Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  In the four decades since peace had been made, the war’s horror and heartbreak had been furiously commercialized. Already in full swing was the very American way of selling a story back to the people who had been touched by it, and songwriters made great (and sometimes beautiful) songs from awful memories of that war. Loss of life, loss of love, and loss of home were copyrighted, printed up, and offered for pocket change. The beauty was, no matter where Americans lined up on the conflict itself, the experience of it was much the same.

  Most everybody in Rich Valley had been affected by what was known there as the War Between the States. At the start of the Civil War, the Nickelsville Spartan Band was formed as one of four companies of the Forty-eighth Virginia Infantry Regiment, and over the next four years these farmers and farmhands fought their way through Romney, Chickahominy, Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, and Appomattox. At Chancellorsville a third of their regiment was killed, wounded, or captured. At Gettysburg, where the Forty-eighth had pushed up Culp’s Hill to within ten yards of the enemy firing line, another third of the regiment had been wasted. When Sara and Madge were young girls, veterans of those manmauling battles still walked, ghostly and deep-socketed, among the living. Every family in Copper Creek and Nickelsville had a memory of the war, and memorabilia, too. The Hartsocks kept a yellowed clipping from the August 8, 1862, edition of the Abingdon Virginian describing the demise of William D., “gone all too soon for his sorrowing friends and bleeding country,” at the Battle of Port Republic. “He fell to the ruthless hand of death by a shell; but he has gone from among us in the bloom of youth, with a heart warm with future anticipations to his last moments,” says the Virginian. “We cannot tell in what mind he died, but of upright life, religiously inclined we may trustfully leave with a good God, who knew best when to call him hence.” The Kilgore family held a letter written by the Spartan Band’s company commander, Sylvester P. McConnell, who was in 1915 a mottled, white-whiskered retired clerk of the county court: “It is my painful duty to inform you of the death of your son, John D. Kilgore,” he wrote in 1862. “I gave William P. Harris an order to the ward master for his money ($10) & his clothing & sent him to town to see him decently buried. We tried to take him home but the higher officer said it was against the order of the War Department . . . it is a sad occurrence indeed that he had to die so far away from his kinfolks, but remember he lost his life in a glorious cause.” Official accounts and correspondence rarely offered much in the way of comfort, or explanation, but draped the awful, lonely, far-from-home deaths in the romantic cloak of martyrdom in “the glorious cause” of a “bleeding country.”

  Casualties were not confined to faraway field hospitals, war prisons, and battlegrounds. The McConnells still told the sad tale of Drusilla, whose betrothed was killed in action at Gettysburg. Drusilla went to an early grave, too, the victim of a broken heart. In 1915 a great-niece kept as a family treasure the last love letter William Patton Harris sent to Drusilla McConnell.

  In the aftermath of the war, the binding sentiment, the one that traveled down through generations, was that nobody’s loss—be it an affair of war or an affair of the heart—should be made small. That simple notion passed almost imperceptibly from generation to generation, through ballads such as “Poor Orphan Child,” “Wandering Boy,” and “I Have No One to Love Me.” What McConnell could hear the lyric “Go dig my grave both wide and deep, / Place marble at my head and feet, / In the middle of the grave put a turtledove, / To show the world I died for love” and not shudder for poor dead Drusilla?

  According to Sara, a neighbor named Myrtle Porter taught her a song about a girl whose once ardent young lover had forsaken her. Nobody knows the exact words Miss Porter left to Sara, but, according to scholar Charles Wolfe, they were most likely based on a song written a half century earlier by Maud Irving and J. P. Welch, called “I’ll Twine ’Mid the Ringlets.” As Irving and Welch wrote it, the opening verse went:

  I’ll twine ’mid the ringlets of my raven black hair

  The lilies so pale and the roses so fair

  The myrtle so bright with an emerald hue

  The pale aronatus with eyes of light blue.

  It’s impossible to know if anybody in Rich Valley still had the published sheet music, but the song itself had been passed around from local singer to local singer. Over the years it was delivered again and again, with scores of musical midwives. It came out sounding different nearly every time. Albert Easterling of Nickelsville would claim for years that he’d written the song from scratch for his wife, Jane. He made that claim without fear of lawsuit and without shame. Songsters like Albert were constantly retuning and rewording. Given Appalachia’s oral tradition, and the dense thicket of romantic poetry, the transmission of the song became a game of transgenerational telephone. What was whispered in at one end of the line came out the other end in sometimes nonsensical little couplets. By the time Sara popularized the song in 1928, the first line had become “I’ll twine with my mingles,” a line without literal meaning; the myrtle became bright with “emerald dew”; the pale aronatus was now “the pale and the leader,” whatever that was. A later line, “the crowd I will sway,” made its way onto the record as “in his crown I will sway.” But what made it loud and clear through all the ancestral noise was the point of the song: that a woman ought to show a fierce and stoic pride in the face of rejection.

  I’ll think of him never, I’ll be wildly gay

  I’ll charm every heart, and the crowd I will sway.

  I’ll live yet to see him regret the dark hour

  When he won, then neglected, the frail wildwood flower.

  Happily, the music Sara grew up with wasn’t all about life’s dark hours; it had a good bit to say about grabbing fun where you could, or just plain having fun with the song. “Chewing Gum” took potshots at the newly puffed-up middle class:

  I wouldn’t marry a lawyer, I’ll tell you the reason why,

  Every time he opens his mouth, he tells a great big lie.

  I wouldn’t marry a doctor, I’ll tell you the reason why,

  He rides all over the country and makes the people die.

  I took my girl to church last night, what do you think she done?

  She walked right up to the preacher’s face and chawed her chewing gum.

  Sara and her pal Madge were exposed to all kinds of music: gospel, ballads, comic songs, and flat-out dancing music. The girls’ grandfather Arnett Kilgore had been able to play any instrument he’d ever laid hands on, and Madge’s mother, Margaret Kilgore Addington, played a five-string banjo and a Sears-bought autoharp. Madge’s brothers played some of the best guitar on Copper Creek, and her baby sister, Maybelle, had pulled the autoharp down off a table and started playing by ear.

  Those talents put the Addingtons at the center of the local social scene, and the highlight of Rich Valley’s social season was October—corn-shucking time. The Easterlings or the Wamplers or the Blankenbecklers would invite all their friends and neighbors to come out and help complete the fall harvest, with promise of reward. The men went out in the fields where the corn lay cut, shocked, and tied to dry, and they shucked all day long, while the women stayed in the house and quilted or made molasses or cooked for the square dance that night. The younger kids milled around the yard playing Andy Over or London Bridge. As the sun dropped low, everybody left for home, but just long enough to spruce up. The men put on fresh overalls and clean white shirts, and the women stepped into their long skirts. The single girls, who were prospecting, generally took the longest time in preparation, and it wasn’t until they were in tow that a party made its way to the square dance. Whether they went on horseback, in wagons, or on foot, there was always somebody sent out front to light the dirt paths so that whoever arrived first could see floating globe-shaped kerosene lanterns converging on that night’s dance hall. The dance hall was really just somebody’s house or, if it was a big party, the Addington Frame Chur
ch. In that case somebody had already pushed aside the pews to make the dance floor.

  It wasn’t long before the crowd was pretty well oiled. When the crop was good—and, tell the truth, even when it wasn’t so good—there was always corn to spare for liquor. Madge’s daddy, Hugh Jack Addington, who ran the Green Store, had a still. Uncle Mil Nickels made a pretty fair batch of moonshine, too. So there might be a half-dozen short pints warming the edges of the dance floor while the fiddlers sawed away at “Turkey in the Straw” or “Sallie Goodin.” A banjo or a guitar gave the music body, but it was the fiddle that shivered the spine and made the feet go.

  “They loved dancing in Rich Valley, and they could do it,” says A.P. and Sara’s son Joe Carter. “Breakdown, Virginia reel, buck dance, just flatfoot dance. Uncle Ermine used to go over courting them girls in Rich Valley. He said, ‘You get out there and try to dance with one of them girls on a waltz and they’d walk all over you. Let them put on a hoedown and it sounded like a bunch of air hammers on the floor.’ ”

  It wasn’t just the dancing that drew the Poor Valley boys across the mountain. Sometimes the teenagers would sneak off for kissing games like Spin the Top, or Post Office. Post Office was a round-robin kissing tournament, where the lead girl would be sent alone into a room to call out the name of her favored boy and ask him to “deliver the mail.” Once that mail was delivered, the postman got to stay in and call out his favored young lady. “They’d tell what they wanted,” says Daphne Stapleton. “A letter with a one-cent stamp, you’d get one kiss; three-cent stamp, you’d get three kisses. If it was a package you’d get a hug. Sometimes you’d get people who were really a-datin’, and they’d stay in there a long time.”

  Now, A.P. Carter shied from kissing games, wasn’t keen on dance music, and wanted nothing to do with corn liquor, so he went about his courting in a more earnest and forthright fashion. He’d iron his stiffest store-bought collar, maybe wet it down and iron it a second time for shine, button it down over his tie, and go visit at Mil and Nick’s.

  Nobody really knows what melted Sara’s initial resistance. Joe Carter figures his father flattered his mother, told her how pretty she was, and how smart. But over the years, Joe has developed a jaundiced view of romance, and that clouds his vision. Neither Sara nor A.P. confided the details of their courtship. What little evidence there is comes from something Sara told a fan who caught her off guard nearly fifty years after the wooing commenced. “A.P.’s main savior was his bass,” Sara said. “I think he was the best. I’ve never heard anybody that could sing bass like him.” For A.P.’s part, he was poleaxed in love. And he wasn’t going to give up.

  Even so, the courtship wasn’t always easy. First there was the simple fact that A.P. had to walk a day or more—over one mountain, two more ridges, and a half-dozen creeks or lesser streams—just to get to the Nickels homestead. And like any sixteen-year-old beauty, Sara could be aggravating. Ezra Addington often saw Pleasant tied in knots. Sometimes when A.P. was visiting Copper Creek, he’d stay with Ezra. Ezra always remembered the time Sara took umbrage at something A.P. had done and refused his company altogether. “He sent his dog up,” Ezra Addington recalled years later. “Put a letter of apology on the dog’s collar to ask if he could come and see her. That’s the way he got in.”

  Sara had to be impressed with A.P.’s resourcefulness and his staying power, but she must have also been aware that a man has his limits. She may even have been a bit chastened by her own sister’s recently failed courtship. Four years earlier Mae had turned down a marriage proposal from William Joseph “Buff” Hartsock. Buff had been so upset that he hopped a train straightaway and hoboed out to Idaho for work in the zinc mines. So when A.P. proposed marriage in 1915, Sara accepted. Pleasant raced back home, took over some farmland in the Little Valley with the help of Uncle Fland, and went to work building a house. It was just a two-room cabin, but he meant to make it a fit home.

  Alvin Pleasant Carter and Sara Dougherty were married on June 18, 1915, the month before the bride’s seventeenth birthday. After the ceremony and the dance that followed, Pleasant loaded up his one-horse wagon and carried his new bride back to Poor Valley. They had to ford the winding Moccasin Creek five times just to get to the gap that let out onto the south side of Clinch Mountain. “I know that was a wonderful trip home,” their daughter Gladys wrote years later. “Daddy always walked over the mountain as it was so much closer to go courting, but now he was bringing her home with her autoharp, all of her fancy crochet pieces, quilts, a few dishes; and, Aunt Nick had picked out twelve of her nicest pullets and a rooster and put them in a coop on back of the wagon. . . . They would be settling down with their horse, a milk cow called Old Brin, two good squirrel dogs Top and Brownie (which was a must in every family those days), a good 12-gauge shot gun, their chickens, a step stove, table, four cane bottom chairs, two iron beds, and a new dresser with a big mirror in it (very rare in those days) in a new little two room cabin which Daddy, his brothers, father and all the neighbors had pitched in to build as soon as he told them he was going to bring his bride home in so many days. He had to have his house on his own little tract of land.”

  For well over a half century, there were witnesses who spoke rhapsodically of the day A.P. brought his bride home to Poor Valley. “My mother always remembered the first time she saw Sara,” says Barbara Powell, a daughter of A.P.’s cousin Elva. “She was the most beautiful thing she ever saw. Mom was so struck with her beauty and how she dressed. She had a huge, wide-brimmed hat with a red rose on it. She had that long, dark hair and big beautiful brown eyes. She was real young when A.P. brought her over the mountain . . . sixteen.”

  The day the newlyweds arrived, their cabin in the Little Valley wasn’t altogether complete; unless Pleasant had meant to have a dirt floor. But it took him only a couple of days to carpenter a solid wood-plank floor, and they were in business. Sara made a space for her autoharp on her cedar chest, and in time she framed and mounted the first picture of the A.P. Carters, their wedding photo. That picture was snapped right outside the Nickels’ cottage, and Buff and Mae are in the photograph, too. (After five years Buff had come home, and Mae had accepted his next proposal. So the betrothed couple had stood up with A.P. and Sara that warm June day, as a dress rehearsal for their own wedding two months later.) In the photo, A.P. sits folded into a too-small chair, his legs crossed and his homburg still on his head. His shoulders are hunched toward his jug ears, and his mouth is curled at the corners in a sheepish grin. He looks a little like that old cat who ate the canary: pleased and proud in the moment, but aware the act he’s just committed might have consequences. Sara stands at his side in a white ankle-length dress pulled fetchingly tight at the waist. She’s looking dead at the camera, almost as if in a challenge. Her hand rests behind her new husband’s shoulder, as if she’s expecting him to lead her somewhere. In that captured moment, Sara Dougherty Carter can have no idea what she’s in for.

  The wedding photo (Carter Family Museum)

  Poor Valley (Lorrie Davis Bennett)

  The Homeplace

  They didn’t live in the Little Valley long. By the time their first child was born in 1919, A.P. had bought a few acres just up the road from Neal’s Store at Maces Springs, and built Sara a bigger cabin in the foothills of Clinch Mountain. A.P. had picked a spot up near the tree line, for comfort and ease of living. First off, he wanted to be close to the timber. About the only way to heat a house in Poor Valley was by fireplace or woodstove. For all the good burning coal in Appalachia, there was little in Maces Springs. By the end of the Great War, two or three freight trains a day would come down from St. Charles, Virginia, grinding through the Valley with dozens of cars, all full of coal dug out of the mines in neighboring Wise County. But those loads were bound for bigger markets; once they hit the railhead in Bristol, the coal would be switched to the Norfolk & Western’s fast freights for points north and east. “A conveyer belt for coal masquerading as a railroad,” one writer ca
lled the N&W. Once in a while the conveyer belt’s flotsam would wash up in Poor Valley. The general store at Hiltons might buy a carload of coal to retail, and Fland Bays would drive over in his wagon (and later a Model T Ford truck) to buy a load. Even better was when the kids in the Valley could walk the tracks after the freight passed and pick up lumps of coal that had bounced out of overfilled cars. That was free fuel. And that coal would burn all night long, without a second’s tending. But A.P. and Sara couldn’t count on found coal. What they could depend on was going out the back door, sawing down a tree, and splitting it for firewood. After a long, cold night Sara might wake to find her bedspread sprinkled with frost, but she could always put a few more logs on the fire to get the house warmed again.

  The other great advantage to A.P.’s chosen lot was its water. All over Poor Valley, streams ran down off Clinch Mountain, feeding the Holston River. So A.P. could have settled in the deepest part of the Valley and been a short walk from good, clean water. But the farther up the mountain one lived, the nearer the spring; the nearer the spring, the colder the water. And in 1920, when the only electricity in the Valley was up in the elements, and there wasn’t enough still water to freeze over into deep blocks of winter ice that might last, Sara had to have cold water nearby to keep her dairy products. Like Mollie Carter, Sara kept her milk and butter under water, as near the mouth of the spring as she could, in a wooden (and later cement) box with bored holes to let the icy water run through. Only on the hottest days would she walk up to the creek and find the milk “blinked.” But even on those airless summer days, A.P. and Sara were glad to be nestled so high and deep into the foothills that Clinch Mountain itself gave good evening shade.