Appalachia is Memory: Yours, Mine, Ours
Effie: An Old Story, Finally Written Down
As I continue to take on the impossible feat of reckoning Appalachia, of looking for its ley lines around fractal borders that are there one day and gone the next, as I accept that my writing in these pages will never speak to everyone, I gather my courage to speak only for myself, and I keep digging.
Appalachia is memory.
The memory of a child who escapes and builds a new life faraway but feels the swift ricochet of time travel at the mere mention of a word. Let me choose a word.
Berry picker.
Dressing in the early morning for a serious late-June session. Black raspberry picking is a heady mix of business and fun for my family. Long sleeves that button at the wrist so they don’t ride up. The well-used coffee can that my grandfather drilled holes and looped a string of wire through so he could hang it around my neck, and I could pick with both hands. Hearing him laugh as he tells his favorite joke about us canning those berries while we pick.
All these years on, and I can hear that laugh. The laugh of a hard man who turned downright giddy as he kitted out his women after having identified a good patch from his tractor.
I never can (eat a berry in the field) without my memory of that laugh. It’s mine.
Memory is serious business for the Appalachian. We turn the mundane into the mythical. We hammer pain at the forge and anneal it into beauty. We add color to the black and white with our effortless storytelling. We stretch and improvise and massage a memory until it shines.
It’s as true a story as stories told can be.
Note to reader: Chapter One of Effie was originally published several months ago. I am sharing it again for those who are new to The Appalachian Optimist.
Effie: An Old Story, Finally Written Down, represents four generations of women (if you are a careful reader, you may recognize five) and over one hundred years of family history. My mother, who was born in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, was shipped back to the hills of Eastern Kentucky every summer of her childhood to stay with her grandmother. Those summers shaped her life.
Turning spoken word into text, turning my mother’s voice into my own writing style is no small feat. What you read below has taken my whole life to get to.
Effie Copley Muncy Dalton James Wesley.
She was born into the Copley. The next four names came attached to husbands.
“Did you really love any of them?” my mother would ask her in her later years. My great-grandmother’s answer only hatches more questions.
She would lean back in her rocker, with her perfectly straight-backed posture and respond carefully, “Law, child, I loved the first one best.”
The chestnut-haired daughter of a hill country farmer father who always wore a suit, Effie came from that old British Isle lineage that carved their places into the steep ridges of Appalachia. Eastern Kentucky, the parts that butt up against West Virginia. Hatfield and McCoy territory to those who think mountain people can be defined simply by their feuds.
She married him too early, so it didn’t take. Fourteen. The court records say sixteen, but she lied on the paperwork. She wanted him. With his shiny black-hair and blue, blue eyes, Lusch Muncy asked her family’s permission to spark. So, in the year 1909, they sat on the front porch of the big house and sparked.
Effie eventually ran back home to her family. Her hope chest was ready, her understanding of marriage was not. But before she left Lusch, they had an adventure. The kind of adventure I like to think made her look back on her long life and choose to see Lusch (pronounced loosh) as her one true love.
Lusch had a brother. Rush. Yes, I love the names too.
Rush was a shwarper, also spelled sharper (I use the mountain pronunciation). The word translates loosely into a man who spends too much time in the honky-tonks. A man who lives for himself. Wild around the edges. To use it in a sentence you can say, “That man does too much shwarping around.”
Effie and Lusch were making their short go of it halfway up a mountain in a small, rough cabin, not too far from the Big Sandy River when Rush came pounding on the door in the deep night during a crackling thunderstorm. He was being accused of shooting a man in a bar. The law was after him. He was making a run for it.
With the wind and heavy rain lashing against them, the brothers packed up horses, supplies, and Effie and headed deeper into the hills.
Their goal was a remote cave that they had agreed to hide Rush into, hoping that the searches would blow over. The journey was rugged.
My facts come from my mother’s oral storytelling.
Effie remembered. My mother remembered. And now I remember.
Details like her long cotton skirts getting dragged down into the water, pooling around the saddlebags, as they forded a flooding creek that came off the Tug Fork River. Sharp flashes of lightning illuminated the way as they wound up steep deer paths, higher and higher into the backcountry. This is where the story goes cold. There is a blank spot between settling Rush into the cave and his eventual trial back in town.
Effie’s mother testified for Rush in the murder trial (the man who was shot later died). She gave him the deciding alibi that released him.
My mother would interrogate her repeatedly in later years, “Was it true, Grannie? Was your mother telling the truth?” Effie, who wore a dress every day of her life and the same wide, black, laced up shoes, would always respond with the cryptic, “Well that’s what she said, child. That’s what she said.” And she never offered more.
Ten years after the trial, my great grandmother walked out of a salon in Huntington West Virginia, having just sold off her long chestnut hair for money. Newly divorced from her second husband, two young kids in tow and another baby, my grandmother, just starting inside her, she still looked sharp. Lusch spots her from across the wide city street, makes a formal reunion, compliments her new, modern hair. Would she let him take her to dinner? The chemistry, now matured, was still there.
She turned him down.
Pride and shame, in equal measures. Three children, divorced again. How could he want that? My mother likes to think that he wouldn’t have minded at all. Lusch went on to eventually marry again, became a respected politician and a man of worth. In my great-grandmother’s words, “a fine man”.
Effie still had two more husbands ahead.
Keep reading Effie’s stories:
Chapter Two: You Can Take the Old Woman Out of the Mountain
Chapter Three: Looking Death in the Eye and Making Music
Some words that I look forward to pursuing as I try to capture Appalachia with my pen.
Memory
Loyalty
Creativity
Noncompliance
Faith
Escaping versus staying
Tragedy
Isolation
Thank you for being here with me on my quest to dig up the truth laying buried in our dirt.
Rachel - I am so enjoying your writings. You have a very talented way with words. Since I know some of those wonderful people you write about, it becomes even more meaningful.
Loved this portrait. While my extended family & hometown was too Catholic for there to be multiple husbands, I can relate; my great aunts and grandmothers came up in the Great Depression and were indomitable, each in their own way! My great aunt Louise, the most prim&proper of them, taught me to drink coffee black at age 10, so as not to inconvenience (or embarrass) your hosts if they don’t have cream or sugar. My other aunt Evelyn who lived to 102 was constantly crafting something— us kids were a form of free labor, always out picking something: corn, berries, tomatoes, ground-pine for wreaths &c
Last thought this triggered: when we went berry picking my dad would always say, “Lets hurry and pick all the berries before the Greedy people come and get them.”. My brother and I thought the Greedys were some other family. Now with age we realize— WE were the greedy people :-)
Thanks & keep writing!!