No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS Review Don West. No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems. Edited by Jeff Biggers and George Brosi. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 2004. 227 pages with an index and photos. Hardback. $55. Trade paperback. $25.00. I love you who toil In the dirt And factories And mines— You whose skin is ebony From a tropical sun And my own bleached brothers . . . Oh, my South My cold-blooded South With a Negro's blood Smeared over your mouth You have drunk poison And it turns you mad . . . From "My South" by Don West (1940) I live in Huntington, West Virginia, and the other day, a ten-yearold told me that her friends had photos of Don West in their living room. Clearly, Don West is still an icon to some people, primarily because of his commitment to ordinary people. Born in 1906, West was the eldest son of a farming family in the Georgia mountains, and along the way to his death in 1992, he worked as a preacher, an educator, a farmer, a miner, and an organizer. All along, however, he was always a poet who helped people join to celebrate and change their worlds, and his life's work has helped formulate how Appalachians—and southerners—have come to think about themselves. Yet his commitment to communication/rather than publication, with working class audiences and his dedicated purposes 93 have made his varied writings hard for some people to appreciate. As a result, West's words are now more felt than known, and his light has dimmed on the horizon. The time for recuperation has come. No Lonesome Road gathers key components of his writing and alerts us to his long fight for the traditional ethics of radicalism in Appalachia and America. But who is "us"? The book is published by the University of Illinois Press, which is, in part, dedicated to scholarship about American labor. Would West have squirmed to have his writing so walled? Maybe, but"No Lonesome Road stands to awaken a new readership to West's work, and to help readers to trace his connections to other movements and people throughout the 20th century who fought and fight for literature that matters, cultural integrity, and social justice. To orient readers, the editors of the collection—Jeff Biggers and George Brosi—provide essential context for West's work. Before each of West's pieces, an editors' note explains where and when it was published. Moreover, footnotes are provided to help readers engage leftist and Appalachian history. To read No Lonesome Road is to explore how one man manifested his belief in people and their capacity for change from 1932-1992. The book begins with Biggers's thirty-five page biography, which clarifies the basic facts of West's life. Therein, Biggers seeks to provide a framework so removed readers can feel West's power:'"West didn't wish to elevate his folk traditions—oral traditions of poetry, storytelling, songs, and even preaching—to a— 'higher art' .... Such a rendering would have transmuted the essence of 'folk' culture of 'living word'" (xxviii). And even then, West's writing calls for nuanced explications. Yet Biggers' urge to help readers understand West succumbs, at times, to a validation of West that becomes problematic when it revises history. The prose selections begin with West's introduction to Clods of Southern Earth (1946), which is an apt choice as this piece might well serve as West's ars poetica',and it is rhetorically brilliant crafted to reach readers who felt alienated by literature. In the next essay (from 1985), West tells a key childhood memory of overcoming fear, and the fourth essay in the collection (1986) recounts his relationship with one of his mentors, Harry Harrison Kroll. With this introduction to West's self-vision, the seventeen prose pieces which follow come in chronological order from his master's thesis on Hindman Settlement School (1932) to his renunciation of copyright from his selected works 1930s, speaks out against fascism in the 1940s and McCarthyism in the 94 1950s, while speaking for interracial working-class unity—and argues for the implicit revolutionary nature of southern and mountain...