by James Still
I had my noggin inside one book or another throughout my year at Vanderbilt. Professor Edwin Mims picked the courses for me, which did not include one of his own. I did attend his lectures on the subject of evolution—the “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, being a sizzling issue of the day. At term’s end I presented my thesis for his approval and signature, and he said he would sign it after Dr. Curry and Professor Ransom affixed theirs. Mims did accordingly, without riffling a page. In a lecture at Alumni Hall, he introduced me to the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Mims had recently published The Advancing South, which was held in considerable disregard by some faculty members. They would shortly offset it with a publication of their own.
The “Fugitives” of Vanderbilt University were on the verge of publishing I’ll Take My Stand, a manifesto on Jeffersonian agrarianism that presented a sardonic view of industrial society (and that over the past seventy years has built up a literature of its own). Those present read their chapters to us. Robert Penn Warren, who later recanted his part, was at Oxford University, and Andrew Lytle was at nearby Sewanee University. Lytle read a play to us, not his contribution to the book. John Crowe Ransom with his book The New Criticism inaugurated a method for closely reading poetic texts that caught hold in English departments here and abroad. Ransom was one of the great teachers, according to the periodical The American Scholar. Quiet, kindly, a Southern gentleman of the old school, he stretched our imaginations beyond the subject at hand, which happened to be “The English Novel.”
During the first week in the American Literature class, Dr. John Donald Wade tested our familiarity with the authors of merit from the Civil War forward. I made a perfect score. Nobody else managed a passing grade. Dr. Wade called me to his office the next day, told me he was now my advisor, and said, “You don’t have to bother with my class. Just drop in once in awhile and learn what we’re up to.” I took him at his word. My contribution to The History of American Literature, the text that the class composed, was the chapters on Cotton and Increase Mather. Some twenty years later, when Katherine Ann Porter told me she was writing about the Mathers, I was prepared to discuss the subject.
The Chaucer class under Dr. Walter Clyde Curry, as we would say here, was a “horse.” I attended it with fear and trembling, as I suspect did others, and yet it was the most rewarding class of all. I once calculated that I spent seventeen hours in preparation for each of the two classes per week. And I chose to write my thesis under Dr. Curry’s direction: “The Function of Dreams and Visions in the Middle English Romances.” Why, given a choice, did I opt to do a thesis under this strictest of professors, who was unrelenting and a perfectionist, and who some said was cruel? Why did I select a subject that required overnight learning to read Middle English and wading through more than one hundred volumes of the Early English Text Society? Dr. Curry read each section of the thesis as I presented it to him during the year, yet gave no suggestions, never the slightest hint that I was doing acceptable work. At school’s end he remarked to me in class, “From where you started, you have made more progress than anybody in the course.” But how far did I get? I was never called for orals or to defend my thesis. The professor’s wife wrote to me at a later date after reading a story of mine and added the comment, “I understand that while you were at Vanderbilt you did not have a course under my husband.”
Shortly after I arrived at Vanderbilt, I spent a weekend in Wilder, Tennessee, where a strike had been in progress for more than a year. I had gone to this benighted mine camp along with two other Vanderbilt students to deliver a truckload of food and clothing collected in Nashville for the strikers. I almost rode in the truck with Barney Graham, who later was to lose his life in the cause. Barney thought it an unnecessary risk, as he was subject to being hijacked.
We found the people drawn and pale from malnourishment, though their resolve was strong and unshaken. They were held together by their common misery. The town was divided, the scabs living in the camp houses on one side, the strikers on the other. There was a “dead line,” and a person crossed it at his peril. On the strikers’ side, the water and electricity were cut off. It was my first inkling that folk could starve to death in the United States of America in plain view of a largely indifferent populace. At that time the Red Cross had not yet allowed flour to be distributed to these people.
I lodged in the home of Jim Crownover, president of the union that year, and caught “thrush,” an infection of the mouth, from which his children were suffering. We attended a gathering at one of the homes after dark, blowing out the light before leaving to avoid providing a ready target for a sharpshooter. Arriving men deposited pistols, rifles, and shotguns on a bed. The conversation was as gloomy as the light shed by a coal-oil lamp. When the meeting was over a banjo-picker provided music for a bit of square dancing.
Until the spring of 1930, when my benefactor increased my stipend a bit, my two meals a day consisted of a ten-cent bowl of cereal in the morning and a thirty-five-cent supper at a Nashville boardinghouse. I lived in the home of a widow at 1913 Broad Street, the only roomer in a house of heavy mahogany furniture and drawn curtains and silence. The widow considered it an aberration that I insisted on a hot bath every day. I blew the speckles of soot from the railroad yards off my pillow at night. The widow’s children were adults, rarely encountered. The son operated a nightclub by the river; the daughter, probably in her late twenties, had some sort of night work, presumably at the club. The few times I passed the daughter in the hall she was swathed in mink and her “Night in Paris” perfume lingered after. She never spoke. The nightclub burned in March, the son in it. I never set eyes on the widow again. I pushed the rent money under her door when due.
In December 1929, en route to Florida, Mr. Loomis stopped by Nashville and had me to lunch. It was raining, and he inquired, “Have you no raincoat?” Instead of saying no, I skirted the question with, “You said you would make it possible, not easy.” Although he didn’t provide the coat—I believe he forgot about it as we talked—he seemed impressed enough with my progress to mention staking me to another year in school so I might learn something practical with earning possibilities. He chose this time the library school of the University of Illinois. I had never considered being a librarian, yet the Depression was still with us, and library work was something to do. A force-put, as we say.
After a year at Illinois I had earned three diplomas; I had graduated three times in the same pair of shoes. And I had no prospects for employment. First, I applied to the Library of Congress for work in their reference division—they waited three years to suggest an interview. I was ashamed to go home to Alabama. I tried the Civilian Conservation Corps. I attempted selling Bibles in Lee County, Mississippi, for Nashville’s Southwestern Publishers. I picked cotton in Texas. I recollect a hungry night atop a lumber pile in Shreveport, Louisiana. I walked, thumbed, and rode the rails. An open freight car I jumped into as it departed a station bore a contingent of World War I veterans on the way to join the Bonus Army in Washington, D.C. I tried Sears, Roebuck in Atlanta, and I signed up with an employment agency. When I asked the boss of a stove foundry in Rome, Georgia, for a job, he burst into laughter. Nothing worked.
In Nashville I looked up Don West, a former classmate who at that time was preparing for the ministry. He informed me that he and his wife would be conducting vacation Bible schools in Knott County, Kentucky, during July and August 1931. He invited me to join his son-in-law, Jack Adams, in organizing a recreational program at three sites, creating three Boy Scout troops and three baseball teams. As a volunteer. So it came it be. We camped and played ball all summer, and I became enamored with the forested mountains, the valleys and hollows of this backwoods country, and with the independent and forthright folk. I began toying with the notion of moving into an abandoned log house and of trying my hand at writing. Then, the Hindman Settlement School at the forks of Troublesome Creek offered me the job of librarian, again as a volunteer—room, board, and laundry furnishe
d. At that time the school was in severe financial straits.
Don West departed, and I was not to see him again for many years. He went on to found Highlander Folk School with a partner near Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they trained blacks and whites in social awareness and union organization. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks were among his students. West headed the National Miners Union in Harlan County, Kentucky, during the “mine wars” and suffered every indignity—jail, beatings, maiming, and visits from the Ku Klux Klan. When the Freedom of Information Act was passed and he had access to FBI files, West learned that his record covered more than four hundred pages. J. Edgar Hoover had stayed on his trail. Jack Adams joined the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and died in a trench in Spain.
Founded in 1901 by two Kentucky women, graduates of Wellesley College, the Hindman Settlement School evolved from a summer session in a pitched tent to eventually feature eight buildings at Hindman, the county seat. The instructors were mostly Wellesley graduates. Men on the Hindman Settlement School staff were usually locals. The students were drawn from adjoining counties and were rigidly selected. This boarding school could accommodate up to one hundred students, and there was no tuition. Hindman Settlement School was not church-related. Students worked in the vegetable garden or dairy, or they contributed to the upkeep of grounds and buildings. Outstanding graduates sometimes won scholarships for Wellesley and Harvard, though most students continued their education at Berea College. A member of the Hindman Settlement School’s first graduating class, Josiah Combs, obtained a doctorate at the Sorbonne in France.
Hindman was a village of some two hundred souls then, with a single blacktop road that originated in Hazard in Perry County and terminated abruptly in midtown at the creek bank where a bridge had washed out. Until another bridge was in place, a person had to walk a plank during low-water or resort to a jumping pole when there was a “tide.” You could cash a check in Hindman at 4:00 A.M., as the cashier was an early riser; and you could call for mail at midnight, as the postmaster was an insomniac. I was assigned Box 13 because nobody else would have it. I had come to the “jumping-off place.” The first week I witnessed a fatal shooting and admitted the fact, whereas several bystanders would not. There followed warnings to stay out of town, a court trial (which was an embarrassment to the school), and a sense of being in the “doghouse.” The murderer, sent to the penitentiary by my testimony, was pardoned and came to see me–an encounter too complicated to relate here. He lost his life shortly after in a shoot-out.
I remained at the Hindman Settlement School for six years. The library was excellent, the students were eager, and the staff was highly motivated. Aware that many one-room schools in the county were without access to a library, I began spending one day a week–my own undertaking-walking from school to school with a carton of children’s books on my shoulder; I would change the collections in these schools every two weeks. I could serve only four schools in this manner. Often as I approached a school I would hear the cry, “Here comes the book boy.” My first three years at the Hindman Settlement School I received no salary; however, the Depression waning, the school paid me a few dollars for the next three years. Averaged out, I worked six years for six cents a day. One summer I served as a social worker for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), and this experience sparked my novel River of Earth.
I began to take writing seriously rather suddenly when I was twenty-six. First came poems, which soon started appearing in national periodicals (Atlantic, Yale Review, Nation, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others) and were collected as my first book, Hounds on the Mountain, issued by Viking Press in 1937. The few dollars I earned kept me in razor blades, socks, and other necessities. I took up the short story, and my earliest appeared in the Atlantic. Several were chosen for the O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories–one winning an award–and for Best American Short Stories in the years following. Martha Foley, editor of the latter, commented: “A delight to read are James Still’s warm-hearted stories of his Kentucky neighbors whom he depicts in an English language as unspoiled as when Chaucer and the Elizabethan first made it into glorious literature.” A heady encomium for a novice.
I recall distinctly the Saturday morning I began writing a novel in the storeroom of the high school. I always retreated there for my one-hour break during the school day and on Saturdays when my duties allowed. The principal was to remark, “He goes in, bolts the door, and only God knows what he does in there.” I began writing River of Earth. It was time to move on.
On a day in June 1939, I moved nine miles over a wagon road and two miles up a creek bed to a two-story log house in an area of the Cumberlands known in pioneer days as the Big Brush. Erected in 1837 by immigrants from the Black Forest of Germany, the house is the birthplace of the noted dulcimer maker Jethro Amburgey, whose instruments nowadays are sought by collectors. (A mile away once lived Edward Thomas, whose dulcimers are rarer yet.) The dwelling faces east, bounded on one side by Dead Mare Branch and on the other by Wolfpen Creek. Wooded mountains rise before and aft. Mine was to be a domain of thirty-one acres, once a farm, now long lain fallow. I had found a home. I marked the day by an observation in a notebook: “A pair of black-and-white warblers teetered along the banks of Dead Mare and minnows riffled the glassy pools. Partridges called in the water meadow, and from a cove sounded an occasional e-olee of a wood thrush. A rabbit flashed a tail in the wild flax.”
A hedge behind the house reached from Dead Mare to Wolfpen, a distance of some 150 yards. By count, thirty-seven varieties of shrubs and vines formed a wall dominated by sumac, blackberry, and sawbriar, and crowned by wild cherry, hawthorn, and crab apple. Anchoring the row was an aged oak, at whose foot during the first warm days of spring I was to gather edible morels, locally known as dry-land fish. Along the creek banks flourished wild mint. The high ground before the house was to become my yard, garden, and farm; it drained into a marsh where frogs bellowed in spring and where red-winged blackbirds frequented in summer. Swamp violets reached up through the sedge on foot-long stems. Partridges nested along the drier reaches and sometimes exploded from cover like a shotgun blast.
Save for three broken chairs and a small table, the house was bereft of furniture. The back door was painted green to ward off witches. I slept on an army cot and cooked on a two-burner coal-oil stove until I could gather other furnishings. My work-table was two stacked steamer trunks supporting a portable typewriter. A neighbor, when asked who had moved into the old log house, had replied, “We don’t know yet. A man person. We call him ‘the Man in the Bushes.’ ” I was reported to be ancient with a two-foot beard. A hermit shunning human contact.
The second week in June was late to start a garden and plant a field of corn; moreover, the signs of the zodiac were not auspicious. I planted nevertheless, and, as hard frosts held off until the middle of October, I had vegetables aplenty, both to eat and to store for winter. Four apple trees furnished fruit for eating, canning, and drying. Following local custom, in the fall I heaped cabbages, turnips, parsnips, and potatoes in mounds and covered them with layers of leaves and dirt. They were unearthed as needed (for those without cellars, this was the alternative). And come March, when cornstalks were ritually burned at the break of winter, I had my own stack to set afire and greet the spring.
Log houses are not as warm as reputed. Not mine at least. My first winter there, a February blizzard dipped many degrees below zero. I pushed my bed as close to the fire as I dared; I heated a rock, wrapped it in a towel, put it at my feet. I wondered how my neighbors fared, many of them in less sheltered quarters. Spring came, and there they were, without complaint.
Toward the end of March there came a warm spell. The meadow greened, and buckeye buds swelled. I heard an early whippoorwill. A wren began a nest under an eave, and frogs bellowed in the swamp. Then, overnight frost nipped the buds and silenced the frogs.
I acquired two stands of bees. I never left home overnight without “telling the bees�
�–folk wisdom had it they would otherwise swarm and depart. Common superstitions often have psychological reasons. This one I believe–never leave home without checking the hives. I acquired a cat, sawed a hole in a door so it could come and go at will. Snakes don’t linger where felines are. One day I rescued a ground squirrel–despite having been told never to take anything away from a cat. If you do, the superstition had it, the cat will bring you a snake. My cat brought me four snakes in due course. Superstition has its limitations: one night a dulcimer hanging from a nail began to play, however faintly, but a struck match revealed a granddaddy spider walking the strings.
Before World War II, I called for my mail once a week at Bern Smith’s store at the foot of Little Carr. After the war the mail arrived on horseback from Bath, named for the oldest Roman town in England. I became the unappointed “Mayor” of Bath in that both postmasters added to my mail any addressed to His Honor. When I went for necessities—coffee, sugar, salt—to Mal Gibson’s store, he informed me, “If you’re going to start hanging out at my place of business, you’re going to have to learn two things: to chew tobacco and tell lies.” Mal was a trickster. He had a joke on every customer, or was working on one. A daughter went North to attend a modeling school and married a Broadway producer. We saw photographs of her taken at Lake Arrowwood, the Claridge in London, and the George V in Paris. And I began to keep an ongoing record of a traditional kind of community that hardly exists anymore in Appalachia. The folk I knew there then were living in the nineteenth century with the twentieth century threatening. More entries in my notebooks involve Mal than any other person.
It was said of me that I had quit a good job and had gone to the backside of Nowhere and had sat down. Well, I did sit down to finish River of Earth and compose in leisurely fashion an occasional poem and short story. Yet, if you are digging your living out of the ground, there is little time for sitting. Along with farming and gardening, I began experiments with the wild strawberry and the wild violet, an attempt by natural selection to discover superior plants. I began a study of the leaf miner, a tiny insect living a varied and fascinating existence—there are some two thousand known varieties. My evenings were spent reading by lamplight, and the library of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute supplied by mail any book I wished to borrow. After selling a short story to the Saturday Evening Post, I began to buy books. I subscribed to periodicals I hoped to appear in. And there was the Sunday New York Times to cope with.
