ELIOT WIGGINTON, who started Foxfire magazine with his ninth- and tenth-grade English classes in 1966, still teaches in the Appalachian Mountains of north Georgia at the consolidated Rabun County High School. Students in Wig’s English classes, as a part of their language arts curriculum, continue to produce Foxfire magazine and the Foxfire book series. Royalties from the sale of the books are directed back into the educational program to pay salaries and expenses involved in offering at the high school some sixteen additional experimental community-based classes ranging from television and record production to photography, folklore, and environmental studies. Mr. Wigginton was voted “Teacher of the Year” in Georgia in recognition of his important contributions to education. In 1989, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
This book is dedicated to our readers. Your interest, your devotion, and your unflagging support of our work have propelled us through twenty years of continuing efforts to prove to high school students that they can not only achieve academically, but also make remarkable contributions to the quality of life in our global human community.
Stick with us. We’ve barely started. There’s so much left to do.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
FOXFIRE—WHAT IS IT?
Mushrooms That Glow
Clyde Hollifield
REMEDIES, HERB DOCTORS AND HEALERS
Flora Youngblood
Remedies
Doc Brabson
THE GENERAL STORE
The Fort Hembree Store and Tannery
The Patton D. Queen Store
Martha and Ed Roane’s Store
Roy Roberts
Earl Gillespie’s Produce Market
“QUILTING—THE JOY OF MY LIFE”:
Aunt Arie Carpenter
Crazy Quilts
Nola Campbell: CATAWBA INDIAN POTTER
THE JUD NELSON WAGON
TWO MEN OF GOD
The Praying Rock
Watchman on the Wall
“LIFE IS GOOD”: D. B. Dayton
HAINT TALES AND OTHER SCARY STORIES
Panther Tales
Mad Dogs, Eagles, and Other Animal Tales
Haint Tales
Witch Tales
A SECOND LOOK AT THE LOG CABIN
The Rothell House
Puncheon Floors
Carlton Nichols Makes a Maul
How To Make a Broadax Handle
Carolyn Stradley: “THE WORST FEELING WAS BEING ALONE”
EDITORIAL CONTRIBUTORS
Students
Contacts
INTRODUCTION
This new volume, published at the conclusion of our twentieth year of work in the Rabun County schools, also concludes the numbered Doubleday series, and in so doing now allows us to explore a whole range of new publishing possibilities with our students.
The reasons for bringing this particular series to an end are numerous and have nothing to do with failure, exhaustion, or an end of subjects to research. In fact, exactly the opposite is true: seven million books in print to date is not failure, our energy level has only rarely been higher, and the number of new projects outlined and stacked in chaotic piles on my desk and on the floor around it is an unending source of frustration. I am being buried alive by great ideas.
The latter is the essence of the problem. Let me back up for a moment, though, and give you the full picture, for as a person who is presumably interested in our work, you deserve a fuller explanation. What’s happening?
First, many of our early readers have lost track of us. Reviewers can find little new to say about the series and so they do not review the new volumes; bookstores, therefore, devote less shelf space to them since fewer people know they exist and request them (and when bookstores stock two or three copies of each of the titles, they have made a major investment in space that they could more profitably give to current bestsellers); and consequently I keep running into people who say, “The Foxfire series is wonderful. I have all three of your books.” Despite that fact, thousands of you still manage to track down each new volume when it appears, and sales of each are still in figures that most authors would envy, but the handwriting is clearly on the wall. Foxfire 26?
Second, and even more to the point, is the fact that the format of the series has become confining. Physically, the size and shape of the books, the number of pages, the paper stock, and the black-and-white illustrations all serve to limit the style of presentation of many of the topics we present. In addition, the fact that traditionally there is a range of topics presented in each volume frequently causes each topic to be treated in less depth than it deserves; and it means that if a reader is interested only in folk pottery, for example, and thus buys Foxfire 8, he must also pay for chapters on chicken fighting and mule swapping, like it or not. It all comes with the package.
Finally, the narrow focus of the numbered volumes, with their emphasis on material culture and traditional customs of the immediate region, has precluded our being able to give quality time and energy to a number of other areas we would like to allow our students to explore. The pressures of collecting the information for the next volume in the numbered series have kept us from those endeavors; one of several unfortunate results is that we have run the risk of giving you a very one-sided portrait of the Appalachian region itself, a portrait that we know has led some readers to believe that our region is still—even in 1986—a geographical and cultural cul-de-sac peopled entirely by human artifacts of a different place and time. A living museum, if you will, or a quaint anachronism from which cable TV and satellite dishes and personal computers and Pizza Huts and even college educations have all been banned. (You may find it interesting in passing to note that a few hundred yards beyond Edwin Meaders’s pottery kiln is the new home and studio of Xavier Roberts, the young mountain man who created the Cabbage Patch Kids and Furskins bears and was born and raised within shouting distance of his present house. Yes, we too are part of the twentieth century.)
So what is next? Four years ago, anticipating this moment, we began our own publishing house, Foxfire Press, through which we have presented a new series of books that are distributed nationally by E. P. Dutton. Like the numbered series, this one also documents our traditional culture, and our high school students are completely involved in its creation. Unlike the numbered series, however, each book features a single topic, and each has a distinctive size, shape, design, and “feel.” The results of a questionnaire distributed to every subscriber to our magazine, Foxfire, helped us determine our master list of topics—initiated in the magazine and the Doubleday volumes—which readers wanted to see treated in greater depth. Published every fall at the rate of one book per year, each book in the new series also contains a response card, which readers can use not only to comment on the new book but also to make suggestions for future volumes.
The inaugural volume, published in 1983, was completely devoted to Aunt Arie Carpenter. Containing material gleaned from years of tape-recorded conversations and scores of photographs, it stands today, I think, as the warmest, most human book we have ever published. Others shared that view, for shortly after its publication it won a Christopher Award.
Aunt Arie: A Foxfire Portrait was followed by a fat cookbook of traditional recipes and foodways that included interviews with some of the men and women who contributed the information. It was runner-up in the French Company’s Tastemaker competition for the best cookbook published in 1984. The next fall the Foxfire Book of Toys and Games appeared, and it was immediately chosen as one of the offerings of the Better Homes and Gardens book club, and six weeks after publication it went into a second printing.
The Dutton series, therefore, is off to an auspicious start with strong acceptance of the first three volumes, and
three more volumes, all requested by readers, are being researched and created by teams of students at this moment.
At the same time we are experimenting with some five other types of books, most of which would be published and distributed through Foxfire Press itself rather than through a national publishing house. They include:
First, a series of children’s books, both fiction and nonfiction, written and illustrated by elementary school youngsters for their peers. Local elementary students have already written and illustrated nonfiction narratives that we have printed and distributed as self-contained, removable inserts in issues of Foxfire, and soon we will begin to build on that embryonic effort. From an educational point of view, this effort has been of particular interest to me for years because of the possibilities it creates for having talented, sensitive high school students working with groups of younger students in the same kinds of ways that we have been working with the high-schoolers, to say nothing of the additional interest in reading that we may be able to generate by being able to give children books written by other children with whom they can readily identify, and whose common experiences they share.
Second, a group of titles that explore, in plays as well as prose, the broader and more current experiences of Appalachian people. Recently, for example, we published an oral history play called Cabbagetown, Three Women in which three elderly residents of the Appalachian Cabbagetown district of downtown Atlanta reveal what happened to their lives after they moved out of the mountains in the early 1900s to the company town created by the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill which offered steady year-round employment. They and their neighbors—all mountain families who suddenly had to adapt to a completely different environment—worked for the mill for years until it finally closed, leaving behind the empty silent factory buildings and a now poverty-racked, deeply troubled mountain neighborhood that stands today in the middle of one of the most prosperous cities in Sun Belt America. A grant from Foxfire sponsored the collection of the initial interviews by young people from Cabbagetown and the publication of a subsequent book and photographs, and Brenda and Cary Bynum, two Atlanta playwrights, used the material in that book to create the play itself. We now hope to explore the possibility of similar kinds of relationships and endeavors.
Third, the discovery and acquisition of the complete collection of prints and negatives of the talented amateur photographer R. A. Romanes has opened a whole new area of activity. Romanes, who photographed our section of the mountains extensively during and following the Depression, and who was a native and resident of the area, left behind a stunning collection that documents rural life here in a way that we have been unable to do. Small groups of our students have been working for over a year to catalogue and index the negatives, and to locate still living subjects for a series of publications of primarily regional interest that we will begin to release shortly.
Fourth, under consideration is an effort that would put back into circulation long out of print works of high merit by Appalachian authors who deserve an audience today. Lists of possible titles are being compiled, and financial support is now being sought to help in what could be an important project.
Fifth, we are also working toward the creation of materials that we hope will be of use to elementary and secondary public school teachers both in the mountains and beyond. A bit of background is helpful here: by the early 1970s we had already begun to work with teachers from Maine to California who wanted to transplant certain aspects of our work to their classrooms and their communities. Hundreds of publication projects resulted, and a network of teachers began to grow, serviced by a small newsletter, Hands On, which we still print and distribute as a way of providing a forum through which those teachers can exchange news and ideas. Partly because of this work, the issue of effective education itself became increasingly fascinating. What other activities could students become involved in that would stretch their talents and capabilities? How else could the overall philosophy of community-based experiential education be applied within and beyond the language arts curriculum to serve not only the more narrow, state-mandated academic agenda but also, simultaneously, certain other needs of the students themselves and the communities from which they came?
Those of you who have followed our work and read the introductions to the previous volumes in this series know how we then expanded our efforts into video and television, radio production, music and record production, community economic development, and so forth. Some experiments have prospered in terms of their educational benefits, and some failed, but all were in the service of the original goal of the original Foxfire magazine: to bring learning to life for the teenagers in our school, at the same time testing options that other teachers might want to try.
By 1979, as word of the experiments spread and as requests for more information arrived from teachers and school districts alike, I was well into a book for my peers that Doubleday released in the fall of 1985. By the time that book, Sometimes a Shining Moment: The Foxfire Experience, appeared, the current educational reform movement was also in full cry, with most commission reports pointing to the need not specifically for projects like Foxfire, but for precisely the kinds of activities in schools with which we have been experimenting for years. The educators who composed the National Commission on Reading, for example, and wrote Becoming a Nation of Readers, concluded in part:
It is a mistake to suppose that instruction in grammar transfers readily to the actual uses of language. This may be the explanation for the fact that experiments over the last fifty years have shown negligible improvement in the quality of student writing as a result of grammar instruction. Research suggests that the finer points of writing, such as punctuation and subject-verb agreement, may be learned best while students are engaged in extended writing that has the purpose of communicating to an audience. Notice that no communicative purpose is served when children are asked to identify on a worksheet the parts of speech or the proper use of “shall” and “will.”
John Dewey was right. Before any of us was born, he warned that a student internalizes and masters the basic academic skills not by studying those skills directly and exclusively, but by doing projects in a real world context where those skills must be utilized. To say it another way, a student may memorize the component parts of a bicycle (read: parts of speech, dates, formulas), and make a perfect score on that section of a state competency test, but that fact has absolutely nothing to do with the student’s ability or desire to ride.
One very real problem is that many teachers today simply were not themselves taught within a school system that followed that philosophy, and consequently they have no real patterns to go by. Those who come to us for help usually want concrete examples of the philosophy at work in responsible, compelling ways within the typical school system. It may well be presumptuous of us to try to help them, but we have examples in spades, and a series of materials for teachers published by Foxfire Press may turn out to be the most efficient and logical way to share those examples with our colleagues.
Numerous questions remain.
Will we publish anything else with Doubleday? I certainly hope so. In the future, however, it will be a different kind of title from this one. Sometimes a Shining Moment inaugurated our new relationship, and my editor at Doubleday and I are watching somewhat anxiously to see how that book does.
Will Foxfire Press ever generate enough income not only to survive financially on its own, but also to achieve our collateral dream that it become a successful, viable business in our county that can employ a number of local people? I just don’t know. It hasn’t come close in four years, and many of the projected titles, being of purely regional interest, will probably have difficulty earning out their costs of production. The play, for example, has yet to sell five hundred copies.
Does it really matter? Well, yes and no. The realist within me says, “Of course it matters. You can’t play if you can’t pay.” The less pragmatic individual within me says, “Look
, the experiments are worth trying if only for what new lessons can be learned from them, and for the fun we’ll have in the doing.”
We’ll see. I can’t resist the notion, though, that a fitting initiation of our twenty-first year is not the continual repetitious application of a so far successful formula, but putting what we’ve learned so far to work on a clean slate.
BEW
FOXFIRE—WHAT IS IT?
For years, readers have written us asking for information as to just what the organic substance foxfire is and how to find it. Now, finally, we think we have some information that is solid enough to pass on.
This chapter has two parts. The first is an explanation of its botanical characteristics—the what is it and why does it glow? It was written by Curt Haban, a high school senior at our school, as a research paper for a college English class.
The second is an interview with Clyde Hollifield who lives with his wife, Adrianne, in the mountains of North Carolina near Old Fort. Together, they have acquired a reputation in the region not only as puppeteers who provide quality entertainment for public elementary school audiences, but also as people who occasionally, in special circumstances, put on “light shows” at night with foxfire, and who appreciate more fully than most its almost supernatural qualities.
MUSHROOMS THAT GLOW
Down through the ages, glowing plants have been wrapped in superstition, associated with witches’ brews, sorcerers, and little elfin people, and linked to magic and religion. It is quite natural that these plants that reveal no roots or leaves and seemingly pop up out of the ground overnight and exhibit so many other strange qualities be treated with awe and wonder.
Foxfire is one of these fascinations. The book Ingenious Kingdom uses a description which states, “Imagine entering a secluded forest glen on a moonless night and finding mushrooms glowing in their own eerie light.”1 An author of Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia ponders the same qualities, writing, “On rainy nights, they glow through the dark forest in a most eerie manner. One could easily picture elfin creatures dancing in the glim, their king and queen, perched on the largest and brightest mushrooms, ordering tricks to be played on human beings. The sudden appearance of a perfect ring of mushrooms in a open field would not be difficult to interpret as the scene of a fairy carnival the night before.”2
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