What It’s All About

Appalachian Heritage is about the people of Southern Appalachia and the land they cling to.

It is about the land that limits their vision to narrow sky-space and near earth—and emprisons them (the hillhaunted) with a deep, buried sense of place and home—and shapes them individually to its contours—and often haunts their dreams with irrational beauty and longing—when they are away.

It is about those who live so far back in the hollows they have to break daylight with a club, use hoot owls for alarm clocks and possums for watchdogs.

It is about those who have moved out along the new highways in little scatterings of helter-skelter suburbias—and those who live in a half-way land of modern conveniences and old customs.

It is about those who live in little mining camps with odd place names and under the shadow of coal tipples and slag piles.

It is about those who have moved up to splendid, electrically-heated homes—sterilized, insulated, insured against time, weather, and accidents.

It is about squatty, little county-seat towns where power and control gather to act out—as elsewhere—sad versions of the American Dream.

And it is about the old, the new, the changing Appalachia—even the future if anyone is able to predict from, or modify, present trends.

But most of all, it is about individuals and their humanity; for the typical mountaineer does not exist, and never has. The people of Appalachia have shared in their individual ways, and many still do, a heritage of customs, attitudes, manners that has come to be known as the Appalachian life-style. To present this humanness and this life-style is a central aim of Appalachian Heritage.

So much has been written about Appalachia—so many analyses, statistics, abstractions—so much of poverty, ignorance, pollutions—that the effect was to glut and deaden. An alternate presentation was called for. The Southern Moutaineer and his life-style are anything but boring and uninteresting. His life-style is a valid alternative to mainstream America. His cultural heritage is both valuable and interesting. He has reacted to an untoward environment with laudable verve, humor and imagination. He has been just as concerned as people elsewhere about values and identifying his place on earth. That he arrived at fairly original answers speaks in his favor.

It is the purpose of Appalachian Heritage to provide this alternate presentation—or let the people of Southern Appalachia do it—through their oral and written literature (past and present), by means of profiles, human interest sketches, commentary, occasional essay or editorial. The purpose is not polemic in any usual sense. Problems and issues cannot be avoided, but they will be treated primarily as tangential—relevent to material of story, poem, sketch. The present issue gives a fair indication of our ways and purposes, but not all, as yet.

If we seem to spend a good deal of time up the hollows and along the side roads where gardens are still planted by moon phases and there is still memory of old song and custom—of how to shoe an ox or rive roof boards—it is because here we find the Appalachia that was, and because the people are more distinct and interesting and retain something of the old personal wholeness, though they represent a vanquished people; for, except for the landscape, the distinguishing features of Appalachia are blurring rapidly.