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Foreword
- The University Press of Kentucky
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FOREWORD MOST ATTEMPTS at autobiography by native Appalachian folk, even retired schoolteachers with college degrees, fail to arouse reader interest. The writer, too often doubting the value of his own story, seeks protection in moral posturing and treats the reader to platitudes and commonplaces, or dilutes the account with generous servings of imitative "fine writing" that alienate the reader after a few pages. Rarely does one come upon a native writer with both a talent for telling a story and a genius for investing it with power. G.c. Jones is such a writer. Growing Up Hard in Harlan County, simply told but with subtlety and strength, despite its candor, is a celebration of Appalachian oral tradition. Jones-whose life spans the age of change in Harlan County, from the 1920s, when it was a thinly settled agrarian region in which styles of living had changed but little since settlement days, through the bloody coal wars of the 1930s, to the collapse of the coal industry in the 1950s-has given us, in the powerful and refreshing idiom of the people, a social and economic report as well as a folkloric history of life there. Social historians have documented what life was like in Harlan County when families lived at a comfortable subsistence level on mountain farms, made and sold moonshine whiskey, hunted and trapped for pelts, and gathered walnuts and herbs to transport in high-sided dragsleds over roads that lay in the beds of streams to stores at crossroads villages or to the muddy little town of Harlan itself to barter for cloth, shoes, salt, and hardware, and enough cash in hand to pay their taxes. The rapid growth of the coal industry, with its record of exciting booms and wrenching busts, attendant violence in the struggle of. miners to unionize, and corruption of public officials by operators, has been reported. The agonies of the Great Depression and the poverty left in the wake of the coal invii dustry's collapse, are subjects of common knowledge. G.c. Jones's straightforward, honest, and delightfully refreshing account of his experiencing this history, participating in the struggle, enjoying the excitement of change, and suffering through the violence and bloodshed , betrayal and corruption, brings the reader immediately into the midst of a shocking reality. Growing Up Hard in Harlan County moves with the speed of a cliff-hanger novel. but the narrative style is that of the teller of folktales. While Jones was a youngster driving his own team of "big blacks" across Pine Mountain, he and fellow teamsters swapped stories around campfires at night. It was here that he mastered the craft of storytelling, a craft that he perfected as a sailor in World War II, as a hobo, and as a genial host. His is an unselfconscious narrator. His keen mind, accurate memory, understanding, compassion , and sensitivity to his surroundings are brought together as one in his powerful story of pioneer self-reliance, courage, and triumph over terrifying adversity. The most refreshing aspects of his book are Jones's expansiveness of style without the irrelevancies that expansiveness invites, and his amplitude of language. He is a master of his medium. His account moves at a colloquial level and as familiarly as a fireside chat. Jones reports the "grub" that mountain people eat-corn pone, shucky beans, taters, sorghums, and dried apple stack cake. A glossary of the vocabulary of teamsters, one of our lost occupations, may be gathered from his account of his early life. He spins a tale in a living dialect so easily and charmingly that we marvel at the literary power of that dialect. Like his friend JoJo, Jones can "make a hand" at anything he wants to do. Rejected, driven out of his family, betrayed and buffeted by circumstances, he never once sinks into self-pity. He tells us that he is a "woods colt," but that knowledge does not damage his sense of worth, for in Appalachia one proves himself with his own individuality , ability, and shrewdness. Jones has the primal strength of the Appalachian pioneer. He has translated that strength inimitably into this candid autobiography, a first-hand account of what life was like in Harlan County during the most convulsive period in the history of Appalachia. CRATIS WILLIAMS viii ...