Asheville, Carters versus Vanderbilts

Yesterday was mountain peoples and today was Vanderbilts. It's an alarming gilded contrast that now, in my own town so visibly, with our Bezoses and Gateses, we're trying to live up to once again.

We drove through Tennessee, where we had a ridiculous huge meal in a restaurant called the Farmer's Daughter. Each table (about 20 people) chose two meats and then we were additionally served a dozen sides like sweet (marshmallow-sweet) potatoes, corn bread salad, creamed corn, mac and cheese, squash fritter, sauerkraut, broccoli and cheese--and the two meats at our table were fried chicken and breaded catfish. I'd already had a hot doughnut from the Pennsylvania Dutch trailer in the parking lot but we'd been waiting for a table an hour, cooled off every once in a while by iced tea in Styrofoam, so I was ready.

Before we arrived in Virginia, our van had also broke and strung a poke of greasy beans (we de-stringed a bag of green beans), which today will be blanched then slow boiled several hours, and the van had me reading out loud--Robert Gipe's powerful illustrated novel, Trampoline.

But where we were heading was the Carter Family Fold at the Western tip of Virginia, the place that houses the homestead of A.P. Carter and the traditions of the rest of the family, Sara, Mabel and later June and her husband, Johnny Cash. Historians claim they are the birth of country music--and you can see the place we visited on the trailer of this Rolling Stone review of a documentary, The Winding Stream (see 1:31-1:36--that's where I was!). There was some grumbling on the way because there'd be no alcohol; and when we got there, the concrete dancing floor was empty and a large crowd was already sitting on steeply pitched seats, stoically listening to bluegrass. An old man danced with the ticket taker, then with a little girl; we all watched them from our seats. But my friend, Corrie (pronounced Car-E, because she's Southern) brought her tap shoes and tried to teach us to clog, which she's been doing for 11 years (she's featured in the video below). I went to the floor to watch, and was soon trying to dance too, in my wide, clingy running shoes, and eventually a few more joined us. I was told repeatedly it looked like I was having a lot of fun. Then that I brought a west coast style to it, with my shoulders. One old man asked me if I was Tommy Wyeth's son--I looked and moved just like him. The last song was gospel, and I was glad to be warned ahead of time that if they start singing Jesus, to sit.

These descriptions reminded my father of his own experiences. In 1969, dad joined nine student docs and their spouses in the SAMA Appalachia to Lebanon, VA, through which he saw clogging for the first time at the Galax Fiddler's festival. Mom tried clogging and dad stayed back, watching with admiration. It was through this project that we ended up in West Virginia a few years later: Dad wrote to the Secretary of HEW (Health, Education and Welfare, a department that may return to replace Health and Human Services and Dept. of Education, among other departments), asking to be placed in a physician-poor area with the National Health Service Corps.

Outside, fireflies flitted in and out of the dark and we were told about a secret place in Cataloochee Valley, North Carolina, where for a very short time the fireflies are synchronized, lighting up the entire valley and then going black.

What a difference that morning, when I ran to the Omni Grove Park Inn, a luxury hotel at the end of a golf course, its tables and music and chairs decadent and comfortable but also resort familiar.

And then a stunning difference visiting Vanderbilt's Biltmore Estate--according to Wikipedia, the largest privately owned house in the country--a French castle built for himself by the grandson of the Vanderbilt railroad and shipping magnate where every affectation was one of money and of Europe. At the time this palace was being built on over 10,000 acres, the forests in much of Appalachia were being denuded and its people tricked and cheated of their land. But the Estate is beautiful. Frederick Law Olmsted did fine work with the lands. And the house is okay. It's big. 43 bathrooms, 33 guest bedrooms, electric, sweeping views of all that land that still no one else occupies.

 

     

It's got some Renoirs and a mess of John Singer Sargent portraits of the family and of Olmsted and people important to the house. And some weird stuff, too.

         

        

It doesn't look, from the tour of the servants quarters, like the help was mistreated. And maybe the ridiculous palatial house has brought Asheville needed tourism over this century. I didn't walk through the house mad or anything, but this much wealth is unethical, even before considering devious ways it's achieved and the distortions of fellow-feeling it brings against the lives of neighbors and other such afterthoughts.

Dale Chihuly has a touring exhibit throughout the grounds, installations it took two years to plan and place.

      

      

   

I thought they added something, a vibrancy, a  magic. My friend, Sondra, said they were distractions to the natural beauty. This place is beautiful. It's not really natural.

Asheville, Appalachian racism

July 12, 2018

Yesterday and the day before were about Cherokees; today and tomorrow, we look into the eyes of Appalachian racism. There's defensiveness about it, evasiveness, and maybe people here don't think so. But it was apparent from the very first part of my day, when I ran to the Riverside Cemetery to visit the graves of Thomas Wolfe and O. Henry and also took a picture of the memorial left to one Zebulon Baird Vance.

    

I was directed to him by the walking guide on the web and so looked him up and he was described in one of the first descriptions as a white supremacist governor of the Confederacy. When I arrived at his gravestone, there was a fresh wreath of flowers and a stone marking him a hero. On our way later to his homestead, I asked one of our professors about what I'd read on the web and was told that he was a product of his times, that any governor serving in the South during the Civil War would be described that way. Later I heard there was a debate about his towering memorial, on obelisk in the center of the city, argued at the time some other Confederate markers in the South had been removed, but the council ultimately decided they didn't need to, because the obelisk is not a man but an abstract object. On the homestead itself, lovingly preserved, we learned about the twenty slaves who served his 900 acres and were shown the little two room slave quarters where they lived; we read plaques that further demonstrated what to me felt like glaring evasiveness but may have felt like brave admissions of truth, to the curators: One plaque managed to discuss slaves on the property without ever using the word "slaves" or "enslavement"--at one point, the phrase "enslaved people" captured the sentiment. And in another plaque, Vance was described as having Unionist sensibilities, but at the last second, he became a general and then a governor for the Confederate forces and people. That sounded super fishy; but now that I've read a little bit more about him and his "unionist" sensibility, I see that it is super fishy. He was a unionist because he didn't want to secede from the Union, not because he wanted to end slavery. Vance's public statement was that slavery would survive better in a country kept whole. When Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he felt betrayed.

We were assigned a Thomas Wolfe short story, "Child by Tiger," that I had also read a couple months ago in Web and the Rock, and I remembered it pretty well because it was such a weird story. There's this super competent, religious, careful Black man who plays with the kids and then one day goes crazy and kills a bunch of people. This is how it ends:

"He came from darkness. He came out of the heart of darkness, from the dark heart of the secret and undiscovered South. He came by night, just as he passed by night. He was night's child and partner, a token of the other side of man's dark soul, a symbol of those things that pass by darkness and that still remain, a symbol of man's evil innocence, and the token of his mystery, a projection of his own unfathomed quality, a friend, a brother and a mortal enemy, an unknown demon, two worlds together--a tiger and a child."

July 13, 2018

I hoped that, when we met with the scholar from African American studies and discussed Thomas Wolfe's story, I would find a way to respond to its "heart of darkness" with something other than revulsion and disappointment. And I have.

Darin Waters met with us on campus in the morning and started his story by talking about both of his family lines. He can trace his father's back to 1850, where the Waters were apple farmers in Henderson, North Carolina. When Darin Waters decided to study African Americans in Appalachia to counteract people's beliefs that they didn't live here, weren't slaves here, and when he had to make a case for it because even well-intentioned professors said he wouldn't find the resources to support his dissertation, the Biltmore Estate came through. It was a treasure trove of documents, like letters written by African Americans to Cornelius Vanderbilt. When the archivist asked on the first day if he would like to look see if there way anything on his great grandfather, Waters thought there'd be no way: First of all, he doubted the man would be literate. Second of all, what would Vanderbilt have to do with an apple farmer? But she said, Let's put him in and see what comes up--and three hits came back. She retrieved for him three handwritten letters from his great grandfather, dated 1892, 1893 and 1895. Meanwhile, his grandfather of his mother's side amused himself with a little bubble-gum-pack sized spy camera, taking secret photos everywhere he went. Now the University of North Carolina Asheville has digitized the whole mess of them, maybe 1500 pictures--they provide, for white people, a rare and private view of life experienced from the eyes of an African American, and of African Americans with their guards down.

I am repeatedly drawn to the intimate, personal stories people use when they're not from a mainstream (white Christian male) academic approach. When whole injustices and histories and triumphs have been made invisible by the broader narrative, people on the margins say, Wait, look at me, my very own story says that's not true, and so scholarship from the margins gets beyond presidents, kings and bullets right into the kitchens and barbershops to announce their truth.

Darin Waters also shared an amazing letter from a former slave I've never seen before but want to share with everyone, and also a fascinating segment of This American Life about a woman playing a slave on a George Washington reenactment farm.

Then we took a van to the city center and listened to Waters some more from the second floor auditorium of the YMI, the Young Men's Institute, one of the oldest freestanding African American cultural centers in the country (and the only thing in Look Homeward Angel that didn't get its name changed). Waters talked there about Black history in Asheville, which he said included both the mountain attitude of Don't bother me I won't bother you, but also the long history of Asheville as a tourist hub, and the need to maintain its harmonious, nonviolent image.

       

And then he invited us with our reactions to Wolfe's "Child by Tiger." I was the first to speak. I talked about how I'd read the story before, as I'd written you, and that it was the thing that made me think Wolfe was a bigot; I described that last paragraph again (in the last email); and I said that I did some research and found the story of a Black man who gets pushed too far and goes on a shooting rampage was based on a real person, Will Harris, who'd shot up two Black people and two white people when Wolfe was six--so now I don't know what to make of that last paragraph.

Waters got very excited, because he knew a whole lot about Will Harris. Two days before the rampage, a "colored" man named Will Harris had sued for wages. Two months before raged the Atlanta race riots. And all this occurs a few years after the Wilmington, North Carolina insurrection that led a mob of 2,000 whites to turn out the Reconstructionist government to one more of their liking. Darin Waters believes what happened with Will Harris is not unlike what happened to Robert Charles of New Orleans, a man who read about white terrorism but had caused no trouble until 1900, when a policeman pushed him too far, at which point, he shot the place up and was riddled with bullets and dragged by mobs. Reconstruction was a shining moment, and for that, it caused violence and terrorism. So, what about Thomas Wolfe and his point of view? In the case of Will Harris, the mayor, fearing a riot, immediately closed the saloons; the African American community repudiated Harris; the whites were proud no vigilantism followed. But there was certainly vigilantism and lynching in the story, which is its own accusation. And those red eyes of restraint in the story are deeply sympathetic. Additionally, Wolfe was apparently reading Black Thunder when he wrote the story--a book about a slave revolt led by Gabriel Prosser in 1800; the book is a warning about the rebellions that come of poverty and racial oppression. Is it an accident that Wolfe's narrator is also Prosser? Is the story of racism or about racism? Waters thinks it's about, and that Thomas Wolfe is a master observer. Here's a last story he told in relation to the conversation. In the 1936 Olympics, Adolf Hitler vexedly asked about the American man nearby cheering and shouting in triumph as a Black man, Jesse Owens, won his race. That's Thomas Wolfe.

Asheville, Blacks and Smokies

I'm currently on an National Endowment for the Humanities summer grant taking place at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, studying environmental history and countering hillbilly stereotypes with a group of 6 program coordinators and 30 teachers from around the country. I love the company and the field trips, the learning and the food.

And I love staying on a campus that has sight lines like these:

The following are observations from the first week.


July 11, 2018

We went out to the Black Mountains and the view was astonishing. Up at the top of Mount Mitchell, and still better, across the saddle to Craig's Peak, every direction around was 6,000 foot mountains of rolling lush green. Speakers and readings suggest that Appalachia is home to the greatest biodiversity outside of rain forests and oceans, such that the variety of trees and plants and animals gives the forest canopy an ever richer variety of greens. I don't know about that, but looking and seeing close range after range and not a trace of us almost anywhere was inspiring.

On Tuesday morning I got up early enough (Eastern Standard Time) to go running and finally get into the city center; and I ran through some super fancy neighborhood with gorgeous old and enormous houses and ran to Thomas Wolfe's birthplace and back.

And then the lectures that morning were better too because it was about Cherokee stories and not about rocks and corn and deforestation, which, it turns out, stories I've trained myself to like better! We compared four versions of the Cherokee story on the origin of strawberries, which all revolve around the idea that husband and wife are bickering, wife runs off and away, then a flower is put in her path but she doesn't stop, a huckleberry is put in her path and she doesn't stop, then a strawberry is put in her path, and she stops to behold and smell and taste the fat red fruit she's never before seen, at which point either the husband catches up or she remembers she loves him, and they're back happily ever after. The different versions are telling. We had extra time on Tuesday because we were supposed to be working on lesson plans, but nobody did. Instead, I went back to Asheville's city center and had prickly pear beer which tasted more slight than botanical. I wanted to try the pimento cheese and pickled green tomato sandwich, I was firmly dissuaded by my southern companions, who said it was common foodstuff and too great a risk.

 

This day, July 11th, was my favorite so far. We drove to the town of Cherokee. On the outskirts, we drove to what looked like a field, and we were there for two hours. But it wasn't just a field. We were first brought to the river cane lining the banks of the river and given a great and important history of what is an American bamboo (thinner, used for basket weaving, for solidifying the soil, for grain, for much more). And then we went and sat on a concrete foundation, where Chief Joyce Dugan spoke to us. It turns out the field just to our right had one of the sacred mounds of North Carolina, which they left unsigned because the Cherokee didn't want the tourist traffic. And Chief Joyce was a wonderful speaker, talking us through important decisions points she'd made--as superintendent of schools, then as primary chief, including buying these fields (and 300 acres) out from under a man who charged a big price, spending money on culture rather than roads, and eventually paying out for a gaming group who set the Cherokee up with a casino.

We visited the school the tribe built too. It was palatial, never-ending, and deeply thoughtful of the communities needs and desires, outfitting it with state of the art athletics and vocational and art facilities, various kinds of therapeutics and other healing resources, and everywhere, messages about the sacred path, the elders. Arts include folk art and what they called traditional art. And everyone takes Cherokee. And when they get to high school, they take syllabary too--the written language the scholar Sequoyah devised. And they can also take Spanish. There is a plaque in the theater dedicated to Chief Joyce. This is a community that clearly cares for its children, in minute, careful ways. The casino funds this. Money from the casino also pays for health care of residents and all university education is free (unless you flunk out). That's half the casino money. The other half pays $10,000 to each person. By the time a kid graduates from high school, they have about $200,000 available to them, although now only $5,000 is released then, and another $5,000 at age 21, and then the rest at 25, when they're responsible enough to receive the rest. This is a school population that doesn't have to worry about affording college, but they still struggle. And the houses people live in are very small, if they're not trailers. The money is not making people rich. Instead, it's being used to teach and care for the community, the culture, and the land.

 

Maybe my favorite moment of all was hearing from the Cherokee linguist, Tom Belt. He is one of only 200 native speakers left of Cherokee, and he talked for over and hour about the relationship of language to the heart and to place. He said Cherokee is a verb language and very precise, and you don't know the meaning of Cherokee uphill and downhill without living among the Smokies. He spoke with great passion and depth about language and land. I'm not with my notes right now, so I can't get further. But we were all moved, knew we were in the presence of an elder, and we were convinced in those moments that compassion and humility and goodness resided in recognizing the sacredness of the land we trod and the creatures who shared it with us.

After listening to Tom Belt, I was thinking about the idea of sacred land. To hold anything as sacred means to outwardly and inwardly experience something with humility and respect, and that might extend into other relationships, too; but to view the land itself as sacred, rather than some external, over-there shrine or god, means not just humility and respect, but something operational and eternal, because you're going to use the land, play on it, harvest it, by necessity. To view the very land as sacred, that humility and respect must be there, but also a deep gratitude and care, and an obligation to be worthy. To go from that to the Trump administration efficiently ripping apart families already fleeing horrors and then not even tracking where the children and parents were separately sent is deeply absurd and disturbing. Nothing can be sacred in such a scheme