Not Real Good at Modern Life: Appalachian Pentecostals in the Works of Lee Smith

In his 1996 essay “Writing on the Cusp: Double Alterity and Minority Discourse in Appalachia,” Richard Cunningham urges Appalachian writers to start writing about, and therefore defining, themselves: “we Appalachian writers are en(cou)raged to fill in the blanks ourselves . . . to displace the categories of domination in both directions and thereby to push open not a vacuum but a creative space” (46). The directions Cunningham refers to are the North and the South; while the North uses the stereotypes of Appalachia to characterize all of the Southern United States, the South displaces those caricatures solely on the Appalachian people themselves, making them akin to “an Other’s Other” (42). Elsewhere, Cunningham, like many Appalachian scholars, has noted that Appalachian people are frequently portrayed “as never really moving beyond some ‘classic’ period” (“Appalachianism” 127). Appalachian people are “Others” who are “not regarded as adults but as children . . . not as legitimate offshoots but as arrested earlier forms—not as rejected brothers but contemporary ancestors” (129). Appalachian literature written by Appalachians, according to Cunningham, would resist the definitions and stereotypes imposed on Appalachia by both the North and the South. Cunningham is clear that what he is calling for has already begun at the time “Writing on the Cusp” was published in 1996. As an example, he points to Lee Smith’s Oral History (1983).

It is no surprise that Cunningham chooses a novel by Smith, who was born and raised in Grundy, Virginia. She is perhaps the best-known Appalachian writer outside of Appalachia, and one of the most championed authors inside Appalachia. Oral History is a particularly important novel for Smith’s career, and for the way readers imagine Appalachia. The novel was a Book-of-the-Month featured selection, giving her national exposure she had not previously enjoyed. But it is more than simply the popularity of the novel, and its author, which led Cunningham to select it as his primary example of Appalachian writers “filling the blank.” Citing an unnamed “native Appalachian reviewer,” Cunningham argues that Oral History is “a pastiche of every kind of stereotypical writing about Appalachia in the past hundred years” (47). Drawing attention to the unreliability of the narrators, and by extension, the stereotypical writing from which the narrative voices are drawn, points to what is left unsaid. According to Cunningham, readers “begin to hear the whispers of the authentic voice underneath, a voice present by erasure—a blankness made articulate” (48). A crucial part of this narrative strategy is the character of Richard Burlage. Unlike most of the characters in Oral History, Richard does not grow up in Appalachia. He is an upper-class man from the city of Richmond, come to Black Rock as a school teacher in the early twentieth century. Cunningham equates Richard’s journals to those of anthropologists and journalists who condescendingly write about Appalachia as “local colour.” Cunningham argues that by making Richard’s voice just as unreliable as the residents of Hoot Holler, if not more so, Smith resists dominant narratives about Appalachia. Most critics of the novel agree with Cunningham’s assessment. For example, Suzanne Jones suggests that Smith uses Richard and Jennifer, another outsider character, “to examine the causes and consequences of typical twentieth-century perceptions of Appalachia . . . revealing the naiveté and the condescension that often characterize the outsider’s perception of mountain people” (102). Likewise, Paula Gallant Eckard argues that while Richard “is a product of powerful Western influences and Latinate education, he is a kind of Other, a true outsider in the mountain community” (“Prismatic Past” 126). This is the dominant interpretation of Richard’s role in the novel: as stand-in for outsiders who perpetuate the condescending narrative of Appalachian people as part of a contemporary past.¹

While Cunningham’s approach to Appalachian literature was never uniformly accepted among Appalachian scholars, it has been heavily critiqued in the past fifteen years. One of the strongest and often cited critics has been Herbert Reid, who suggests that celebrating Appalachian literature and identity created by Appalachians is “a retreat to...