James Still: In His World

James Still: In His World John Egerton Lee Marshall Smith was a twenty-year-old sophomore at Hollins College near Roanoke, Virginia, in 1965 when she stumbled upon a book that changed forever the direction of her life. "I had gone to Hollins hoping to learn how to be a writer," she recalls. "But what was popular in fiction then was foreign to my experience as a girl growing up in Grundy, Virginia, in the coal fields of Appalachia." One day as she was browsing in the library, her interest was drawn to a writer named James Still, and in particular to his 1940 novel, River of Earth. Still had spent most of his adult life in and around the Hindman Settlement School in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Critics had praised his work, but the remoteness ofhis chosen residence had consigned him to obscurity. "We weren't told about him in our literature classes," Lee Smith recalls, "so I wasn't in the library looking for him—River ofEarth just fell into my hands, and I was galvanized by it. Here was the language I was born to, put down in the pages of a book, and it sounded so natural that I could hear my grandfather talking." In the climactic closing pages, she found this paragraph: "I was born to dig coal," Father said. "Somewheres they's a mine working. I been hearing of a new mine farther than the head o' Kentucky River, on yon side Pound Gap. Grundy, its name is.... Hit's a far piece to Grundy, three days' travel. Can't haul all our belongings . We'll sell and give away. We've got to begin over again. We've got to start from scratch." "When I read those words, I burst into tears," Smith recalls. "It was a revelation, a defining moment: to understand that your own life, your own place on earth, is worthy of literature." In the ensuing quarter of a century, Lee Smith's own works of fiction have brought her considerable visibility and stature in American letters. Since 1968, she has written nine novels, all of them set in the John Egerton, Nashville, Tennessee, a well-known Southern writer is currently being recognized and honored at the national level. One ofhis recent books is Speak Now Against the Day: Southern Voices in the Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement. Southern highlands, and today she is generally regarded as one of the region's finest contemporary novelists and teachers of creative writing. River ofEarth is a powerful novel about the nomadic odyssey of a Kentucky hill family in hard times, endlessly trudging back and forth from its tiny subsistence farm to a succession of grimy coal camps. The narrator is a young boy coming ofage in this family, feeling the constant tension between staying put and moving on. The book itself has a current as impelling as the creeks that flow all around the Baldridge family. That flow is also present in the words of Brother Sim Mobberly, from whose sermon comes the novel's theme and its title: I was borned in a ridge-pocket. I never seed the sun-ball withouten heisting my chin. My eyes were sot upon the hills from the beginning. Til I come upon the Word in this good Book, I used to think a mountain was the standingest object in the sight o' God.... These hills are jist dirt waves, washing through eternity. My brethren, they hain't a valley so low but what hit'll rise agin. They hain't a hill standing so proud but hit'll sink to the low ground o' sorrow. Oh, my children, where air we going on this mighty river of earth, a-borning, begetting, and a-dying—the living and the dead riding the waters? Where air it sweeping us? The Baldridges keep hoping that something better awaits them over the next mountain. And in the end, they turn east to find another coal mine at a place called Grundy—Lee Smith's place. As surely as Brack Baldridge, the father, led his family there, James Still's words led Lee Smith back there, a...