The Dark and Clear Vision of Ron Rash

FEATURED AUTHOR—RON RASH The Dark and Clear Vision of Ron Rash Joyce Compton Brown They stood around a snapping turtle big as a Thanksgiving platter, its hard shell plates peaked for protection, its wizened face protruding, jaws ready to snap on sticks or fingers. Its kind had survived since the Mesozoic period; it certainly could survive three teenage males and a herpetologist's backyard jokes and harmless proddings. Ron Rash and his friends had dragged it out of the shallow waters of the Broad river, put it in a gunny sack, and hauled it to our back yard, where my husband, who shared their fascination with anything reptilian or amphibian, stood there in the yard with them. It wasn't that unusual for Ron and his friends to bring strange critters around. They didn't go for bunny rabbits and chipmunks; they went for the stuff under logs, under water. Ron was never one to settle for easy surfaces. We were in Boiling Springs, NC, a western NC foothills town set right in the middle ofAppalachian out-migration country a town with farm crossroads origins, still with the biggest John Deere tractor dealership for miles around. The center of town was dominated by a snack shop, a drug store, and a cemetery. The church had moved down the road a piece for lack of growing space. In our area Baptists always build bigger or divide like amoebas. The side of the town across from the cemetery was taken up by Gardner-Webb College, a Baptist institution founded first as a high school and now an educational refuge for many first generation college kids. Many of us who taught there, including Ron's father, were also first generation college graduates; certainly most of us were the first in our families to teach at the college level. The more prestigious Baptist college, Wake Forrest, was farther east. Boiling Springs was a hybrid town. It was a college town with outsider faculty families and insiders with Cleveland County roots, rich roots. With only a couple of small mills, it was at the center of mill valley. About five miles to the west stood Cliffside Mill, the "cotton mill" where Earl Scruggs and his buddies had played banjos and guitars when they had time off from work. Scruggs' playing had forever changed the role of the banjo in American roots music. About six miles to the east were the Dover mills, owned by one of the college's major benefactors. Other Shelby mills had been owned by O. 15 Max Gardner, governor of North Carolina during the period of infamous North Carolina textile mill strikes in the twenties. Thomas Dixon, author of The Klansman, source of the technically famous and infamously racist silent film Birth ofa Nation (1916), had preached and written his novels up the road a ways, near Polkville. And W.J. Cash's The Mind ofthe South had been written primarily in the Boiling Springs dry cleaners, at one time the post office, where Cash had been an employee more interested in writing than in delivering the mail. So Ron Rash could have been a more distinctly Southern writer, living in this town on the edge of Appalachia, on the edge of intellectuality, on the edge of change from old to new, but his roots were in the mountains where his family had lived for generations. In the seventies, if you lived in Boiling Springs, you would be treated kindly, but you would never really be Boiling Springs. Not being multigenerational Cleveland County was an isolating factor for many faculty kids, not out of local meanness but out of the simple understanding that Cleveland County, NC was the center of the universe and that anyone not from there probably needed to be treated with a degree of kindness and tolerance. Few faculty kids grew up to remain in the area. It was not their home. And although the area had been a prime example of Appalachians carried to the foothills in the cause of industrialization, little interest remained in those roots, except for pride in the wealthy owners. O. Max Gardner and Thomas Dixon were enshrined in the Cleveland County...