This Side of the Mountain . . .

This Side of the Mountain Not long ago, a man who had returned to the mountains after years of living elsewhere decided to treat himself to a new house. He also decided that since the place would be his alone, it ought to fit his own desires and tastes. Accordingly , though the building he put up was standard cinder block, it didn't face the road, as was the universal custom, but instead looked, front porch and all, toward the back hillside. Not content with this unconventional arrangement, the fellow also painted his new house an unconventional bright color. I don't know whether or not he expected any reaction from his neighbors, but in any case that's what he got. People in the community began by laughing at the house, and then friends started avoiding the fellow, and finally matters became so serious that his relatives begged him to do something about the problem. The man wasn't happy about all this, of course, but finally he gave in, cutting a front door facing the road and ripping the porch off the back and moving it around to the opposite side of the house. And—though I don't know this for sure—he presumably gave the place a few coats of quieter paint. Even after making these changes, the man has continued to be known as "the fellow with the house." But his family has managed to work its way back into public esteem. This account comes from an essay by Charles E. Martin, a former teacher at Alice Lloyd College, in a provocative Thomas Parrish new collection called Sense of Place: American Regional Cultures (University Press of Kentucky). As Martin sees this situation, the people in the community wanted to control the builder of the house—that is, they wanted to limit the range of his individual expression— and the means they employed was "unarticulated threat to the social position of the family group." If family members became embarrassed enough, they would put irresistible pressure on the offending builder—and that was exactly what happened. A curious aspect of this story—to me, at least—is that it sounds un-Southern. I've known many people from all sorts of small towns across the region, and certainly in the Kentucky Blue Grass, with relatives and acquaintances who were wildly eccentric and yet, though perhaps condescended to at times, always found social acceptance. My own favorite was a man whose family had once packed him off to a state mental hospital for evaluation. After a brief stay he had been released with a favorable report, and from then on he took great delight, in any company, in declaring that he was the only person present who could produce irrefutable evidence of his sanity; he would reach into his pocket and pull out what I suppose was a bureaucratically unassailable certificate of mental health. Nobody ever bested him. It has always seemed to me, as well, that people in the mountains have tended to accept people with whatever kinds 3 of personalities they had. If so-and-so was "quiet turned, ' for instance, that was simply his own individual nature and not anything to be deplored. But this observation may be beside the point here. In his essay Martin comments that in Appalachia, traditionally, social stability has been maintained in good part by the "appearance of egalitarianism '— an "appearance" that clearly is far more important in the mountains than in the surrounding South, much of which always responded with a flutter to words like aristocracy. In other words, whatever the personality of the man who built the unconventional house, it was his behavior that brought on the trouble with his neighbors . An aristocratic, or quasi-aristocratic , or even crypto-aristocratic society can, I think, allow all kinds of conduct without feeling itself threatened in any way. In Appalachia, however, says Martin, "observable individualistic activity is still discouraged since the activities of the individual can frequently come in conflict with the concerns of the family group." (Actually, this comment is strikingly similar to some of Alexis de Tocqueville's observations about the entire United States a century and a...