prefers, and always has preferred, a painful truth to a well-intentioned lie.
I asked him, “Is my dad going to die?”
He kept his eyes on the road.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said.
There was frost on the ground when Uncle Joe pulled the Buick up my grandmother’s gravel driveway and parked by the well. I got out and let the dog do his business by the Rose-of-Sharon. We opened the storm door and crossed the back porch, inhaling the mingled scents of laundry detergent, mothballs and coffee. Granny was waiting for us in the hall.
This is how I always see her in my mind: her salt-and-pepper hair, still thick and curly, her pale blue eyes behind black-framed glasses, her beige-checked house dress worn over heavy support stockings and brown oxford shoes; tall, just a little stout, still possessed of a wiry strength and a determined temperament. She may have still been in her nightgown that morning; I don’t remember.
Light spilled into the hall from the dining room. She put her arm around me and asked if I’d had breakfast. She said nothing about the poodle. She was a farm woman and firmly believed that dogs were intended by God to live outside, but she could make an exception. Putting her fingers under my chin, she lifted my face toward the lamp and took a second, longer, more sober look.
“Joe,” she said, “I hope all of yours has had the chickenpox, because this young’un has got them bad.”
As far as I was concerned, my life couldn’t get any worse. I’d been jerked from sleep, turned out of my sickbed, taken on a wild ride to town, and brought without so much as a change of clothes to my grandmother’s house, where she now correctly identified what my mother had misdiagnosed as the flu. Everything felt terribly wrong, and no one could assure me that it was ever going to feel right again.
Saturday was Halloween. My mother still had not left the hospital; she sent terse bulletins in quick, long-distance phone calls. My Aunt Ruth was an emergency room nurse, and she brought news of a more technical nature, talking about myocardial infarction and necrotic heart tissue. My own health was improved; my fever was gone, and the blisters on my skin had become thin scabs. I slept with socks on my hands, to keep me from scratching in my sleep.
Before everything fell apart, I had planned to be a princess for Halloween. My K-Mart costume was still in my bedroom of the now-silent house on Old Stage Road. Even if I had the pink satin dress with the lace sleeves, how could I be a princess now, with the marks of chickenpox all over me? Princesses didn’t get chickenpox. My cousins teased that they might share their candy, if they got enough to share.
My grandmother sat at the dining room table with her fingers curled around her old, stained coffee cup while I poured out my troubles. Then she got up and went out to the smokehouse.
The smokehouse’s day as a preserver of meats was long past; now, it was where she stored her canning jars and garden tools, the barrel of sweet feed for the horse, the bag of Sevin dust for the beans, the Japanese beetle trap that came out each spring, and a host of other items that were out-of-season or kept “just in case”. The smokehouse terrified me. I imagined its dark corners filled with spiders. I knew there were mice; that’s why we kept a cinder block on top of the feed barrel.
When she came back from the smokehouse, she had an old feed sack. Out came the sharp, black-handled sewing shears, the ones we children weren’t allowed to touch. Armholes and a neck opening appeared in the burlap fabric. Granny dropped the sack over my head. Then she took a newspaper off the back porch and burned it to ash in on the concrete sidewalk outside the back door. When the ashes were cool, she smeared them in streaks on my face, my arms, and my hair.
“There,” she said. “I’ll get you a paper sack, and you can go around to the neighbors with your cousins when they come.”
I looked in the mirror: a dirty, scabby, frowsy-haired little girl looked back at me with a puzzled expression. “What am I?” I asked my grandmother.
She sat back and folded her hands, pleased with me and with herself. “Why, you’re a leper,” she said. “A person who has leprosy gets covered in scabs. And in Bible times, those folks had to wear sackcloth and ashes.”
I got plenty of candy that night; enough to share with my cousins.
Before everything fell apart, I had planned to be a princess for Halloween.
My sixty-year-old father suffered three heart attacks in forty-eight hours. After the third attack, his cardiologist couldn’t find a pulse. Dr. John was halfway out the door, on his way to tell my mother that she was now a widow, when the monitor beeped and proved that my father hadn’t given up, not just yet. Dad was alive, but his condition was still tenuous. The adults around me said it was touch-and-go for the first few days.
As long as he was in the hospital, my mother was by his side, coming to my granny’s only to bathe, eat, and fall into exhausted slumber. My dog jumped up on the bed and kept watch at her feet; he showed his teeth and growled at anyone who set foot in the bedroom, even if that someone was me. After that autumn and for the rest of his life, he was more her dog than mine.
My father had survived, but surviving cost us everything. Dad had seen no need for medical insurance; he’d never been seriously ill, and the policy premiums for a self-employed landscape architect were sky-high. He was in the hospital for sixty-three days; the hospital bill consumed our small savings and left my parents deeply in debt. My mother told me we would not be going back to the house on Old Stage Road. Most of our furniture was put into storage. Some items were sold to friends and family. I would be going to a new school, the same one she and her brothers and sisters had attended. Two of my cousins were students there, and another, more distant cousin was a first-grade teacher.
I didn’t want to go.
What I wanted was to go home, but I wasn’t even sure where home was anymore.
My first day of school at Hiltons Elementary was library day for the fifth grade class. The tall, slim woman behind the librarian’s desk had large blue eyes and a broad, gentle smile. Her name was Ruth Lanningham. She spotted me right away as the new chick in the flock and motioned me over. She only asked me my name, but I ended up telling her my name, my dog’s name, who my cousins were, and that I was living with my granny because my dad was sick.
Mrs. Lanningham listened to all that with an odd, sad smile. Then she stood up and said, “Wait right here.”
She went straight to one of the shelves and came back with a book. “Here,” she said, placing it in my hands, “I think you’ll like this. Have you read it?”
It was The Golden Name Day by Jennie Lindquist. “No,” I answered.
“It’s about a little girl who goes to live with her grandmother when her mother gets sick. Would you like to check it out?”
That night, while my grandmother visited with my aunt and uncle in the “front room”, I sat on the stairs behind her rocking chair and read that book, cover to cover. The next morning, when my class spilled onto the playground for recess, I ran to the library and laid the book on Mrs. Lanningham’s desk. She didn’t say a word, but she gave me a conspiratorial look and handed me another book she had pulled and laid aside for me: The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
The tall, slim woman behind the librarian’s desk had large blue eyes and a broad, gentle smile. Her name was Ruth Lanningham.
My father was discharged on December 30, 1974 with stark instructions from his doctor: go home, sit down, do no work at all, and you might live five years. I left my grandmother’s house and joined my parents in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment my mother over a laundromat, a few miles down the road from my grandmother’s farm. The smells of a dozen different detergents and fabric softeners seeped through the floor. Steam from the dryers fogged the bedroom window on cool days.
Dad’s initial joy at having our family reunited was soon overshadowed by the shame of being unable to provide for us. My mother put on a brave face when she paid for our groceries with food stamps, and tried to hide her despair at the turn our lives had taken. My parents exorcised their respective demons by snapping at one another about just about everything: money, family, me. My mother thought she should get a job; my father was opposed to the notion. At best, their quarrels ended in cold silence. At worst, they ended in thrown objects and tears and my mother locking herself in the bathroom to cry.
Coming home from school, I never knew whether the faces that greeted me would be smiling or sullen. I dreaded getting off Bus 36.
A sea of bitterness is a dangerous body of water, especially for a child. It’s all too easy to get pulled under, beset on all sides by resentments that aren’t yours, swallowing them until they fill you up and become yours. The temptation is always there: to give up on surviving, to let yourself sink and become just another undead thing at the bottom of that sea. To keep that from happening, you need to find something to cling to – some spar that will carry you to less turbulent waters.
My spar was made of books.
I kept two piles of them by my bed: one pile from the school library, and the other from the public library in town. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, Jennie Lindquist, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Jesse Stuart, Harriette Simpson Arnow and Janice Holt Giles, kept me company in my half of the bedroom I shared with my parents. Their tales took me away from my own troubles. They taught me that it might not be easy, but I could survive.
After months of reading their stories, I started writing my own.
It was “The Secret Room,” now lost and gone forever, that caught Ruth Lanningham’s eye. Handwritten on notebook paper, it told of a girl who discovers an attic room full of antiques, books, and old clothes in the otherwise-bare farmhouse her family has rented. It was childish and faulty, strongly influenced by A Little Princess and The Secret Garden; but it was my story.
I let Mrs. Lanningham read it.
She went through it twice while I hopped from one foot to the other, then looked at me sharply over her half-moon reader glasses. “You wrote this?” she asked me.
“Yes ma’am,” I said, “every bit of it.”
“Can I keep this for a few days? I’ll give it back, I promise. I want to show it to someone.”
I wasn’t sure about that; I hadn’t let anyone see my stories, not even my parents. But Mrs. Lanningham was my friend, and she knew an awful lot about books. I said yes.
She gave it back to me before the end of the week. “You keep writing stories,” she told me. “Any others that you write, you bring them to me. I want to read them.”
She must have said something to my teachers, for they also took notice of my work, and encouraged me to keep going. Every story I wrote, from fifth grade through seventh, passed through Ruth Lanningham’s hands, and was inspected by her keen, literary eyes.
A sea of bitterness is a dangerous body of water, especially for a child. It’s all too easy to get pulled under, beset on all sides by resentments that aren’t yours, swallowing them until they fill you up and become yours.
I often wonder if teachers and librarians know how much influence they have on creative children; how their encouragement, their praise, their thoughtful criticism can plant the seed of something that is rare and wonderful, even if it takes years to mature and bear fruit.
My exultation should end here, with me telling you that – after many years and a bunch of “fits and starts” – I became a writer. I should speak of my sorrow when I saw Mrs. Lanningham’s obituary in my hometown newspaper a few years ago, and how I regret not keeping in touch with her.
But I can’t end my exultation of Appalachia without telling you, as the late Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.
Writers are odd and contrary creatures. We yearn to have our work read, loved, and praised; yet we hesitate, like girls at their first big dance, when we’re ready to have someone read it for the first time. But we also want to have other trusted eyes look at our fledgling works before we boot them out of the authorial nest and into the cold, harsh, critical world. The same survival instincts that sent pioneers across the prairies in groups of wagons moves writers to gather, formally or informally, a group of other writers for encouragement and support.
One of my writer/readers, Julie, shares my Appalachian roots, my obsession with history, and my love of a good story. She was intrigued by my experience with Mrs. Lanningham; so intrigued that she looked up the late librarian’s obituary online.
And Julie, with her unquenchable curiosity and her encyclopedic knowledge of histories near and far, revealed to me the reason behind Mrs. Lanningham’s odd, sad smile.
Perhaps it was a visit to family that brought James and Minnie Poe, with their six children, to Wheat, Tennessee in September of 1931. James was born in Johnson County, as far east as one could go in Tennessee without entering North Carolina; but since his marriage to Miss Minnie Robbins in the spring of 1918, he’d made his home in Lee County, Virginia, where he operated a general store. The need to make the hundred-mile-plus trip must have been great; Minnie was pregnant with the family’s seventh child.
And while they were in Wheat, on a sunny Sunday afternoon – the 13th day of September – Minnie delivered a daughter. They named her Ruth.
The family returned to Lee County, where Minnie went on to bear seven more children. The youngest, born in 1940, were twin boys: Wendell and Wilkie. They only lived ten days before succumbing to gastric enteritis. They share a granite headstone in the cemetery; across its top is engraved the single word, Brothers.
Two years later, Ruth, eleven years old, experienced a different kind of loss.
Of her parents’ fourteen children, she was the only one born outside Virginia. The town of her birth, Wheat, Tennessee, was more than just a wide spot in the road; in addition to stores and churches, it boasted of a Masonic lodge, a gas station, a college, and numerous peach orchards. The Tennessee Valley Authority brought electricity to the town in 1936. A farm collective formed in 1937; by 1942 they had plans to build a cannery, a cold storage facility, and other projects to assist the area farmers.
But someone else had their eye on the town of Wheat, Tennessee.
In 1942, the residents of Wheat were notified that they needed to move. The Department of Defense had been looking for a site for its new, top-secret government installation, and had determined that Wheat fit the bill. The entire town – homes, churches, stores, schools, the Masonic lodge and the college and the gas station and the orchards – would be demolished. There was, after all, a war going on. Our soldiers needed weapons.
For some of the townspeople, this was the second time they had been displaced by a government project. Many of those who lost their homes to the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the 1920s or the building of Norris Dam in the 1930s had settled in Wheat and the surrounding countryside.
The residents were given little notice to vacate; for some, the deadline was only two weeks away. Landowners were compensated for their condemned property: an average of $34 per acre in Roane County, but the payments sometimes took as long as six months to a year to arrive. The government offered no subsidy for relocation expenses. That obligation fell squarely on the shoulders of the evicted populace.
Construction of the “Clinton Laboratory”, which would later be renamed as Oak Ridge National Laboratories, began in November, 1942. Some landowners continued to fight condemnation proceedings until late 1943, enlisting the aid of their elected representatives, filing suits in the court system. They did not prevail.
By the time Ruth Poe celebrated her twelfth birthday, the town in which she was born had disappeared from Tennessee’s map. Only a single church remained.
Ruth Poe Lanningham, who graduated from Union College in Barboursville, Kentucky, where she worked as a reporter for the school newspaper, never told me this part of her story. Not until Julie sent me her comments on my first draft of this essay, with a note about Mrs. Lanningham’s birthplace, was I aware that my elementary school librarian knew how it felt to lose a part of one’s self that one considered home. Our losses were different, but not wholly dissimilar. I believe that was the secret behind her odd, sad smile. She saw in me a young plant that had been uprooted, and offered me books to heal the wounds left by the loss of things familiar. Later, she recognized in me the spark of a writer. She did her best to nurture that spark, to fan it into a flame that would someday become a fire in my soul.
I often wonder if teachers and librarians know how much influence they have on creative children; how their encouragement, their praise, their thoughtful criticism can plant the seed of something that is rare and wonderful, even if it takes years to mature and bear fruit.
I promised you an exultation. Perhaps, instead, I should have promised you an exhortation – an altar call, of sorts – for that’s what I’m about to give you.
Appalachia does not need an elegy, but it does need a revival.
We need to look backward, at those people – like Ruth Lanningham – who made a difference in our lives. We need to look inward, at our own experiences, and use what they taught us to build a bridge between ourselves and those who now struggle with the same issues. We need to look outward, at other cities and towns and counties and communities, and realize that the problems we are facing – poverty, unemployment, addiction, chronic illness – do not belong solely to us, but exist in every community in this country. Don’t let the elegists tell you otherwise.
We need to stand up to the writers of the elegies, those who are singing the requiem of Appalachia, and show them that, like Mark Twain, the reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.
Every day, we need to look in the mirror – individually and collectively – and tell our reflection that it’s worth saving. Every day, we need to say to that reflection: prove them wrong.
The Appalachia of my childhood had all the problems ascribed to today’s Appalachia, problems which – I repeat – are found in every single community in this country. (Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you. They have probably lied to you about other things, too.) The Appalachia of my childhood also had a rich tradition of music and literature, a natural beauty second to none, a culture of helping to build our neighbors up instead of tearing our neighbors down. The Appalachia of my childhood had people like Ruth Poe Lanningham, whose tombstone is simply and appropriately inscribed, An Inspiration To All.
And despite what you’ve heard, none of that has changed. The tradition, the beauty, the culture, the people like Ruth Lanningham who are reaching out to children like the child I was – it’s all still there, side-by-side with the problems that seem to be all some folks can see. Those who see only the problems are making the same mistake my dad’s cardiologist made, when he threw down his stethoscope and walked out of my father’s hospital room: giving up on something that’s not ready to give up on itself.
So spare me the elegies, please. Appalachia isn’t dead yet. Not even close.
Author’s Commentary: I wrote this essay in response to a call for submissions from the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea College because, quite frankly, I am still angry at J. D. Vance and his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. While I don't doubt Vance's account of his childhood, I refute that his experiences are representative of the entire Appalachian culture. This essay, I hope, shows that Appalachia -- like every other place on earth — has its good and its bad, its successes and its failures. The role that Ruth Poe Lanningham played in my development as a writer is critical; she nurtured the seed, believing that it would someday flower. I offer this essay in tribute, not only to my family and my culture, but to Ruth Lanningham.
Lonormi Manuel was born in northeast Tennessee and grew up in southwest Virginia; she has called Kentucky home for over 30 years. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction focus on the Appalachian culture and people, and she pleads guilty to being a "vigorous defender" of her mountain roots. Her short fiction has appeared in Still: The Journal, Wraparound South, and Barely South Review. "An Exultation of Appalachia" was awarded first place in the Appalachian Narratives for Our Time competition, sponsored by the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center of Berea College. Lonormi is currently working on her first novel, based on oral histories of coal camp life in 1920s West Virginia.
