Leicester Luminist Lighted Local Language and Lore

LECTURE Leicester Luminist Lighted Local Language and Lore___________________ Loyal Jones Loyal Jones presented these observations and memories for the annual Jim Wayne Miller Lecture at the Appalachian Writers Workshop, Hindman, Kentucky, July 2001 Alliteration is a literary device which calls us to attention, though it may not convey as much information as we would like. Jim Wayne Miller was from Leicester, North Carolina, pronounced Lee-cester by some natives. A luminist is an artist who studies the effects of light on colored objects. Of course, what is poetry—or any art—but the shedding of light on things? And what is a writer but one who absorbs and uses the stuff of his or her life? I chose this alliteration as part of my hope to shed a little more light on Jim Wayne's career. Jim Wayne and I were friends and colleagues for a good many years. We both studied English at Berea College (as did Jim's wife Mary Ellen), and we shared a lot of interests in the region. I inveigled Jim Wayne into teaching at the annual workshop in Appalachian Studies at Berea for nearly twenty years, and we worked together on editing Cratis Williams' Southern Mountain Speech and preparing its 63page "Glossary of Mountain Speech." While I was working on my book about Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who had also lived in Leicester, Jim volunteered to do some interviews for me with people he knew, and in the process he found out that his father had been sweet on one of Bascom's daughters. Jim used to open some of his poetry talks by singing Bascom's version of the ballad "Little Margaret," and then connecting the ballad tradition with the whole business of poetry. I also got Jim to do a wonderful talk on Appalachian humor at one of the festivals Billy Edd Wheeler and I hosted, and this talk is included in More Laughter In Appalachia. Over the years, he and I, sometimes with the ultimate raconteur, Cratis Williams, shared some of the world's best jokes, several that would have made Chaucer blush. I appreciated Jim's sense of humor as much as his poetic ability. 18 But of course these two things are related. Jim, quoting Arthur Koestler, compared humor to poetry. Humor is a "momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices." Poetry is the same thing, and metaphoric thinking is original thinking, Jim observed. And there is playfulness in both, as Jack Higgs, a great advocate of play, has probably told you a couple of times this week. Jim liked stories that said something about human nature. One of his favorite jokes was of the old man with the shrewish wife: One day the wife passes on and they prepare the coffin, put her in it, and pallbearers start with her to the church, but when they are going through the yard gate they bump the coffin against a post, and the old lady sits up. They carry her back in the house and she lives for another ten years. Finally, she passes on for sure. They get out the coffin, put her in it, and again the pallbearers start for the church. When they get near the gate, the old man cautions, "Now boys, watch out for that post." Another reflection on religion: A man staggers home from a knife fight, bleeding. He remembers a verse from the Bible, Ezekial 16:6, that's supposed to stop blood. He asks his wife to fetch the Bible, but she says, "Why, Robert, they ain't no Bible on the place." He says, "I've told you and told you to get one." She says, "Well, we never did need one until right now." Jim loved local language and found a lot of humor and a sort of common sense in overheard comments, such as one he attributed to Cormac McCarthy. Somebody asks McCarthy where a mutual acquaintance is and he replies, "I think he's dead, or maybe he's teaching English." Here are some misuses, or creative uses, of language which Jim collected: Commenting on a spell of cold weather a man mentions the "windshield factor." A woman talking...