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Reflection

Still in the Holler

(Shane Kell)

If a stranger comes around, if he’s wise, he will keep to the road and announce his business soon, clearly and loudly, then you’ll see what’s what. You’re not against him, but you’re not automatically for him.”

My father, whose namesake I am, was born in a makeshift cabin in a holler in Rockcastle County, Kentucky. It was called The Hainted Holler because haints, or ghosts, who died in a tannery fire, were said to dwell there still, lamenting their fates. Nobody else in the tiny farming community of houses littered along the narrow valley known as Clear Creek wanted that scary patch of land, so my penny-starved grandfather claimed the steep, rocky acreage for himself. I used to drive out that way when I returned to visit Kentucky, to gaze upon the one-room, white plank schoolhouse my grandmother taught all the grades at once in, and I’d stalk the Hainted Holler, half-hoping for a ghost to appear. 

As a young professor right outside Chicago, I co-wrote a musical, produced at Loyola University, set on Clear Creek in the 1930s. In one of its scenes, young women in long, white nightgowns holding lanterns, from behind a scrim walked out of that holler in half-light, toward the audience, singing in eerie and touching harmony how the Devil came to fetch each of them as his concubine. Some people in the audience wept for them. A couple of years after I wrote that play, my cousin wanted to sell her five-acre farm right down the road from the Hainted Holler, and I bought it. My plan was to use it as a writer’s retreat, though soon I’d take a job in South Florida and so I rented it out instead. Yet that area founded by my kin has kept a grip on my imagination and keeps reappearing in my writing. Even when all my ancestors had moved out, the place held me in thrall, and I’d find reasons to go back out there, to hike Anglin Falls, to visit a high school buddy who moved to Clear Creek, or just to drive its once-gravel, twisty roads, now paved and flanked by expensive houses where doctors and lawyers could build big, fancy abodes high on a hill, and have their privacy. In the end, everybody wants to live in the country. Most just want it to also be a city with all the amenities, where you can rent out your tobacco allotment and hire somebody to mow your acres of fallow fields. 

Everybody who immigrated to Appalachia from Ireland and Scotland was looking for relative solitude. They were used to living in hideaway places tucked into hills, where nobody would bother you—not your neighbors and not the law. Even the preacher couldn’t hike up all those inclines. For what is a holler? It’s an area formed in mountains or foothills by the folds they make—the hollows. It’s where the creeks flow down toward the bottomlands and their banks are populated with elms, oaks, spruce and cedars. It’s where you once could make moonshine whisky when the price paid for your corn cratered in the world market, and you were in the middle of the economic depression, and either the federal government wouldn’t give you a subsidy or help you out some other way—or else, you didn’t want them to, because of your damned Celtic independence and pride. A neighbor might holler up the holler to warn you that a revenuer was coming your way. You’d rather tote your rifle to shoot squirrels and opossums and rabbits and birds if you must, to feed your children, who are being taught by one single lady whom you’ve known for years, and you can predict exactly what’s going to come out of her mouth because it first went from God’s mouth to her ear. 

If a stranger comes around, if he’s wise, he will keep to the road and announce his business soon, clearly and loudly, then you’ll see what’s what. You’re not against him, but you’re not automatically for him. When Jesus said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” you assumed he meant all the people up and down the valley you see at the Clear Creek Baptist Church every Sunday, and occasionally throughout the week, usually at the post office-slash-general store. Even then, a little company goes a long way. People gossip and speculate, even though the preacher told them not to. So and so is a drunk and so and so is running around. It’s more behavior than you want to think about.

As for strangers, or “foreigners” as they used to be called, even if they were just from the next county over—you don’t stop to think what color they might be, if you think of them at all. Your mind simply doesn’t ever get that far. Everybody around, including yourself, is pasty white, unless their necks and face got sunburned from plowing or scraping hides at the tannery in full sun. It isn’t something you really have had to deal with, and you don’t want to answer a survey on your feelings about the matter by a man who shows up unannounced. There’s a nervous local history about people appearing out of nowhere. In my forebears’ Baptist religion, the Devil was a shapeshifter, known as “The Stranger,” as he could assume any human guise whatsoever. You’re not out burning crosses on lawns, an activity which sounds foolish and like a lot of extra work and staying up late. You have too much to get done when the sun comes up. You’re not that good at cogitating about things that are different. If one word could sum up your life, it’s sameness, which if not exactly happiness, is the opposite of torment. In the 1700s, there was all that upheaval and dissension, back when plenty of Irish were thought of as heathens and slaves to be transported to America involuntarily, and even the ones who didn’t get transported, a lot of them were hungry and so they figured out how to get on a ship and vomit their way across a pitching sea. Your ancestors got established, built modest dwellings, barns, the aforesaid church and general store and pretty much kept it the same for two hundred years. Everybody in Clear Creek wants to maintain things nice and quiet, unless they get drunk and go to the barn dance, after which they’ll have a hangover and repent.

Some people out-migrated from Clear Creek to Detroit or Dayton or else Okinawa when they got drafted or volunteered. Others moved out during the Depression, and later, went on down to Oak Ridge, Tennessee to work at the nuclear facility. A few went on up over Bear Mountain to Berea, a couple of them even to college. But most stayed put and tried to keep still.

Still means several things. First, it’s that contraption that moonshiners—such as your distant cousins, but not you, praise God—set up in the hollers to make distilled corn whisky, near the creek banks, a contraption that got assembled and disassembled as needed and stashed among piles of rocks and rotting tree branches, out of reach of inquisitive federal revenue agents, who insisted such products weren’t taxed, therefore were illegal. For once, you strongly disagree. Certain matters are private, between you and God, and the government doesn’t need to be involved in every last thing.

Still also means quiet, a lack of noise and motion, a relative scarcity of people moving around. It’s quite enough exercise to be tracking all the creatures in the forest, much less incessant human traffic like what exists in the cities, where you’ve been now and then, but don’t want to go back unless you get cancer and have to see a doctor, and even then, you might just tough it out. There are worse things than dying. Anyway, in that case you’d go to your eternal reward; that’s what the Bible says. Unless you don’t make the cut, in which case, well, those are the breaks. You’re not fatalistic. God’s plan is whatever it is, and you accept that. Everybody else can do what they want.

Still means as well that I, my father’s namesake, still go back now and then, up to the present time, no matter that my credo—me, born in a small city, in what was at that time unromantically called a “subdivision”—is vastly different from that of my grandparents and those who came before. My politics, too, would doubtless not elide with theirs—though we never spoke of such things, which would feel highly personal, invasive, and all-around inappropriate. Instead, we talked about biscuits and snowfall. All the same, as gregarious and social as I can be, I still require a lot of privacy. I used to think it’s because I’m a writer, and that vocation-profession requires substantial solitude by its nature. Other times, I wonder if I didn’t become a writer in order to have a good reason to be alone a lot of the time, as I had first expected to be when I bought my cousin’s five-acre farm, planning to spend my summers in retreat and instead becoming a college administrator a thousand miles from the Hainted Holler. 

Four years ago, I managed to negotiate working remotely for my Los Angeles job and moved back to Kentucky for the first time since I was 20. I bought a nice house in a family deal, in a suburb of Lexington, comfortable and cityfied but near horse farms, a river, woods, and streams. There are plenty of limestone cliffs nearby where I could hide a still and bottles of homemade corn whisky if I ever took a notion. But the development in which I reside is true suburbia, and when I shoveled snow from my driveway recently, I waved to my neighbor and his son building a snowman, and another neighbor scraping ice off his car windows. I don’t know them, except to say hello, and I’ve never been inside their houses. During the recent elections, hardly anybody put lawn signs out for presidential or other candidates, even in these hyper-politicized and fractious times. It would have been unseemly because that’s private business. You’d no more chat up a neighbor about it than you would go up on his porch and ring his doorbell to tell him about your recent gallbladder operation. Or worse, to ask about his. When my wife and I went to the public library to vote, there was a long, peaceful line to wait in, though some individuals looked quietly excited, as though something momentous was about to happen. There were two controversial measures on the ballot: one to use public money to fund charter and Christian schools (surprisingly defeated) and one to bar immigrants without United States citizenship from voting in Kentucky (approved). The whole voting process happened without any ugliness or elbowing. The poll workers thanked us in soft voices for coming to vote. Everyone concerned couldn’t have been kinder in their demeanor. But I knew in advance which presidential candidate almost everybody voted for, and it wasn’t whom I voted for.

Our lives go on in the day to day, each keeping to his own. In a profound way, after all these years and all that moving around the country and the globe, like my father and grandfather, I’m back in the holler.

Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.

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