She Walks These Hills (review)

Kathryn Stripling Byer. "I hoe/this earth until I think of nothing/but the beans I will string/the sweet corn I will grind into meal." Coal was still king in 1980 when these verses were first collected, and many of the poems bear the mark of that dominance. In "3 A.M. Train," "it seems," to Gail Amburgey, "as though/the railroad cars/are loading up souls/along with the coal./Souls of dead miners that owe their essence/to that life-giving cinder." Russell Maraño describes "Flora," "Husband killed by company mines,/evicted from company house." In "The Last Unmined Vein," Lee Howard writes "Now my daddy and me/we used to dig a little coal/out of that vein across the bottom." Like Jean Ritchie's song "Black Waters," these poems have lost none of their power now that King Coal has been dethroned. Instead their power is heightened because the terrible destruction wreaked by coal has proven to be for naught. Old Wounds, New Words is a tribute to the Appalachian Poetry Project, to the ninety-one poets who contributed, and to the Jesse Stuart Foundation which published the collection in a handsome paperback edition. Yet as Gurney Norman notes in his dedication, the book is also a tribute "to the twenty million people of the Appalachian Region of North America." As George Ella Lyon carefully explains in the introduction , "Through intense selectivity in imagery, in rhythm, in sound, and in word, poetry calls forth value; its light shines on the few things chosen till they become luminous, radiating a truth long locked within." Old Wounds, New Words shines the light of truth on the people and places of Appalachia. —Judi Jennings Sharyn McCrumb. She Walks These Hills. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994. 334 pages. $21.00. Sharyn McCrumb's "ballad" books get better and better. The third in the series, She Walks These Hills, draws on legend, research, and the real and mystical journeys of a book full of colorful characters. A city-bred graduate student, Jeremy Cobb, attempts to complete a scholarly journey, to trace the trail of Katie Wyler, unaware that Katie's spirit is still out there with him, still trying to get home. Hiram Sorley, a sixty-five-year-old escaped convict suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome (which means he's permanently, mentally, stuck in the year 1965) is also trying to come home; his path crisscrosses with those of Jeremy Cobb and Katie Wyler, and in the process "Harm" becomes a folk hero. 62 Sheriff Spencer Arrowood also has to deal with murder, a fotchedon deejay who stirs the stew, a female deputy out to prove her worth by capturing Hiram, and the rest of the tangled web Sharyn McCrumb weaves against an authentic East Tennessee backdrop. Yet, within all the action, McCrumb opens chapter eight with a 2,000 year geology lesson: "Mountains, too, have a lineage. That spine of towering rocks that rises in Georgia and ends with the sea in Nova Scotia, the Appalachian Mountains have long-lost kinfolk on the other side of the Atlantic. The bloodline that marks that kinship is a vein of green mineral called serpentine that snakes an intermittent trail from Georgia to Newfoundland, then appears again in the western extremities of the Caldonides in Ireland . From there the traces stretch through Scotiand, Wales, and England , turning northward through the Shetland Islands, witii a branch touching Greenland, and another line crossing Scandinavia to end in the Arctic Circle. "Perhaps," concludes McCrumb, "when the pioneer descendants of those ancient Celts halted their covered wagons, looked up at the green mountains of Appalachia and felt at home, they were more right than they knew." Even a "ballad" series, in the hands of Sharyn McCrumb, becomes an encyclopedia of Appalachian history, folklore, geology, and mythology , couched under the genre of "mystery." McCrumb is doing for Appalachia what Tony Hillerman does for the Southwest, teaching history and culture to readers who'd never venture near a volume labeled as such. McCrumb dedicates her latest book to Gurney Norman, "the fox on the run," and prefaces the novel with James Still's poem "Heritage...