Sharyn McCrumb, Keepers of the Legends: Bloodroot


	Keepers of the Legends "Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers" Edited by Joyce Dyer, University of Kentucky Press, 1998 “All around the water tank, standing in the rain, A thousand miles away from home, waiting for a train...” When I was four, I thought that was the saddest story in the world. It was a Jimmie Rodgers tune, I later learned, but I only ever heard it sung a cappella by my father in our old Chevrolet on the five-hour drives to visit my grandparents in east Tennessee. Who was the fellow in the song, I wondered, and how did he get stuck out there on the desolate Texas prairie all alone, so far from the mountains? He seemed to think he was going to make it home all right, but for the duration of the song, he was stranded, and I could never hear it without feeling the sting of tears. I come from a race of storytellers. My father’s family—the Arrowoods and the McCourys—settled in the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina in 1790, when the wilderness was still Indian country. They came from the north of England and from Scotland, and they seemed to want mountains, land, and as few neighbors as possible. The first of the McCourys to settle in America was my great-great-great grandfather Malcolm McCourry, a Scot who was kidnaped as a child from the island of Islay in the Hebrides in 1750, and made to serve as a cabin boy on a sailing ship. He later became an attorney in Morristown, New Jersey; fought with the Chester Militia in the American Revolution; and finally settled in what is now Mitchell County, western North Carolina in 1794. Another relative, an Arrowood killed in the Battle of Waynesville in May 1865, was the last man to die in the Civil War east of the Mississippi. Yet another "connection" (we are cousins-in-law through the Howell family) is the convicted murderess Frankie Silver, the subject of my next novel, The Ballad of Frankie Silver. Frances Stewart Silver (1813-1833) was the first woman hanged for murder in the state of North Carolina. I did not discover the family tie that links us until I began the two years of research prior to writing the novel. I wasn’t surprised, though. Since both our families had been in Mitchell County for more than two hundred years, and both produced large numbers of children to intermarry with other families, I knew the connection had to be there. These same bloodlines link both Frankie Silver and me to another Appalachian writer Wilma Dykeman and also to the famous bluegrass musician Del McCoury. The namesake of my character Spencer Arrowood, my paternal grandfather, worked in the machine shop of the Clinchfield Railroad. He was present on that September day in 1916 at the railroad yard in Erwin, Tennessee when a circus elephant called Mary was hanged for murder: she had killed her trainer in Kingsport. (I used this last story as a theme in She Walks These Hills, in which an elderly escaped convict is the object of a man hunt in the Cherokee National Forest. In the novel the radio disc jockey Hank the Yank, reminds his listeners of that story as a prayer for mercy for the hunted fugitive.) I grew up listening to my father’s tales of World War II in the Pacific, and to older family stories of duels and escapades in Model A Fords. With such adventurers in my background, I grew up seeing the world as a wild and exciting place; the quiet tales of suburban angst so popular in modern fiction are Martian to me. Two of my great-grandfathers were circuit preachers in the North Carolina mountains a hundred years ago, riding horseback over the ridges to preach in a different community each week. Perhaps they are an indication of our family’s regard for books, our gift of storytelling and public-speaking, and our love of the Appalachian mountains, all traits that I acquired as a child. I have said that my books are like Appalachian quilts. I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life, and local tragedy, and I piece them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the culture of the mountain South. It is from the family stories, the traditional music, and from my own careful research of the history, folklore, and geography of the region that I gather the squares for these literary quilts. Storytelling was an art form that I learned early on. When I was a little girl, my father would come in to tell me bedtime story, which usually began with a phrase like, "Once there was a prince named Paris, whose father was Priam, the king of Troy..." Thus I got the Iliad in nightly installments, geared to the level of a four-year old’s understanding. I grew up in a swirl of tales: the classics retold; ballads or country songs, each having a melody, but above all a plot; and family stories about Civil War soldiers, train wrecks, and lost silver mines. My grandmother contributed stories of her father, sixteen-year old John Burdette Taylor, a private in the 68th North Carolina Rangers (CSA), whose regiment walked in rag-bound boots, following the railroad tracks from Virginia to Fort Fisher, site of a decisive North Carolina battle. All his life he would remember leaving footprints of blood in the snow as he marched. When John Taylor returned home to Carteret County, eastern North Carolina at the end of the war, his mother who was recovering from typhoid, got up out of her sickbed to attend the welcome home party for her son. She died that night. My father’s family fund of Civil War stories involved great-great uncles in western north Carolina who had discovered a silver mine or a valley of ginseng while roaming the hills, trying to escape conscription into one marauding army or the other. There were the two sides of the South embodied in my parents’ oral histories: Mother’s family represented the flat-land South, steeped in its magnolia myths, replete with Gorham sterling silver and Wedgwood china. My father’s kinfolks spoke for the Appalachian South, where the pioneer spirit took root. In their War Between the States, the Cause was somebody else’s business, and the war was a deadly struggle between neighbors. I could not belong completely to either of these Souths because I am inextricably a part of both. This duality of my childhood, a sense of having a foot in two cultures, gave me that sense of otherness that one often finds in writers: the feeling of being an outsider, observing one’s surroundings, and looking even at personal events at one remove. So much conflict; so much drama; and two sides to everything. Stories, I learned, involved character, and drama, and they always centered around irrevocable events that mattered. In addition to personal histories set in Appalachia, I was given a sampling of my father’s taste in literature: the romantic adventure tales of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the frontier stories of Mark Twain and Bret Harte, and the sentimental surprise-ending works of Dickens and O.Henry. Add to that the poetry of Benet, Tennyson, Whittier, and Longfellow. It is no wonder that, years later, when I was ready to be a published writer, I found that I had no aptitude for minimalism, despite studies in the contemporary trends in creative writing at my alma mater UNC Chapel Hill, and later at Virginia Tech, where I received my M.A. in English. I took all the courses in Victorian literature that the university offered, and it was there that I found my mentors. My role model of a successful, important writer became Charles Dickens, not for his style, but for his philosophy. Charles Dickens wrote best sellers in order to change the world. Here’s one example: In the mid-nineteenth century child labor laws in Britain were virtually non-existent. Children worked twelve hour days in factories, were maimed in coal mines, and died of lung disease in their teens from work as chimney sweeps. No one seemed to care. For decades ministers and social reformers wrote earnest pamphlets reeling off the statistics of child mortality, and calling for child-protection laws. These pamphlets were mostly read by people who already agreed with the author; other ministers and social reformers who were working on pamphlets of their own. And nobody did anything to help the children. -- Then Charles Dickens wrote a book. It was a novel, about a little boy who suffered terribly in the workhouse: David Copperfield. Then came Oliver Twist , with its grim picture of a child’s life on the street in the slums of London. Those books became best-sellers in Great Britain, and within two years of their publication the child labor laws of England were changed. The general public, who had never bothered to read the informative pamphlets, wept for a little boy who existed only in a novel, and as an echo of the author’s childhood. People became so outraged at the fate of these fictional children, that they demanded laws protecting child workers. First Dickens had to make people care; then he could persuade them to act. This is what John Gardner later called "moral fiction," and I knew early on that I wanted my words to make a difference. Writing should do more than entertain. Even the early "mystery" novels that I wrote reflect this sense of purpose, that a good book should have a message. The books featuring forensic anthropologist Elizabeth MacPherson have been described as "Jane Austen with an Attitude" for the way that they blend social issues into the plots. In each of the early novels, the murder is committed by someone who is trying to protect an assumed cultural identity-- not for greed, or revenge, or any of the usual motives. Cultural identity, I learned from my dual-culture childhood, is optional. The point of those novels is not to reveal "whodunit," but to satirize a pretentious segment of society: in Highland Laddie Gone, for example, the Scottish Wannabes at the Highland Games are lampooned. The last novel in that series, If I’d Killed Him When I Met Him is a synchronically structured meditation on the dysfunctional nature of contemporary relationships: i.e. there is a war going on between men and women these days, and in this book, Elizabeth MacPherson becomes the war correspondent. These satirical novels reflect the culture of my mother’s South: the mannered society where appearances and social position matter. The dark and troubled world of the Ballad novels are the other South, drawn on my father’s Appalachian heritage. The idea of being a writer took root early in my consciousness. When I was seven, I announced that I was going to be a writer-- even though I had to ask my parents how to spell about every third word of my compositions. My first work was a poem called "The Gypsy’s Ghost" written when I was in the second grade. It had the sing-song rhyme of iambic octameter, and the most frightening thing about it to me now is the specter of seeing it in print, but it told a coherent ghost story in verse, and my parents seemed pleased with my efforts, so I persevered. I must have been nine when I heard the Irish song "Danny Boy" for the first time, and while I recognized the urgency and sadness in the song, I could not figure out where Danny was going, and why his father wasn’t sure he’d ever seen him again. Unable to get any satisfactory answers on these points from the lyrics, I invented a story to explain the situation in the song. It has to do with a changeling being reclaimed from his human foster parents by the Irish fairies, but it wasn’t a bad effort for a nine-year old’s imagination. I still think it might be a good children’s book. Music is a continuous wellspring of creativity for me. When I was writing the previous Ballad novels, I would make a sound track for each book, before I began the actual process of writing. The cassette tape, dubbed by me from tracks of albums in my extensive collection, would contain songs that I felt were germane to the themes of the book, and sometimes a song that I thought one of the characters might listen to, or a "theme song" for each of the main characters. Generally, the songs I use to focus my thinking do not appear in the novel itself; they are solely for my benefit, although I have thought of providing a "play list" in the epilogue to each book. The soundtrack for She Walks These Hills, for example, was a mixture of Bluegrass, Scottish folk songs, and modern country music. It begins with the Don Williams recording of "Good Old Boys Like Me," a song that captures the character of Sheriff Spencer Arrowood in a few well-chosen lines: "...Those Williams boys, they still mean a lot to me: Hank and Tennessee." A "good old boy" who is able to appreciate both Hank Williams and Tennessee Williams has a blend of urbanity and traditionalism that typifies the rural Tennessee sheriff I wanted to create. The music of Deputy Joe LeDonne’s is an acid rock tune from the Sixties, "Break on Through to the Other Side." A Vietnam vet, LeDonne listens only to recordings made in the late Sixties and early Seventies: Otis Redding, the Grateful Dead, Kris Kristofferson, Janis Joplin. Other songs on my home-made album for She Walks These Hills include: "Jamie Raeburn," a Scots folk song about a convict forced to leave his homeland; the Bluegrass standard "Fox on the Run," both theme tunes for the novel’s escaped convict Harm Sorley, as well as "Poor Wayfaring Stranger;" "The Bounty Hunter" written and sung by North Carolina musician Mike Cross; and a selection of hammered dulcimer recordings of traditional Scottish and Irish melodies. When the cassette tape was finished, I made one copy of it for my car, and another one for my office. Then during the months that I was researching, before I wrote a word of the book itself, I played the car tape whenever I was driving, to absorb and internalize the sound and the themes of the novel-to-come. I suppose the music serves as both the means of directing my thoughts along the lines of motivation, characterization and theme during the planning phase of the novel, and later for the creation of mood when I am in my study actually working on the book. I read non-fiction incessantly, always trolling for some relevant thought or fact that will add a grace note to the next story. I keep hardbound notebooks for possible future novels, each one labeled with the working title. When I see an article, a quote, or a phrase that might pertain to the subject of this future book, I copy it onto a blank page in the scrapbook. I have discovered through bitter experience that it is much easier to stockpile things you may never use than it is to try to track down an article or a reference several years after you’ve seen it, when your memory of where it can be found is no longer reliable. The prepared mind saves me much time and energy in the long run, and the background reading that I have done has triggered associations and brought other facets of the story into focus, giving my work a scope and texture that it would not otherwise have. I read. I study. I interview people who are experts in the subject of the current work. I have hiked the Appalachian Trail with a naturalist, and explored country music with Skeeter Davis. I researched wood-working with a master dulcimer-maker, and I have sat in Tennessee’s electric chair. I try to write interesting, compelling stories, because I think it is the duty of a fiction writer to entertain, but: beyond the reader’s concern for the characters, I want there to be an overlay of significance about the issues and the ambiguities that we face in Appalachia today. In my novels I want there to be truth, and an enrichment of the reader’s understanding of the mountains and their people. I have been known to warn folks not to read my books with their brains in neutral. Dickens again: "Never be inducted to suppose that I write merely to amuse or without an object." I have a mission. Appalachia is still trying to live down the stereotypical "backwoods" view of the region presented in the media. I think one of the best ways to combat this negative portrayal is to educate the general reader about the real character of the region, and particularly about the history and origins of Appalachia and its people, both culturally and environmentally. Like Charles Dickens, I think that in order to win hearts and minds, one must reach the greatest possible number of people, and so I am pleased when my novels make the New York Times best seller list, because that means that millions of people have been exposed to my point of view. Millions of people watched the Dukes of Hazard: surely the opposite opinion deserves equal time. I am passing along the songs, the stories, and the love of the land to people who did not have a chance to acquire such things from heritage or residence. Perhaps my own theme song ought to be the one Joan Baez recorded an early album called One Day at A Time: "Carry It On." Carry it on.

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