Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers

Keepers of the Legends

SHARYN MCCRUMB Best known for her Appalachian novels and short fiction, Sharyn McCrumb (b. 1948) has a deep connection to the Appalachian South. Her great-grandfathers were circuit preachers in North Carolina's Smoky Mountains. Her grandfather was an eyewitness to the hanging of an elephant for murder in Erwin, Tennessee, back in 1916. Family tales and memories ofAppalachia feed McCrumb's gift ofstorytelling, her love of the mountains, and her unending search for the truth about complex mountain culture. A resident of Montgomery County, Virginia, she is the author of thirteen novels, including the highly acclaimed Ballad series, IfEver I Return, Pretty Peggy-O (1990), The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (1992), She Walks These Hills (1994), and The Rosewood Casket (1996), a series that weaves together the legends, natural wonders, and contemporary issues of Southern Appalachians. She has spoken or lectured at the Smithsonian Institution, Oxford University, the University of Bonn, the American Library of Berlin, the Antioch University Writers' Workshop, the Hindman Settlement School Appalachian Writers' Workshop, and the New Orleans Writers' Conference . She has won numerous awards for her fiction, including the New York Times Notable Book of the Year Award, the Los Angeles Times Notable Book of the Year Award, the Best Appalachian Novel Award, and every major award in crime fiction. McCrumb, whose novel She Walks These Hills spent five weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, is currently writing her fifth Ballad novel, The Ballad ofFrankie Silver, the story of the first woman hanged for murder in North Carolina. * * * Keepers ofthe Legends Allaround the water tank, waitingfor a train, A thousand miles awayfrom home, sleeping in the rain . .. When I was four, I thought that was the saddest story in the world. It was a Jimmie Rodgers tune, I later learned, but I only ever heard it sung a cappella by my father in our old Chevrolet on the five-hour drives to visit my grandparents in East Tennessee. Who was the fellow in the song, I wondered, and how did he get stuck out there on the desolateTexas prairie all alone, so far from the mountains? He seemed to think he was going to make it home all right, but for the duration of the song, he was stranded, and I could never hear it without feeling the sting of tears. I come from a race ofstorytellers. My father's family-the Arrowoods and the McCourys-settled in the Smoky Mountains ofwestern North Carolina in 1790, when the wilderness was still Indian country. They came from the north ofEngland and from Scotland, and they seemed to want mountains, land, and as few neighbors as possible. The first ofthe McCourys to settle in America was my great-great-great-grandfather Malcolm McCourry, a Scot who was kidnapped as a child from the island of Islay in the Hebrides in 1750, and made to serve as a cabin boy on a sailing ship. He later became an attorney in Morristown, New Jersey, fought with the Chester Militia in the American Revolution, and finally settled in 1794 in what is now Mitchell County in western North Carolina. Another relative, an Arrowood killed in the Battle of Waynesville in May 1865, was the last man to die in the CivilWar east of the Mississippi. Yet another "connection" (we are cousins-in-Iaw through the Howell family) is the convicted murderess Frankie Silver, the subject of my next novel, The BalladofFrankie Silver. Frances Stewart Silver (1813-33) was the first woman hanged for murder in the state ofNorth Carolina. I did not discover the family tie that links us until I began the two years of research prior to writing the novel. I wasn't surprised, though. Since both our families had been in Mitchell County for more than two hundred years, and both produced large numbers of children to intermarry with other families, I knew the connection had to be there. These same bloodlines link both Frankie Silver and me to another Appalachian writer, Wilma Dykeman, and also to the famous bluegrass musician Del McCoury. The namesake of my character Spencer Arrowood, my paternal grandfather, Keepers ofthe Legends 177 worked in the machine shop of the Clinchfield Railroad. He was present on that September day in 1916 at the railroad yard in Erwin, Tennessee, when a circus elephant called Marywas hanged for murder: she had killed her trainer in Kingsport. (I used this...