The Balm of Gilead Tree by Robert Morgan (review)

Robert Morgan. The BaIm ofGilead Tree. Frankfort, Ky.: Gnomon, 1999. 344pp. $17.95. Robert Morgan is a master storyteller. In The Balm of Gilead Tree, a collection of ten new stories and seven previously published, Morgan crafts stories of hardship, danger, and disasters. The stories sweep across American history. The opening tale, "The Tracks of Chief de Soto," imagines a squaw's response to the arrival of the Spanish. The closing tale, "The Balm of Gilead Tree," follows a Vietnam veteran as he joins a crowd rushing to the scene of an airplane crash. In between, Morgan writes of runaways, rebel soldiers, floods, stone masons, migrating families, and divorce. And yet, the collection has a coherence: all are set in Appalachia, and each is a quiet story of the unexpected. There are no surprise endings, and although many have violent moments, these stories do not make the heart race. For Morgan, American history is a series of encounters between ordinary folks and extraordinary events. In "The Tracks of Chief de Soto," Morgan renders the cruelty and greed of the Spanish. And yet, the colonial encounter is not melodramatic, for Morgan. In the spare language of the squaw, he captures the ambiguous consequences of cultural crossings: "While I lay under the hair-face I thought of the corn that was still unplanted. Two more days and it would be too late for the half moon. The Blood Soil Field would be bare, and would then grow up in weeds. And next winter the grain binds would be empty. It seemed stranger than I can tell to be lying with a hair-face in the night, giving and receiving pleasure. But I ached because the cornfield was unplanted." In "Dark Corner," we also hear the thoughts of a young woman who finds the world strange. Her family has failed to make good on the promise ofboom times in Texas and decides to return to North Carolina. Poor and desperate, they are kicked off a train they've jumped and must walk the rest of the way. The father, wracked by pneumonia, will not make it. She thinks to herself, "When the worst things happen to you it's like you know how bad they are, but you don't quite feel it." In fact, Morgan's characters feel deeply, but they rarely make a show of their emotions. In one tale, a young woman married-off to an old man finds pleasure with a young man but remains devoted to caring for her husband's decaying body. We hear her argue against those who would condemn her, listing all she does for her husband, but we never hear her rant aloud. Morgan's stories are interior monologues, and the extraordinary events he chronicles are muted yet intensified because 71 we witness them through the minds of people who manage to survive. Morgan captures, without grotesque exaggerations, the patterns of Appalachian speech, and his stories tell an extraordinary history of the region as witnessed by ordinary people. —Stephanie Browner Groce, W. Todd. Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War, 1860-1870. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. 218 pages, illustrations, maps, tables and index. $28.00. For many years, East Tennessee has often been labeled as a stronghold of Unionist sentiment during the American Civil War. Regretfully, this view has suggested that little or no Confederate sentiment existed in the Tennessee mountains, or if it did, the "rebellion sentiment" could not have had much impact set amidst so many Unionists. W. Todd Groce's useful book, Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War, 1860-1870, offers a convincing and important analysis that once again undermines the idea that Appalachia was some type of Unionist monolith. Instead, we find in East Tennessee a region full of complex controversy that led to bloody fighting and bitter memory. In many respects, East Tennessee secessionists were what Daniel Crofts has termed "reluctant Confederates." Groce argues that these mountain rebels, many of whom had developed social and economic ties with Virginia and the Deep South, followed their home state out of the Union only after Abraham Lincoln's call for volunteers to suppress the...