Out of the Mountains: Appalachian Stories

Triangulation

There is a process in navigation by which you locate an unknown point by forming a triangle between it—where you are standing now, for example—and two known points. From time to time, we use great events in history in this way. That was the year I got married and also the year of the great blackout. Where were you when the president was shot? When the towers fell?

The great events, the bombings and genocides, the assassinations and scandals in high places, tend to frighten us with our smallness, our vulnerability. We strain to regain equilibrium, some of us through prayer, some through political action, some by withdrawing to family or a circle of friends. Yet we are all always a part of it. It was history that drove people out of Northern Ireland to take their chances in the Appalachian Mountains of America. History that gave them the upper hand over those who had previously used those lands.

History and chance.

I imagine that the survival of my precise genetic material was ensured by a series of accidents: the dead branch of an old oak tree that fell and missed a man who was clearing fields for plowing—and he was one of my ancestors. A midwife who once washed her hands in cold water and homemade lye soap—and thus a woman and baby survived who were also my ancestors.

My father was discharged from the army for bad eyesight just before they changed the medical standards, and thus spent the Second World War in Akron, Ohio, working in an airplane factory rather than dying on the beaches at Normandy before I could be conceived. Behind him, in the mountains, the farmer who dodged the branch, the midwife with clean hands.

My father’s father’s family were short, dark people who didn’t keep a family tree and were perhaps part Melungeon, the southern mountain mixed-race group. My father’s mother’s family were lighter-colored, large people from long-established families in Lee County, Virginia. They were educated by the standards of the day, and it is said that my grandmother’s mother rode a horse, and that this demonstrated her pridefulness, and since pride goeth before a fall, it was no surprise to anyone when her husband ran off with the hired girl.

The children were divided over whose fault this was: my grandmother’s brothers said he was driven to it by her gentility, but my grandmother’s older sister blamed him. My grandmother herself, the baby girl, had been the delinquent’s favorite and the playmate of the teenaged hired girl. She was crushed to lose them, and, as she got older, to know that her family’s business was talked about by people up and down the Powell Valley. Her mother eventually remarried a roughhewn Mr. McPhee, and my grandmother had to share a bed with his large and not always clean daughters.

But the haughty woman held onto a nest egg and used it to send my grandmother to boarding school for a term. There my grandmother picked up ideas about gracious living and the world beyond the mountains. When she came home, she married my grandfather with his small, dark, unnamed ancestors. My grandfather himself was an up-and-coming man with plans for the future. He was a man who intended to go somewhere. He liked to say that a man who wants to go somewhere must go where they have somewhere for men who want to go somewhere to go. He took a job teaching school in Wise County, which was less populated and steeper than the farming valley where they had grown up. They lived in a cabin on a mountainside. My father was born there.

Here I begin to locate myself. I have been to Wise County. I used to spend summers with that grandmother. Her life coincided with enormous swathes of twentieth-century history. She lived during the time of both Russian revolutions, two world wars, and various struggles for and against empire. She was in the same age cohort as Pablo Picasso, Rosa Luxemburg, and Adolf Hitler. She was, especially late in life, a reader of books. And yet, as far as I know, she had no opinions on revolution or modern art or even war, except to express relief that her son didn’t have to fight. Did she simply believe that history was not for her? Was she too busy keeping house in that cabin to think of the world? She was still a teenager the first year of her marriage, living in a place called Bold Camp. She became pregnant. How could I ask that she be aware of Europe or Asia or even New York or California as she stood, on July 10, 1917, stirring the wash in a pot over an open fire, waiting for my grandfather to come home?

July 10, 1917 On the Attersee in Upper Austria

While, at that same moment, an artist is looking at a town on the far side of a large lake in Austria. The town is set against a hill raised and flattened by the lens of his spyglass, as if each little house were fastened to a coverlet that someone had pulled up and gently undulated. This is what Gustav Klimt, painter of patterns and sexual ecstasy, sees at this moment. He chuckles in delight at the flatness of it, although flatness isn’t the point, except in as far as the flatness creates the surface pattern he is always seeking.

Klimt loves pattern, and in winter he paints lovers and orgastic-eyed women pulsating in color, imbued with sensuality. In summer he paints landscapes, and this day, on the dock on the Attersee, he looks through his telescope and sees something new. He has always known! The world is made of pulsations of light and tiles of color, whether in the studio or on the hillside. He loves this, feels rapture in the quivering surface of the water, in the buzzing golden haze on the orchard, in the rooftops of the town.

He is an informed, modern man. He thanks God he is too old to be conscripted for the war. The war is foolishness, he says. It is the result of nationalism and anarchism and all the other isms that would suffocate beauty. Death comes soon enough, he says, thinking of his painting of people sleeping under a colorful quilt, and beside them, the death’s-head grinning, with his shroud of crosses, with his weapon ready. He comes soon enough, says Klimt. Why encourage him?

The goodness of life is what Klimt lives for. The goodness of life includes food, sex, summer on the lake, companionship around a bottle of wine, and, above all, this pulsation of light, these colors he will touch to his canvas with the tips of his brushes.

He will paint all morning, till he is hot and hungry and ready for some conversation. He will paint cropped edges and close focus, infini-tesimally distant trees, piled up like haystacks, like gumballs. Piled up like the slopes of the Appalachian Mountains that Emma Goldman sees from her train as it chugs through West Virginia, Kentucky, and southern Ohio. Not so far, as the crow flies, from where the mountainside looms over my grandmother’s shoulder.

July 10, 1917 The Most Dangerous Woman in America on Her Way to the Federal Penitentiary in Jefferson City, Missouri

Emma Goldman is on a train, watching America unroll, surprised by the darkness in the shadow of the mountains even though it is broad daylight. She loves train travel, the suspension of ordinary activities, the naps, the reading, the conversations with strangers. She enjoys her traveling companions, two young federal marshals who are escorting her to prison. She is eating a ham sandwich, and she has treated her guards to sandwiches too. Finished ahead of her, they have gone to smoke and left her unguarded. She especially likes the plump one, MacLeod. She would gladly have him on her side—but then, she wants everyone on her side.

She sees a small settlement along the river and a woman hanging up her wash. She wants her too! All the ones she can see, and the ones like my grandmother hidden from her in the folds of the mountains. She wants them all to enjoy the fruits of this splendid big country of big ideals and bad leaders. She is amazed by these mountains that fill her gaze: how near they seem. There is a river, there is the railroad track, there is the little line of houses, and then the sheer forested mountains. She rests her eyes in those dark folds of rich green just a hair’s-breadth from black. She feels sly: this is a little vacation, courtesy of the United States of Capitalism. This trip, she told the marshals, is a waste of the government’s money. Her smart lawyer Weinberger is filing a whole sheaf of papers about why she should be free to tell the world that this war is not against the Kaiser but in cahoots with the Kaiser, a war against the international working class. Well, that’s not what Weinberger will say to the judge; he has technical points, but she is confident that Weinberger will get her out of jail. She has great faith in Weinberger with his beautifully tailored overcoats and dove gray homburg hats, always with the brim perfectly rolled. She teases Weinberger about his vanity, but he is a good man, working for the cause in the way he can, which is not her way, but she is old enough now to see that there are many ways of struggling.

Weinberger says the trial was a farce. Of course the trial was a farce, she says, it is always a farce when the ruling class pretends to be fair to revolutionaries. This time it was their stand against conscription, the next time it will be something else. Any excuse to take them off the street. She minds less for herself than for Sasha, who has already lost so much to prison. She has lost weeks and days and overnights, but he has lost many, many years.

She is forty-eight years old, and sometimes her teeth hurt, and when they don’t hurt, her knees do. There is a balance, a trade-off, between what you lose and what you gain with age. She and Sasha are no longer lovers, but they are still good comrades. Her monthlies have ended, so she no longer has to travel with the rags, thank God—no washing them out at night in poor people’s houses and cheap hotel rooms and then looking for a place to dry them. She is thicker and slower than when she was twenty, but she has gained the wisdom to know that it is not only the destination but also the journey that matters.

She thinks it was not understanding the importance of the journey that led them to try to kill Frick. She and Sasha and the others wanted to make a bonfire of their lives to rouse the workers and create the future. They had hardly seen America, they barely spoke English, but, learning from the tactics of their comrades in Europe, they believed the workers’ revolution could be started by a single call to action, and they decided to bet everything on this one great action, this attentat, that would clear the clouded minds of the masses, make them understand who the enemy was.

She wonders now if they would have adjusted their tactics if they had talked to some American workers first. And poor Sasha, with all his years in prison and his bad English, she thinks he has probably still not talked to them.

Well, the American workers didn’t get the message. Not even the Amalgamated Union at Homestead for whom the blow was struck understood the attentat. Some argued that it even raised sympathy for Frick, the bloodsucker, who was revealed as a man a bullet could penetrate. Frick bleeding in his chair, murmuring, Spare the misguided young anarchist! And Sasha represented in the press with wild hair, wild eyes magnified behind his glasses, and the wild nose, of course, the rabid anti-Jewish American press and its noses like mushrooms! Gentle passionate Sasha portrayed as the monster, not Frick, the Baron of Homestead! Boss of the Pinkerton thugs!

And now Frick prospers in his old age, she thinks, collecting art. He uses the blood sweat from his workers’ brows to purchase madonnas with gold leaf in their hair. Well, let him live. Long live Frick. She’s glad Sasha didn’t assassinate him. She doesn’t have the stomach for killing anymore. Death breeds death, she thinks, gazing out at the mountains, feeling the hot wind. It is too easy to kill. Death breeds death, and life breeds life. Frick acted in his self-interest as we all do. What is needed is to expand that self-interest to include all of humanity, all of life. She would still give her life if called to, but she will no longer take someone else’s.

MacLeod lumbers back, a big boy, what they call in English a strawberry blonde, pink and yellow, with tender skin and neck rubbed red by his collar.

So, she says, once again I did not squeeze my fat body out the window and leap to freedom.

MacLeod grunts and settles in the seat facing her.

She says, You enjoyed your anarchist sandwich?

Yes. It was a good sandwich. Thank you.

She smiles. It bothers him that she is a regular person, like maybe his Aunt Sally. She says, You should work for the people instead of for the Carnegies and the Rockefellers.

I work for the United States, he says. That’s the people.

You only think so. You think you are working for the people of your country, but you are being tricked into working for the interests of the rich.

He snorts softly, a big draft horse of a boy.

She says, This is a waste of your government’s money, you know. I’m going straight back. And if I don’t, someone will take my place. You should be fighting for the working man, MacLeod, not dragging people of your own class to prison.

He says he’s just doing his job.

She laughs. He has told her he is from Ohio, from a farm. She looks at him and thinks of cows and plows and barns full of corn. She likes so much these real Americans. And I too, MacLeod! I am doing my job! I will convince everyone to join the struggle!

July 10, 1917 Bold Camp, Wise County

Meanwhile, my grandmother stands in front of the cabin where she has built a fire to do the wash. My grandfather has finished his term as schoolmaster. My grandmother is doing the best she can in a cabin worse than even the poorest farmhouse back in Lee County. She can make do as long as she keeps her eyes down, on the swirl of shirts, if she doesn’t let her eyes drift up the mountainside, which is in front of her, behind her, on all sides of her, so steep that it threatens to crush her. There is not another house in sight, and the houses just out of sight belong to people to whom she is a stranger. She knows the Bakers and the Robinsons and the others, and they have offered to help when the baby comes, but Mrs. Robinson and Mrs. Baker have hard, calloused hands and bake with cornmeal. They are not her mother or her sister.

Her loneliness has become a malevolent whisper about terrible, inexorable dissolution to come. She knows you are supposed to be glad about a baby. She knows that even today her husband is on the move, exploring the coal-company towns where there are jobs for a man like him. She even liked this cabin well enough in the spring, when they first came. It was like a playhouse then with its raw wood walls, its board floors. But then her body began to swell up with terrors.

And now she hates how the mountainside falls into shadow as soon as noon has passed. There is not enough sun for a good garden. She concentrates on the odor of blueing in the wash, which blots out the smell of the trees. She can see a sliver of sky above and the green, sharp inclines that she would swear are creeping closer. She has this idea the mountains are watching, and if she makes very small movements, there is a chance that the malevolent powers won’t take away everything.

The baby has shortened her breath, caused her back to ache. A great wall seems to have risen up between her and the future. She thinks she’s not going to get out of this alive.

February 6, 1918 Death Apprehends the Artist

My grandmother thinks she is going to die, but she has more than sixty years ahead of her. Klimt, on the other hand, is struck down a few months later at the height of his powers. Is this all? thinks Klimt. It is such a surprise, the blow that leaves his left side paralyzed. Oddly, the stroke has a resemblance to the conception of a new work: a flash of white light, a falling into. And this thing, like his work, demands all his attention. He doesn’t rail against what is before him, because he is so absorbed in it. It lacks the grinning personality of the death’s-head he painted. This thing moves almost imperceptibly but constantly toward him. It fills the door, hides the ceiling. It is an enormous, silent, yellow block. Sometimes it pulsates slowly to orange. He tries to blink, to clear his eyes, but it fills everything, this great congealed color. As it approaches, it becomes paler, at once transparent and as massive as a mountain. As abstract and as concrete as his own hand.

Which he uses to reach for it, spreading his fingers as if they were brushes. He would speak to it, but there are no words. With his good hand he sketches it in the air as it approaches. Half painting, half swimming, he reaches for it.

February 6, 1918 The Anarchist Begins to Serve Her Sentence

Emma Goldman’s first trip to the federal penitentiary was a vacation compared to this. She believed correctly that Weinberger would get them a new trial, but she failed to look beyond the second trial, which of course they lost also. A person knows, she thinks, and yet a person doesn’t know. This time she will be staying, at least until they figure out how to throw her out of the country. This time, instead of the warden greeting her at the gate, she encounters only sleepy-eyed hirelings. This time, they have done the things they refrained from doing the first time: shaved her head, stripped her and lifted her naked breasts to make sure she isn’t hiding anything in the crease underneath. They’ve probed her privates.

At first she tried to make them talk to her: "So, you think I might be carrying a gun up my tuchas?"

But they don’t react. They don’t shove, they don’t shout, they only give orders. They move her from place to place, with each wait longer and longer. This is the longest wait of all. She sits in the irritating, stiff canvas dress, towel and blanket folded on her lap. There are no windows and only one lightbulb in a cage far higher than she could ever reach. There is also a cage over the small glass hole in the door. She reminds herself that even though she is alone, she is certainly watched. She tries to keep her back straight.

The walls seem remarkably close, the door unutterably thick. Carnegie and Frick would be pleased to know their steel doors imprison her. She tries to cheer herself with a little irony, but is too cold and tired. She feels the weight of Frick’s doors and girders. She has been in jail many times, but it is as if this is the first time she ever noticed the thickness of the doors.

She tries poetry, quotes Blake, who saw visions and hated the way capitalism turned men into machines: And was Jerusalem builded here / Among these dark Satanic Mills? But