Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes

Up in the Country

Up in the Country Fred Hobson It is a strange destiny, Thomas Wolfe begins Look Homeward, Angel, that leads from England to Pennsylvania and down into the Carolinas. Or, in my case, a strange destiny (although, in fact, no stranger than any other, for all destinies are equallyimprobable) that in 1756 brought a Pennsylvania Quaker down the Valley of Virginia into the western Piedmont of North Carolina; and some forty years later brought a restless young ConnecticutYankee, a son of the Puritans , down from New Haven to Burke County (that part of it that later became Caldwell County), North Carolina, within sight of the Blue Ridge. The Quaker was my father's remote ancestor, who moved into the hills northwest ofthe Moravian settlement ofSalem (Winston was still more than a half-century away) and began a line of farmers and teachers, many of whom never left theYadkinValley. The Puritan was my mother's great-great-grandfather , Andrew Hull Tuttle, who in his travels through the Carolina hills met and married a farmer's daughter, Elizabeth McCall, and settled down on her father's fertile acres in a broad, green valley not far from Grandfather Mountain. He began a line of Methodist preachers and missionaries who, over the next century and a half, would venture as far away as China, usually (the preachers, that is, after 1890) after playingfootball and running trackwhile absorbingWesleyan theology at little Trinity College and its successor, Duke University. (Sturdy, red-headed, indomitable, the earlier Tuttles, more than any mortals I have known, embodied that Victorian ideal, "muscular ChristianitY:') These Tuttles went out from Caldwell County, but they always came back to the place "up in the country:' as they called it, for summer vacations, family reunions, and long hikes up Grandfather Mountain. In a number of cases, they came home to grow old and die and to be buried in the old cemetery on a high hill above Littlejohn Church. It is these families and the places they came to that I want to consider-for after nearly two centuries, the families and the places became essentially one. The two places,Yadkin County and Caldwell-neither particularly remarkable in the larger scheme of things-are some fifty miles apart, and neither is truly in the mountains but rather just at the place the mountains begin, each with a Up in the Country ~ 175 definingpeak-PilotMountain forYadkin,GrandfatherMountain for Caldwelljust across the county line. Yadkin, south and west of the river called Yadkin (meaning "valley of peace" in Cherokee, I was told-probably mistakenly-as a child, but because nothing ever happened there, that seemed reasonable enough), is the last county in North Carolina's northwestern Piedmont, just before rip-roaring and mountainous Wilkes, legendary home of moonshiners and stock car racers, including the man, Junior Johnson, whom Tom Wolfein a famous Esquire piece in 1965--designated "The Last American Hero." Caldwell County is farther south and west, some thirty miles south of Boone, eighty miles northeast of Asheville, and in somewhat higher hills. The counties , as I remember them, were as different as any two places so close could be. Or, rather, ofcourse, they probably were not different at all. It just seemed that way to me when I was a boy, living most ofmy life inYadkin County, but going up in the country for a week or two in the summer. Those summer interludes in Caldwell County are among the best memories I have. We stayed in the old Tuttle homestead, a large two-story frame house built in 1870, shortly after Benedict Marcus Tuttle came back from the war, and, in my childhood,presided overbyGreat-Uncle George-awiry, toothy octogenarian who almost alone among the Tuttles of his generation had not taken to the pulpit-and his wife, Aunt Jess, stern, patrician, bearing a strong facial resemblance, I thought, to the pictures of Franklin D. Roosevelt I had seen. In fact, the whole contingent of great-aunts and great-uncles up at Tuttlefields seemed-as I lookback-something ofa gerontocracy: Uncle John, a retired preacher in his eighties, always genial, always playing jokes and telling stories; Cuddin Rob, another retired preacher, even more a jokester; and Aunt Luley, unlike all the others because she was an outlander, from Cleveland, brought south by Cuddin Rob after he ventured north and married her. But most remarkable by far was Aunt Lelia, retired to Tuttlefields after forty years in China and another ten or fifteen traveling around...