High Mountains Rising (22 page)

Ah like to ——— with diffr'nt huntin' spots. [“spearmint,” for “experiment”]

 

Don't let the man stand outside.———. [“Vitamin,” for “Invite him in”]

 

——— tard of this bad weather. [“Armageddon,” for “I'm a-getting”]

 

——— pa? He feelin' better? [“Anheuser,” for “And how's your”]

 

——— up, why dontcha grab me a beer? [“Sensuous,” for “Since you is”]

The puzzle not only distorts the mountaineers' pronunciation and grammar but also emphasizes stereotypical hillbilly concerns: hunting, drinking, weather, neighbors, and kin.
²

Sometimes the images come from the news media. Dan Rather of the CBS news program
Forty-eight Hours
invited viewers to take “a disturbing journey to a separate world close to home,” to Floyd County in eastern Kentucky. “What is it that keeps them [the residents] tied to a place that seems like something out of another country? Come along with us now for 48 hours to the isolated beauty of Appalachia, to hills and hollers most Americans have never seen and a life most Americans will never experience.”
³
Other images come from Hollywood in movies such as
Silence of the Lambs
(1991),
Cape Fear
(1991),
The Beverly Hillbillies
(1993),
Nell
(1994),
Fire Down Below
(1997), and
The Songcatcher
(2001).
⁴
Cable television's endless rebroadcasts of older films such as
Deliverance
(1972) and 1960s and 1970s television shows such as
The Beverly Hillbillies
(which was far more popular than the later movie),
The Andy Griffith Show, The Dukes of Hazard
, and
The Waltons
guarantee that today's viewers can grow up on a steady diet of the images that shaped their parents' and grandparents' understanding of the mountains.
⁵

Of course, mountaineers are not the only people who suffer from stereotypes. What about that big burly guy with a thick neck? Obviously a “dumb jock.” And the woman with the carefully applied but excessive makeup? The skateboarder with headphones draped around his neck? We create stereotypes by taking the characteristics of a few individuals we know and applying them to a whole group. Sometimes this process helps us make our way through the world in one piece. We cannot possibly know the driving record of every cabbie in New York City, but perhaps all it takes is one white-knuckle ride through Manhattan to convince us that
all
New York cabbies drive like maniacs and that it would be safer to walk. Similarly, we have acquired experience negotiating the social minefield of getting along with our peers. Before long, we can categorize people on sight as jocks, nerds, beautiful people, burnouts, gearheads, Greeks, townies, or whatever labels have evolved at various schools or in different neighborhoods.

Every stereotype has some basis in truth, but the danger comes when stereotypes make it easy to generalize and paint everyone with the same brush. Everyone knows some dumb jocks but also some smart athletes. Do examples of poverty, violence, illiteracy, inbreeding, and laziness exist in Appalachia? Certainly, but that does not mean the entire region should be characterized by such terms. The sociologists Kathleen Blee and Dwight Billings argue that many media representations “work by universalizing common stereotypes of hillbillies and implying that these images represent all that is essential about Appalachian peoples—black and white, straight and gay, rural and urban, rich and poor,” and they reduce “a complex regional society that is peopled by diverse groups to a set of simplistic caricatures.”
⁶
The analytical study of stereotypes teaches us that no people or place can
be described uniformly. The details—the specifics of who, what, when, and where—do matter. Stereotypes deceive us into seeing the world as black and white when we should be looking not only for the many shades of gray but also the entire palette of other colors.

However familiar we are with the act of stereotyping, to understand it we need to examine how the images came to be applied to the mountains. Let's consider two theories. First, Henry D. Shapiro has argued that the idea of Appalachia as a distinct region and culture came about when Americans outside the mountains felt a need to square the “otherness” of Appalachia, as described by visitors to the region, with their assumptions about the unified and homogeneous character of American civilization. Until the mid-nineteenth century, Americans typically regarded the Southern mountain region pretty much like other unexplored or undeveloped parts of the United States: worthy of study mostly for its geological features rather than for any human society that had developed there. By the 1870s, however, Americans began to see Appalachia differently. According to Shapiro, the writer Will Wallace Harney was “the first to assert that ‘otherness' which made of the mountainous portions of eight southern states a discrete region, in but not of America.”
⁷
Popular writers such as Mary Noailles Murfree and John Fox Jr. then put their stamp on the “local color” genre of fiction. Shapiro argues that this literary movement “emerged as a response to the existence of a substantial market for descriptive pieces which the readers of the new middle-class monthlies would find interesting.” Editors particularly sought topics that would provide “a perception of the peculiarity of life in the ‘little corners' of America.”
⁸
Readers gobbled up these stories. Murfree's pieces for
Atlantic Monthly
, collected in the volume
In the Tennessee Mountains
(1884), went through seventeen editions in two years and seven more by 1922.
⁹

What images did these local colorists produce of mountaineers and their society? Murfree had the mountaineers speak in dialect like, “I hev hearn tell ez how them thar boys rides thar horses over hyar ter the Settlemint nigh on ter every night in the week ter play kyerds.”
¹⁰
She described the men as tall and lanky, often with “an expression of settled melancholy on his face” and a “listless manner [that was] of stolidity, not of a studied calm.”
¹¹
Murfree described positive characteristics as well: “Their standard of morality and respectability could not be questioned; there had never been a man or a woman of the humble name who had given the others cause for shame;. . . they neither stole nor choused; they paid as they went, and asked no favors; they took no alms,—nay, they gave of their little!”
¹²
Given that Murfree depicted her characters as physically isolated from the rest of America, it is not surprising that the men spent their days feuding, drinking, and hunting while the women spun thread and wove clothes.
¹³

Whereas local color writers contributed their images to the reading public, Northern Protestant churches provided similar images to their congregations. By the mid-1880s, almost all Northern Protestant denominations had begun home missionary activities, using religion and education to “lift” the mountaineers out of their isolation and into the mainstream of American life. The Presbyterian Board of Home Missions wrote in 1886, “Religion and knowledge go hand in hand; churches and schools supplement and assist each other. . . . In pushing our missionary work into the South, we have struck another great mass of illiteracy, this time among the whites. . . . These hardy mountaineers are eager for schools.”
¹⁴
Shapiro argues that these and other Americans were dogged by a need to understand how this Appalachia fit into their understanding of modern America “as a unified and homogeneous national entity.” By and large these writers and church leaders saw “typical” American society as characterized by the more urban and northern or eastern culture in which they lived. The mountaineers' peculiarity could not be explained away by their living on some distant frontier or their being ethnically “inferior” people. As Shapiro puts it so directly, how could observers explain “the ‘deviance' of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, native-born Americans living in the present and within miles of the older centers of American civilization”?
¹⁵

By the turn of the twentieth century, they came to explain it by defining and accepting Appalachia as a non-American place, “a legitimately discrete region defined by a particular pattern of culture as well as by its location, and inhabited by a legitimately distinct population.”
¹⁶
William Goodell Frost, the president of Berea College in Kentucky, played a key role in this shift. He proposed the phrase “Appalachian America” to give the region a name of its own, and he called the mountaineers “our contemporary ancestors,” which cemented the idea of a homogeneous population in Appalachia.
¹⁷
Remember, this type of generalization must take place for stereotypes to arise.

Stepping back and looking at Henry Shapiro's theory, two points stand out. First, the stereotypes did not develop until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when American society seemed to have developed in noticeably different ways than had Appalachian society. In the 1780s, life around Chesapeake Bay did not differ all that much from life in the Blue Ridge. By the 1880s, the differences had grown to the degree that some people took notice, found them remarkable, and wrote about them in national publications. Second, people from outside the mountain region created and publicized the stereotypical images of Appalachia. Mary Noailles Murfree lived in Murfreesboro, a few dozen miles southeast of Nashville, whereas home missionaries and educators hailed from New York City, Philadelphia, and
other Northern locations.
¹⁸
The role of outsiders in Appalachia forms a common theme that runs through several chapters of this book; consider the role of coalmining, lumbering, and the federal government to name just a few. In Shapiro's analysis of stereotyping, the mountaineers themselves had little to say.

Research on upper East Tennessee in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveals a different process at work, however. These mountaineers were never cut off from the larger American society, never so isolated as to develop the characteristics described by the local color writers. Instead, differences began to appear within this population. The topography of the region—more open rolling valleys to the north and west, steeper mountains to the east and south—made movement and communication easier in some places than others. There developed two ways of seeing the world. Some who could travel more easily had an outward-looking perspective; for example, they tended to see their interests connected to regional markets and national issues. Others who had difficulty moving about developed a more inward-turning or local perspective; for example, these people tended to be more concerned with immediate neighbors and local matters.
¹⁹

By way of analogy, consider the people who read the
New York Times
, watch CNN, check out the NASDAQ online, or debate the Florida vote count in the 2000 presidential election. These folks have an outward-looking perspective. Then consider others who read the local paper and watch the local news, talk about the health of businesses downtown, or debate the outcomes of the school board and sheriff elections. These people have more of an inward-looking perspective. Of course everyone holds a mixture of these two views, but most tend to hold one perspective more than the other. Do the people with similar perspectives tend to stick together with others who hold comparable views? This began to occur in East Tennessee as the inhabitants developed self-perceptions of difference.

The stereotypes began to crystallize at midcentury when the better-connected outward-oriented inhabitants campaigned for the East Tennessee and Virginia Rail Road, which would allow farmers to reach new markets quickly and manufacturers to distribute their products more easily. One newspaper writer claimed that the railroad would “open out the hidden treasures of East Tennessee that have so long been buried for want of an outlet—and then will her citizens who have so long been bowed down, have all the facilities necessary to make them a happy and prosperous people.”
²⁰
The goal seemed so sensible and desirable that the railroad advocates came to see people who did not support their efforts (and who often lived in the less accessible areas and therefore would not be able to take advantage of the railroad) as being backward and ignorant. For example, the writer “C”
lamented the lack of support but thought it futile to print more facts because “we could multiply them without number but they would not be read, or if read many would prefer living in barbarism forever to putting forth one animated effort to secure them.”
²¹
The battle to fund and construct the railroad thus produced a clear sense of difference between these two groups.

Henry Shapiro correctly states that Mary Noailles Murfree played a key role in spreading the stereotypes to a national audience. But how did Murfree develop these images in the first place? Murfree had very limited exposure to mountaineers. She spent her summers from the ages of six to twenty-one (1856–70) at the mountain resort of Beersheba Springs, and she took one trip farther east to Maryville. “Beersheba and Maryville,” notes Murfree's biographer, “are barely in the Smoky Mountains, if at all, and she had known only those mountaineers who came often into contact with residents from the lowlands.”
²²

In other words, Murfree came into contact with mountaineers who lived in more accessible areas and who probably had a more outward-looking perspective, like the railroad advocates in upper East Tennessee who were, at precisely this time, criticizing their more remote and locally oriented neighbors as being backward. Imagine a prosperous farmer visiting Beersheba Springs and telling a young Mary Noailles Murfree about the state of his crops, the fair prices he obtained at distant markets, the railroad that made such sales possible, and, conceivably, the destitute mountaineers who had no such access to modern transportation. He himself was advancing toward a bright and prosperous future while others in his community were mired in a gloomy and primitive past. Perhaps Murfree remembered such stories when she sat down, in middle Tennessee, to write
In the Tennessee Mountains.
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