FRANKLIN: A flour sack or somethin’.
JOSHUA: That’s right. An old flour sack. And we sat there together on this little burlap island, lookin’ out over this sea of people like the mountains in bloom in that spring my mama usta tell me about in her dreams, and they were all holdin’ hands and swayin’ back and forth and it was all one thing—all of us and them mountains—and I remember thinkin’, there ain’t nothin’ we can’t do! Nothin’!
Franklin gets up and moves away.
FRANKLIN: That was a long time ago, Joshua.
James returns, holding the buckskin.
JAMES: Hey, look what I found!
FRANKLIN: What is it?
JAMES: Piece of buckskin, I think.
FRANKLIN: Lemme see. Man, that’s beautiful.
JAMES: Those guys you chased off musta dropped it. Where were they workin’ when you saw them?
JOSHUA: Over there.
James looks down into the hole.
JAMES: I don’t see anything. (He gets down on his hands and knees and looks into the hole.) Wait a minute . . . I think there is somethin’ here. (He reaches in and pulls out an old deerskin bundle.) Jesus Christ.
The men crowd around.
FRANKLIN: Look at the beadwork on that.
JOSHUA: Lemme see. Looks like stars, don’t it—like the Milky Way! Like all the stars in the sky was sewn on that piece of deerhide.
JAMES: What do you think’s in there?
FRANKLIN: Gotta be somethin’ valuable.
JAMES: Hell, the buckskin alone’s a collector’s item.
FRANKLIN: Open it up, Josh.
Joshua slowly unwraps the bundle. Franklin and James crouch around him, next to the open grave. Pause.
JOSHUA: It’s a baby.
Beat.
JAMES: Damn.
FRANKLIN: Jesus.
JAMES: That thing must be . . . what?
JOSHUA: Two hundred years or more. Ain’t been no Indians in the Cumberland for two hundred years.
FRANKLIN: Can’t be that old. Look at it, man.
JOSHUA: She’s beautiful. Look at her: hair, fingernails.
JAMES: I read about things like this—freak stuff. They dug some guy out of a peat bog in Europe, couple of thousand years old.
JOSHUA: The buckskin musta kept the water out. Preserved her.
James takes the baby back.
FRANKLIN: What do you think we oughta do with it?
JOSHUA: I don’t know.
JAMES: It’s plenty valuable, I know that. There are private collectors who’d pay thousands for something like this.
JOSHUA: You’d sell her?
FRANKLIN: Oh, man, your taste is all in your mouth.
JOSHUA: Jesus.
FRANKLIN: Look, James, you wanta make a quick buck, God bless, but if you wanta make some serious long-haul money here, I’ll tell you what we do.
JAMES: What do you mean, “we”? I found it.
JOSHUA: Wait a minute, it’s on hospital land. . . .
JAMES: “Was” hospital land. Don’t get up on your high horse again with me, Joshua.
JOSHUA: Oh, come on . . .
JAMES: I’m serious—don’t start with me.
FRANKLIN: Fine, James, it’s yours!
JOSHUA: No it’s not! Put it back.
JAMES: Hell no.
JOSHUA: Then I will. Give it here.
JAMES: No!
JOSHUA: Give it to me, James.
JAMES: No—I found it, it’s mine.
JOSHUA: Give it to me!
FRANKLIN: Come on, Joshua, quit horsing around.
JOSHUA: I’m not kiddin’!
FRANKLIN: Come on, Joshua, what difference does it make?!
JOSHUA: IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE! (He picks up his gun.) Now give it to me.
JAMES: Fuck you!
Joshua cocks the rifle.
FRANKLIN: Joshua!
JOSHUA: Don’t move, Franklin.
JAMES: God damn you!
JOSHUA: Do it! Go on, James. Put her down.
FRANKLIN: Okay. Let’s everybody take it easy. Put it down, James. Come on, what does it matter? Come on, James, let him have it! Give it to him and we’ll all just go home. All right?
Beat. James puts the baby down on the ground. He never takes his eyes off Joshua. Joshua picks up the baby.
FRANKLIN: Okay, Joshua, put the gun down.
Joshua lowers the gun but doesn’t put it down.
JAMES: You are outta your fuckin’ mind, Joshua, you know that? You know what this is about, don’t ya, Franklin? Hell, we all know what this is really about, don’t we? I’m s’posed to be the bad guy here. It was all my fault, right, Joshua? Bullshit! You’re just as guilty for what happened as I am, and you are just gonna have to live with it.
JOSHUA: I’m tryin’, James.
James backs off.
JAMES: We can do this land without you, you know? It’ll take a little longer, but I can just get a court order.
He exits.
JOSHUA: I know he can make this work without me, Franklin, but he can’t do it without you. Don’t let him do it.
FRANKLIN: It ain’t gonna make no difference, Joshua.
JOSHUA: We gotta try, don’t we?
Franklin slowly picks up his things.
FRANKLIN: I’ll think about it.
He exits in the opposite direction of James. Beat. Joshua moves to the grave and kneels down. He carefully rewraps the baby in her buckskin shroud. He starts to lay her in the grave and then stops.
JOSHUA: It’s cold down there, baby. It’s so cold.
He takes off his jacket and wraps it around her. He pauses. He removes a leather thong from around his neck. Tied to it is the now battered and tarnished Rowen family gold watch. He holds it up to the sunrise and looks at it. Then he tucks it into the coat wrapped around the infant.
He lays her in the grave. He shoves the dirt in with his bare hands. Finished burying her, he rocks back on his heels, his head bowed.
Behind him, and clearly unseen by Joshua, the ground erupts. Pushing up through the soil are the figures of those we have watched live and struggle and die over this ground.
Star rises, reunited with her baby at last.
Joe Talbert stands beside his daughter, Rebecca.
Sallie Biggs and her son, Jessie, stand side by side, arms around each other.
Richard Talbert rises, his Confederate uniform still damp from the muddy waters of the Cumberland. Beside him is his son, Randall. Jed Rowen stands next to both of them.
Scotty Rowen, crushed miner’s cap under one arm, sits next to his unseeing father and drapes an arm over Joshua’s shoulders. Joshua rests his head on Scotty’s shoulder.
Mary Anne Rowen and Tommy Jackson stand just behind them.
Mary Anne touches both Joshua and Scotty. She smiles.
Long beat.
A wolf howls. Joshua grabs the rifle. He cocks it and stands up slowly. He looks out front and raises the rifle. He stops.
JOSHUA: Look at you, you big, beautiful son of a bitch. Christ almighty, look at you!
The figures behind Joshua watch him without emotion. Joshua laughs. He points the gun into the air and fires several times. He yells.
RUN, YOU SON OF A BITCH! RUN! RUNNNNNNN!
Joshua stands yelling at the wolf in sheer joy and exultation. The figures watch.
Blackout.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 1981, a friend of mine who had run a radical health program in eastern Kentucky offered to show me his part of Appalachia. He drove me out of Louisville, past the beautiful horse farms and antebellum mansions (some with their slave quarters still intact, but tucked discreetly away from the road), and into the hills of the Cumberland. In the mining town
of Hazard, scene of some of the bitterest labor struggles in the previous decade, we joined up with one of his former nurses and drove with her into the “hollers” as she made house calls on the handful of families his program still served. The poverty I saw that day was extraordinary.
I remember one family in particular. Their house was a single-room “shotgun shack” with a tin roof, a dirt floor, and a coal-burning stove. It was situated on what looked like a combination garbage dump and gravel pit. The mother, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen, had two children below the age of two, one of whom was crippled. The father, not much older than his wife, was unemployed, with little training and few prospects. The smell in that house was what my friend with grim humor referred to as “the smell of poverty in the mountains”—as though you had taken a corn-shuck mattress, soaked it in piss, covered it with garbage and coal, and set it on fire.
During the course of my visit we met other people who lived under quite different circumstances. I remember a conversation I had with the owner of a successful coal-mining operation. I couldn’t help talking about the terrible scenes I had witnessed less than a stone’s throw from his palatial mountaintop retreat. His reaction was interesting. He wasn’t the least bit concerned or even embarrassed; if anything, he was indignant. In his opinion, the poverty and extreme want of his neighbors was their own damn fault, a combination of “laziness and stupidity”; in any case, it was certainly none of his concern. This was a pretty amazing statement to me in 1981. Of course, years later we would see this same philosophy embraced by our highest political leaders. Who can forget the compassion implicit in the Great Communicator’s now famous reply to the suffering of his countrymen—“Let them vote with their feet”? Or his righteous indignation at scheming “welfare queens”?
For me, there was something so disorienting about these extremes of poverty and wealth existing this close to one another but without any acknowledged relationship, without any sense of community. Again, I now realize that what I was a witness to there in the hills of eastern Kentucky was prophetic. Much ink is spilled these days marveling at the increasingly isolationist spirit in our society. This fracturing along socioeconomic and racial lines even has a nickname, the “Lebanonization of America.”
What made this all so striking in eastern Kentucky was how closely the physical landscape of the area seemed to embody this social contradiction, this dichotomy of simultaneous abundance and need. It was, at one and the same time, some of the most beautiful mountain scenery in the country and some of the most devastated. There were lush mountain forests full of oak and pine, flowering dogwood and azalea; then you’d turn the corner and the other side of the mountain would have been strip-mined completely away—all vegetation long since bulldozed off, the fertile topsoil buried under a slag heap of crushed rock and mine tailings so heavily sulfurous that heavy rainfall leached out a mild form of sulphuric acid. It looked like the moon.
I was outraged. What had happened here? How could this be?
I began to research the history of the region, beginning with Harry Caudill’s now classic work of sociology Night Comes to the Cumberlands. The story of the Cumberland Plateau is a fascinating one, rich with colorful characters and acts of both extraordinary violence and courage. Above all, it is a quintessentially American story. It was inherently theatrical, but at the time I couldn’t see how to approach the subject, and so I set the whole project aside for three years.
In 1984, I went back into the material and wrote what is now Play 6, Tall Tales, as a wedding gift to my wife, Mary Anne: an odd gift, perhaps, for such a happy occasion, but her strength of heart was very much an inspiration for the character who bears her name.
I was quite taken with the Rowens, this fictional family I had created, and it was at that point that I began to consider using them as my way into the region. I imagined a series of short plays that would trace the Rowens’ personal history in the Cumberland over two hundred years, from the “discovery” of the region by white settlers to its “rediscovery” by the country during JFK’s presidential campaign. At first I imagined maybe three plays, four at most; but as I wrote, I discovered that the events I wanted to relate made no real sense without the history that had preceded them. The cycle became six, then eight, and finally nine plays. Two other families appeared, the Biggses and the Talberts. And I began to realize that there was, of course, a fourth major character in my story, and that was the land—this land that these three families had fought over and dreamed about, bought and sold and lost and regained.
Interestingly, as I played out the history of these families over this broad expanse of time, the play seemed to become less and less about the history of eastern Kentucky or even the history of Appalachia. It was about America. It had become an unintended exploration of the process of “mythmaking”: that alchemy of wish fulfillment and political expediency by which history is collected and altered and revised, by which events become stories, and stories become folklore, and folklore becomes myth. Ultimately, I realized that the play was about American mythology.
It seemed to me that at the heart of our mythos lay the Myth of the Frontier. In hindsight, it was inevitable that I should find myself exploring this terrain, since in a very real sense Kentucky had always been the first “American frontier.” When it got crowded in the thirteen colonies, or if you were the second son and not likely to inherit the family farm, you headed into the Virginia Purchase, into Kentucky.
The Myth of the Frontier is a fascinating construct, an extremely seductive and ultimately very dangerous myth comprised of two lesser myths. The first of these is the Myth of Abundance, which says, “These resources are so vast that they will never end. You cannot possibly use them up.” One ecstatic early pioneer in the region wrote back to his family: “Oh honeys, heaven is a Kentucky kind of place.” Lord Carlisle, reflecting on this country to George Selwyn in 1775, said: “Everything is upon a great scale upon this continent. The rivers are immense, the climate violent in hot and cold, the prospects magnificent, the thunder and lightning tremendous. The disorders incident to this country make every constitution tremble. Our own blunders here, our misconduct, our losses, our disgraces, our ruin, are on a great scale.”
So indeed it has been: ruin on a great scale. Too late we are discovering —and not just in Kentucky—that resources are finite. Trees grow only at a certain rate; species once extinct cannot be recovered; you cannot re-create arable soil or recharge depleted aquifers. Hell is also a “Kentucky kind of place.”
The other half of the Myth of the Frontier might be called the Myth of Escape. It says, “Only today matters. The past? Who cares. If you don’t like where you are, literally or metaphorically, well, pick up stakes and move. There’s plenty of land out there. Change your address, change your name, change your history. Who you were, or what you did yesterday, doesn’t matter.” Undoubtedly there is a certain psychic freedom in not having to lug one’s past around, and this probably accounts in part for the amazing speed with which we overran this continent. But by the same token, there is also a significant loss, and one that goes well beyond Santayana’s trenchant warning about reliving the past. Without the past, what is there to connect us to the present? If actions don’t have consequences, how can there be a morality? Individuals who display such a cavalier attitude toward their own lives are currently diagnosed as “sociopaths” but what do you call a society that functions that way?
The Myth of the Frontier is alive and well in America today and it is killing us. Joseph Campbell says, “The rise and fall of civilizations can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth. . . . When the mythology of a culture no longer works, there follows a sense of both disassociation and a quest for new meaning.”
“Disassociation” quite accurately describes the part of Kentucky I saw in 1981. The poverty and the environmental abuse I witnessed t
here were not simply a failure of economics. It went much deeper than that; hence our continual failure to “social engineer” meaningful changes there. It was a poverty of the spirit, a poverty of the soul. What I was a witness to there was a vision of the future. Campbell’s “disassociation” quite accurately describes the state of our lives today, and not just in eastern Kentucky but all over the country. People feel “disassociated” from each other and from their environment. They feel out of touch and disconnected. They feel helpless. And that sense of helplessness breeds a terrible anger.
Einstein described our true, our healthy state, a state buttressed by a healthy mythological canon, when he said:
A human being is part of the whole, called by us, “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
In the final moments of The Kentucky Cycle, Joshua Rowen arrives intuitively at the same conclusion. How do we bring an end to these seemingly endless cycles of violence and loss? If family is not the answer and class is not the answer and social movements are not the answer, what is? It must be something larger—something big enough to embrace “the whole of nature.” Joshua doesn’t know that per se. When pressed by his companions, Joshua cannot explain—he himself does not even understand—his fierce need to defend this unknown child’s corpse, but he knows in his gut that the impulse is right. He knows that he must act if is he is to have any hope of salvation. All he knows is that “it makes a difference”!
It makes a difference.
The Kentucky Cycle Page 22
