The Last Days of Big Grassy Fork (review)

Hunter James is a journalist who has written for the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other newspapers, as well as the author of books on subjects ranging from the civil rights struggle in Alabama to the rise and fall of Jim Bakker. A native of Winston-Salem and a descendant of its early Moravians, he decided in the late 1980s—when he was in his fifties—to leave behind big city journalism and life on the road in order to return to the old and somewhat dilapidated family farm he had inherited on the outskirts of his native city. The Last Days of Big Grassy Fork is his record—partly serious, often comic—of his attempt to restore that farm, all the while battling encroaching progress as the city of Winston-Salem grows closer year by year.

The author—part Thoreau, part John Crowe Ransom, part Wendell Berry—is, perhaps more than any of them, Mark Twain—or, more precisely, the self-deprecating, often hapless persona Twain often cultivated in his early autobiographical works. James can certainly laugh at himself and his forebears—at his grandfather's flying leap from a second-floor whorehouse window to a sturdy maple during the great Winston flood of 1916, at his own trials in renovating the old farmhouse, his attempt at the "controlled burning" of a field which gets out of hand and brings fire trucks screaming to the rescue, his venture into New Age politics, his desire to become a wine snob. He describes a wine-tasting tour in Germany with a group of teetotaling Moravians—James's version of Twain's "Innocents Abroad"—and then his own attempt to grow wine-worthy grapes in North Carolina's red clay: "They assured us that nature had conspired in some mystical way to bless our land with precisely the right amounts of rainfall, sunlight, soil diversity, and dark nights of the moon to transform our Piedmont countryside from a land that had known only the cultivation of tobacco—pernicious weed!—into a region soon to be acknowledged as one of the premier wine-producing regions of the world." After failures as a vintner, a horse-breeder, and a best-selling novelist, he concludes, "Was then my whole purpose in life to save the family homestead?" Even at that he often finds himself a failure: after he nearly destroys a part of the house in an attempt to remove old bricks, he hears "howls of loud, sneering laughter from the road, where people had stopped for a quick look at my doomed restoration project." But James's book isn't all hilarity. In between these comic episodes he includes

reflections both on the pious Moravians of the eighteenth century (he is author of a previous book on the Moravians) and, even more so, on "tobacco-stinking" Winston. He returns to the city in 1987, just as R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company—the industry that had defined Winston-Salem for a century—is about to move its corporate headquarters to Atlanta. In the early twentieth century Winston-Salem (after the nineteenth-century marriage of industrial Winston and the former Moravian village of Salem) had been the largest city in North Carolina (now it is fifth). Both Thomas Wolfe and W. J. Cash, writing about it in the 1920s and 1930s, had demeaned the town—to Wolfe "there was forever . . . a smell of raw tobacco, biting the nostril with its acrid pungency"—but, in any case, it was a boomtown.

As his narrative progresses, however, James is concerned not so much with the decline of Winston-Salem (and that decline is only relative: it is not so much that the Twin City has faded as that other Tar Heel cities have now boomed even more) as with what has happened to the old family farm. Toward the end of his book he drops the tone of...