The Road Back

STAYING AND LEAVING A Symposium on the Appalachian Experience Betty James . . . Charles Counts . . . Jim Miller Loyal Jones The Road Back by BETTY PAYNE JAMES ". . . He saw now that yon can't go home again—not ever, there was no road back." Thomas Wolfe. You Can't Go Home Again Yet for those of us who belong truly to the mountains, there is always the homegoing . Inevitable, inescapable, our sense of belonging to that time-caught landscape draws us, in our separation from it, to some continual and certain knowledge of return. Leaving school, the majority of us must migrate to seek work in cities and towns along a perimeter of the Appalachian range. Yet as we drive to and from work on the crowded freeways of Atlanta, Knoxville, Washington, Cincinnati, pressing into the urban environment of suburbia, learning to speak a language not really our own as though we are acquiring a facility for French or Italian, the awareness of ourselves and what we truly are rises and falls within us like the seasons ebbing and waning upon the hillsides in valleys we have unwillingly left behind. And so, inevitably, we go home. Amateurs at first, we return armed only with the credentials of an educative process which has not taught us the primary essential for remaining. Nothing in our college training teaches us how to survive in an area so economically depressed that the average or better-than-average jobs for which college has prepared us are part and parcel of an entrenched socio-political patronage system, doled out like plums. Tenaciously , because our resolve is fixed to stay, we try any job that we can find. Gradually, that tenacity wears down under a pressure of dissapointment and financial leverage, and many of us are forced to retreat again to the outside, re-assuming the somewhat awkward foreign identities which we had earlier acquired and hoped to leave behind going home. What polish we tend to acquire then, 38 we displaced Appalachians! What a flair we develop for assimilating cultural traits not really natural to us. We leam to laugh more easily, to speak more freely, to respond to strangers with casual informality, to re-gait our walking to a sidewalk pace. How often we learn to give over our innate sense of privacy and unique pride of isolation to the "group effort" of those firms and surburban communities in which we are shocked to discover ourselves hedged by economic necessity. Eventually, the more stubborn among us try again to go home. These determined home-goings tend to become easier with experience. Here we come along interstates and winding mountain highways crowded by coal trucks, pulling U-Haul trailers loaded with books, several rather good pieces of furniture, automatic washers, TVs, a good guitar, some tastefully framed inexpensive original prints, nice clothing, Portugese cooking utensils, and hand-crafted mugs. These are not our only acquisitions from the outside, but they are integral to us now, and we bring them back with us in our return as natural new outgrowths of our old selves. Sometimes civilization has encroached with unexpected niceties during our absences . Occasionally, the muddy or dusty backroads of our former homes have been paved. Sometimes the roads have opened the area to industry, bringing in people with strange names, making our own returns less noticeable. For we are different now. We act strangely, we speak oddly. Our old friends and neighbors are careful when they talk with us. Even our parents and relatives have a tendency to find something askew or almost foreign in much of our behavior. Made uneasy by their uneasiness , we react brusquely or we withdraw slightly, but we stay. This time (or the next time), with our additional experience and our attitudes of casual assurance and efficiency, with our better knowledge of the approach required in finding employment, we are given jobs as Social Worker II, guidance counselors, environmental specialists. Many of us have completed graduate degrees. We are geared to overachievement. This time, we get the jobs and we stay, only to discover, in many instances, that we have gradually become out of step with the rhythm of our own place. Sensing...