This Side of the Mountain

This Side of the Mountain James Gage Many readers of Appalachian Heritage will know Mary Murfree's "Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove," which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (1878) and was included in her first volume of stories, In the Tennessee Mountains (1884). Scholars have long identified Murfree as the local colorisi who formulated many of the images which persist to this day of mountaineers and hillbilly culture. Of her premiere mountain woman, Mrs. Johns, Murfree writes, "She was tall and lank, and with such a face as one never sees except in these mountains." Murfree's southern highlanders are always different from her narrators and their presumed audience. More specifically, her mountaineers are culturally-debased descendants of Angles, Saxons and Scots, "with deeply sunken eyes and high cheekbones and ... settled expression^] of hopeless melancholy." Consider how similar are Chad Buford's mountain family in The Little Shepherd ofKingdom Come (1903), Emma Bell Miles's community in Spirit of the Mountains (1905), the Baldridges in James Still's River of Earth (1940), Gertie and Clovis Nevéis in The Dollmaker (1954). The photographs of Doris Ulmann. The War on Poverty. David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed (1989). There persists in the national consciousness a Southern Mountain Region populated by "yesterday's people," with no acknowledgement (other than the romance with Melugeons) of the black communities in East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Southeast Kentucky and West Virginia, or the multi-ethnic labor force in the coal industry—or Armenian peddlers. The pictures on this summer's front and back covers are from the eighteenth annual North Carolina International Folk Festival, Folkmoot USA, which took place in July, in Haywood County's Waynesville and Maggie Valley. Cloggers and contra groups from the Appalachian Region mixed in a colorful whirl of dancers and musicians from Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, France, India, Jordan, Mongolia, Paraguay, Togo and Venezuela. Mary Murfree could never have imagined such diversity just over the mountain from her fictional East Tennessee. Neither could she have imagined the energy, talents and diversity of experience among the more than seventy writers gathered this Summer at the Hindman (Kentucky) Settlement School for the twenty-fourth annual Appalachian Writers Workshop. With this issue, we are pleased to bring to our readers three papers which explore the novels of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, whose work Cratis Williams considered at "the vanguard of the new realism destined to stimulate a new way of looking at the mountaineer and his problems" (The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction, 1227). We are pleased as well to present new essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews of recent literature from around this region so rich in tradition yet bustling with activity and change. Trumpet Vine Voluntary garland of railroad trestles, it blares from telephone poles and blazons along fence posts in a burst of crimson horns a fanfare for buzzing bees and the 10:05. In the suburbs, they chop away at the creeping vine conquer and subdue it muffle the wild din. No more blossoms the color of sunset. No more clusters of orange stars. But you can't turn your back on a trumpet vine. In the hush of thick green fescue noiseless and controlled a flourish of ruddy constellations. — Nancy Compton Williams ...