Free Dimestore by Lee Smith Page B

Appalachian dialect I had grown up hearing as a child.
    This did not happen until I encountered James Still—all by myself, actually, perusing the
S
s in the Hollins College library.
    Here I found the beautiful and heartbreaking novel
River of Earth
, a kind of Appalachian
The Grapes of Wrath
chronicling the Baldridge family’s desperate struggle to survive when the mines close and the crops fail, familiar occurrences in Appalachian life. Theirs is a constant odyssey, always looking for something better someplace else—a better job, a better place to live, a promised land. As the mother says, “Forever moving, yon and back, setting down nowhere for good and all, searching for God knows what. Where are we expecting to draw up to?”
    At the end of the novel, I was astonished to read that the family was heading for—of all places!—
Grundy
.
    â€œI was born to dig coal,” Father said. “Somewhere they’s a mine working. I been hearing of a new mine farther than the head of Kentucky River, on yon side Pound Gap. Grundy, its name is . . .”
    I read this passage over and over. I simply could not believe that Grundy was in a novel! In print! Published! Then I finished reading
River of Earth
and burst into tears. Never had I been so moved by a book. In fact it didn’t seem like a book at all. That novel was as real to me as the chair I sat on, as the hollers I’d grown up among, as the voices of my kinfolk.
    Suddenly, lots of the things of my own life occurred to me for the first time as stories: my great-granddaddy’s “other family” in West Virginia; Hardware Breeding, who married his wife, Beulah, four times; how my Uncle Vern taught my daddy to drink good liquor in a Richmond hotel; how I got saved at the tent revival; John Hardin’s hanging in the courthouse square; how Petey Chaney rode the flood; the time Mike Holland and I went to the serpent-handling church in Jolo; the murder Daddy saw when he was a boy, out riding his little pony—and never told . . .
    I started to write these stories down. Many years later, I’m still at it. And it’s a funny thing: Though I have spent most of my working life in universities, though I live in piedmont North Carolina now and eat pasta and drive a Subaru, the stories that present themselves to me as worth the telling are often those somehow connected to that place and those people. The mountains that used to imprison me have become my chosen stalking ground.
    THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE James Still lived most of his life, in an old log house built in the 1800s between Wolfpen Creek and Dead Mare Branch near Wolfpen, accessible only by eight miles of dirt road and two miles of creek bed. Still was born into a farm family of five sisters and four brothers in Alabama in 1906; went to Lincoln Memorial University near Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, where he worked as a janitor in the library to earn his scholarship and discovered
Th
e Atlantic
magazine, which he read cover to cover, every issue. Later he would publish ten stories and several poems in the very magazine that he had read so carefully. He earned another bachelor’s degree in library science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and a master’s in English at Vanderbilt, but was still unable to get a job in the midst of the great Depression. After picking cotton and riding the rails, he came to Knott County, Kentucky, in 1932, where he finally found employment at the Hindman Settlement School, an association that would last for the rest of his long life. As the librarian, he carried books to people all over remote Knott County, working for room and board only. Eventually the school paid him $15 a month, and he began to sell his poems and stories to magazines nationwide. He also worked for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, traveling the county on foot, talking to everybody, writing their stories down in his ever-present