Appalachian Heritage

In the interests of full disclosure I should probably confess up-front that Mildred Haun's The Hawk's Done Gone gets my vote as the most remarkable Appalachian novel ever written. When I first read it a decade ago, it knocked my socks off. I wondered why I had not heard of it sooner and why we had not studied it in high school instead of Silas Marner.

When I was a teenager in Kingsport, Tennessee, I wrote my first short story and started looking around for role models. I found Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers and read everything each had written. The fact that both were Southern women, as well as wonderful writers, gave me hope that I, too, might be able to become a writer some day.

But as I read O'Connor and McCullers, I had to adjust my inner dials to tune out some static. Much of their fiction was set in Georgia, not in East Tennessee, so the speech patterns and vocabulary were slightly different from those with which I had grown up. O'Connor's Catholicism lent her world an exotic tinge foreign to the evangelical Protestantism that surrounded me. The isolation of the characters in McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, published in 1940, the same year as The Hawk's Done Gone, did not entirely resonate for me, trapped (as I felt then) in a web of family and neighbors from whom it seemed impossible ever to escape. I found McCullers's and O'Connor's grim humor congenial, but they seemed sometimes to distance themselves from its targets in a way that left me uneasy, as though their characters were just laboratory specimens to them.

The setting for The Hawk's Done Gone was neither their down-at the-heels Deep South nor my paternal grandparents' coal-mining Appalachia. The prologue and twelve linked stories that form the chapters of the novel instead take place just down the road from Kingsport, on hardscrabble hill farms like the one on which I had [End Page 30] spent my childhood weekends and summers. Its characters are similar to the people who had farmed the fields neighboring ours, whose relatives worked in the mills and factories of Kingsport and were my classmates at school.

By the time I read The Hawk's Done Gone, I had been living in the North and in Europe for over three decades, exposed to many different versions of the English language. So some unique East Tennessee sentence structures that Haun records leaped out at me as they had not when I was immersed in them:

"Sarah sent by Howard for me some shoes."

"I wished there hadn't so many folks come."

"Laying on the floor in that little old lean-to with no cover on her. And it snowing outside."

I was also struck by the many earthy similes, some of which I had heard before, many of which I had not. A poor countrywoman looks "like the devil before daybreak." When an old woman sees her son's ghost, her eyes bat "like a frog in a hailstorm." A man's threat to kill his daughter's suitor "spread around over the country like polecat stink." A cruel mother stares at her abused daughter "like a snake trying to charm a gopher." The same mother describes her daughter as "blundersome as a blind buzzard." A mountain boy characterizes his romantic rival from the lowlands as not having enough sense "to pour water out of a boot—not even if it had directions on the heel." A conceited young woman plays the piano by holding "her hands up in the air like a sailing buzzard's wings and . . . pecking at the keys like a buzzard pecking at kyarn [carrion]."

I would not go so far as to say that The Hawk's Done Gone was the reason I returned to East Tennessee to live part-time eight years ago, but I will say that it was a welcoming beacon along my path back home. Since then, I have thought a lot about why I found the book so powerful, apart from the familiar language, into which I sank as though into a warm bath on a cold night. For one thing, Haun not only preserves the distinctive speech patterns and folkways of a fading culture, as though in a time capsule for future generations, she also summarizes the economic and social evolution of that culture from the Civil War up to World War II. Almost as an aside, she refers to the local feuds and internecine bushwhacking that passed for battles [End Page 31] in Appalachia during the Civil War. In a hilarious story called "Dave Cocke's Motion" (one of ten unrelated stories included in the 1968 edition of The Hawk's Done Gone), Haun turns a country church's replacement of its damaged organ with a piano into a Civil War reenactment, with the worshippers grouping together on opposite sides of the church according to whether their families had supported the Union or the Confederacy.

Haun also depicts the grim poverty of Reconstruction, the arrival of railroads and industry, the loss of family farms to the national park system, the relegation of cherished handmade furniture, tools, and quilts to collectors and museums. And she portrays the documented surge in racism after the Civil War, primarily via the shift in attitude toward her Melungeon characters. It appears that darker-skinned people such as the Melungeons were originally accepted in Haun's Cocke County, on the border of the Melungeon strongholds in Hancock County—and were even admired for their attractiveness. The narrator of The Hawk's Done Gone, an elderly midwife named Mary Dorthula White Kanipe, says of her granddaughter, "Drusilla had just enough of Burt's Melungeon blood in her to make her pretty—big black eyes and long black hair." Two of Mrs. Kanipe's daughters marry Melungeon men without hesitation. Of one daughter's husband, Mrs. Kanipe says, "Murf was black, and she was proud he was black." Mrs. Kanipe's first and only love, the father of her illegitimate son Joe, although not Melungeon, was a Rebel soldier with a dark complexion.

But this acceptance was apparently based on the belief that Melungeons were the exotic remnants of some lost tribe. Mrs. Kanipe explains, "Melungeon folks can tell about themselves—how they are an old race of folks, and how they were started somewhere on a ship. They had some kind of trouble on the ship and ended up here." Their popularity began to wane with the introduction of the notion that they were instead partly African. "Some folks were getting so they held it against a body for being a Melungeon. I reckon it was because of what that ignorant man from down the country said about them having Negro blood in them," says Mrs. Kanipe.

However, Haun also suggests that any growing resentment of Melungeons was often based on considerations other than their ancestry. The real reason one man objects to his half-sister's marrying a [End Page 32] Melungeon is that he does not want interference in his incestuous relationship with her. Mrs. Kanipe's husband Ad hates them "because they claimed they were in this country before our kind of folks come. [He] thought some of his own kin ought to have the credit of finding the whole new country." By the time I was a child in the Jim Crow 1950s, Melungeons had become the mythical bogeymen of East Tennessee. Those who could escape the stigma had already rushed to do so.

Gradually I have come to realize that Haun's stories have haunted me ever since I first read them because they embody some of the same inner conflicts about our shared homeland with which I have wrestled for much of my life. The antique language, the colorful similes, the encapsulated history, the quilts and ballads—these elicit nostalgia for a vanished time and a disappearing people, much as The Waltons did for many TV viewers. But Haun is much more complex than the "local colorists" with which some try to lump her. Her rollicking humor, which has much in common with the tall tale tradition of the American frontier, is balanced by tragedy of almost Greek proportions, and the horror of some of her plots provide characters and readers alike with something akin to a catharsis. In "Melungeon Colored," an unexpectedly dark-skinned infant is buried alive by her father and her great grandmother, along with her dead mother, who has been murdered by the baby's father for apparent infidelity. But afterwards this great grandmother feels only relief at having averted by these murders what she sees as the greater sin of betraying a deathbed promise to her daughter never to reveal to her granddaughter (the baby's mother) that her own father was Melungeon, even though this revelation would have explained the baby's dark skin and saved the lives of both mother and baby. In "Wild Sallet," another infant is burned alive in a fireplace at birth, and her twin dies of disease when her father refuses to help her. These crimes serve to reunite the estranged parents and bring them peace. Go figure.

Preachers and organized religion in Haun's work are ridiculed for being irrelevant or worse. Mrs. Kanipe says of one character, "Dreams didn't bother Amy any more than a lie bothers a preacher man." Elsewhere she says, "I sort of believe folks can be saved without giving Preacher Jarven the last poke of meal they've got." [End Page 33]

But Fate, another matter altogether, is regarded by Haun's characters with sacred dread. An entire menu of superstitions has evolved in an attempt to control or predict its caprices. To prevent bad luck one must avoid burning sassafras wood, or standing on an ant hill, or eating honey on the day a relative is buried, or getting married when red haw bushes bloom. A horseshoe nailed to the bottom of one's churn keeps witches at bay.

These witches and ghosts are real, and often present, for Haun's characters, and "witch doctors" have busy practices fending them off. Dreams and visions are carefully noted and heeded, and the natural world is festooned with warning signs. Dreaming of a snake means the dreamer will soon be killed. A girl sees the face of her future husband reflected in a spring. A dove calling from a housetop warns of death within a year. A snakeskin in one's path, a hooting owl, a cow with a dry teat—all presage bad luck. But a daddy longlegs brings good luck, while the crow of a roosting rooster announces rain. Much of this strikes me as a genuine spiritual impulse run amuck. Those who lack real faith in, or experience of, a trustworthy God try to glimpse their futures or avert disaster through the aid of such obsessive-compulsive rituals. But alert readers will notice that many of the disasters the characters regard as foretold and foreordained stem from the passivity or poor choices of those involved.

At the same time, Haun hints at the possibility of an authentic relationship with the supernatural on the part of some characters. Because they live in such close contact with nature, using its bounty for food and medicine, and for materials with which to build and heat their homes, crossing any chasm between the natural and the supernatural is an easy step for a few, rather than a precarious leap. If Haun views Christianity with a jaundiced eye, she seems to have a higher regard for the pantheism that underlies her natal culture. Like a substratum in an archaeological dig, it bristles with potsherds from the shattered belief system of the Native Americans who originally inhabited East Tennessee. They believed that an essence they called the Great Spirit resided in and united all living organisms and inanimate objects and could incarnate in varying forms. Similarly, Mrs. Kanipe says, "The same body can't last forever, of course. So the soul has to have a new one to take the place of the old wore-out body—just like [End Page 34] a plow that is out in the weather, the handles rot out but the point lasts on." In a beautiful ballad-like story called "The Piece of Silver," Haun illustrates this pagan transubstantiation via two thwarted lovers. The bewitched girl, who can transform into a doe, is shot with a silver bullet by the boy's father. The grieving boy gradually turns into a buck and vanishes into the forest.

This struggle in Haun's work to reconcile genuine spirituality with its distorted expression in both folk superstition and organized religion is a topic that has preoccupied me for a long time.

A second conflict that Haun grapples with in her fiction is that between kind but ineffectual females and brutal, domineering males. I count eight murders in the 197 pages of The Hawk's Done Gone in addition to endless beatings, incest, animal torture, and verbal abuse. Usually the perpetrators are male and the recipients are women, children, and animals. Many of the men are unabashed drunks and "whorehoppers" who pay for their liquor and their prostitutes by moonshining and by selling off anything their long-suffering womenfolk own or manage to produce. But the real problem is not just the random viciousness of drunken louts, though it is that, too. It is deliberate sadism, which is usually met by its targets with mute masochism, the ethos still glorified in such country music hits as "Stand By Your Man."

The sado-masochism of some of Haun's characters is so extreme that it would be funny, if it were not so horrifying. In "The Look," a mother insists that her daughter permit her own brother to rape her. Another brother beats his sister's pet calf to death, makes a whip of its hide, and flogs her with it. When a young man comes calling on her, the brother breaks a plate over her head. At the end of The Hawk's Done Gone, Ad, the husband of the matriarchal Mrs. Kanipe, sells off all her cherished family antiques and tears down her log cabin to make room for a house more to his liking, while she sits in agonized silence and eventually dies.

The most baffling aspect of this syndrome is the participation of most of the women in their own victimization. A few of the male characters try to protect the women from the abusive men. But these good guys end up being killed by the bad guys, as is Mrs. Kanipe's son Joe. Or they are run off, as is Sam Scott in "For the Love of God and Sam Scott." Worst of all, the women often turn against their would-be [End Page 35] rescuers and ally themselves with their persecutors. In "The Spring Is Trusty" Mrs. Kanipe's oldest daughter Amy turns down marriage to Eloyd, who is "as good to her as a cat is to its sick kitten," in favor of Enzor, who "boss[es] her around like a slut dog." Even though Enzor tells Amy she is as "ugly as a mud fence dabbed with tadpoles," he is the one she chooses. Meady, Mrs. Kanipe's youngest daughter, reunites with her estranged husband Burt only after he refuses to help save their dying child. She explains, "It did her good to know he had some spunk in him." Most heartbreaking of all is the girl who narrates "The Look." She has been raped, beaten, and threatened by her two brothers for so many years that she is unable to respond to the repeated advances of a kind cousin who loves her, and whom she loves.

And so it goes, down through the generations to the present, some mothers raising their sons to be monsters of narcissism, and training their daughters to indulge even the most selfish and perverse whims of their menfolk. A friend of mine who grew up in the heart of Haun country has six relatives who've been murdered. Six of her eighteen uncles were alcoholics, and one blew his leg off with dynamite so he could collect the insurance. My father and grandfather were doctors, and I was a candy striper at their hospital in Kingsport during high school. So I often heard about and witnessed the results of this senseless violence, which causes Tennessee to be listed as #3 among all the states in 2005 for violent crime and aggravated assault. Some have offered historical explanations for this phenomenon, invoking our descent from Scottish clans with their perpetual feuds, or from Native Americans with their rituals of torture and revenge. Others have proposed the lawlessness of the Civil War years, or the frustration of men descended from frontiersmen who no longer have a heroic function to perform. But I confess that I remain puzzled by this compulsion to torment and destroy other creatures, just as I do by the cooperation in their own destruction of those who are often its targets. Haun's work reminds me that the roots of this syndrome go deep in our region and intertwine with many of the qualities I admire most. Some of her writing would seem to give ammunition to those in the media who perpetuate the negative stereotypes that many Appalachians resent—of ourselves as lazy, ignorant brutes. But I figure that Haun served her time in the salt mines of the Appalachian psyche and earned the right [End Page 36] to say whatever she wants about our unfortunate shadow side. Besides, I need all the help I can get at understanding it.

Some have speculated on why Haun stopped writing fiction so young, but no one seems to know for sure. It's usually a mistake to search a writer's work too closely for autobiography. But there does have to be some way for a writer to know what she knows, and some reason for her being preoccupied with one type of behavior over another. So why all the savagery in Haun's writing? Reading between the lines, I suspect she must have witnessed and/or experienced some kind of violence as a child, which taught her what she knew about sadism. Her father's middle name was Enzor, and the character named Enzor in "The Spring Is Trusty" is a cold but jealous man who exercises tyrannical control over his wife. The mother in "The Look" is a masochist in the face of her abusive sons, and she demands masochism toward them from her daughter as well. Once Haun had written her wrenching stories about domineering fathers, incestuous brothers, and vicious mothers, had her childhood demons been exorcised? Or did she reach territory that she couldn't bear to explore any further?

Compared to most young writers Haun had a lot of encouragement and assistance, from Donald Davidson and John Crowe Ransom, her teachers at Vanderbilt, and from Wilbur Schramm, her writing teacher at Iowa. Allen Tate hired her to work for him at the Sewanee Review. The Hawk's Done Gone was accepted for publication quite quickly and was favorably reviewed by many, including Andrew Lytle. (Davidson, Ransom, Tate, and Lytle were all members of the Fugitives, who published a collection of essays called I'll Take My Stand, in which they maintained that certain traditions of the agrarian South needed to be salvaged from the wreckage of the Civil War and Reconstruction for the benefit of the entire nation.)

In Davidson's unpublished letters to Haun, he comments on her apparent complaint about writer's block, explaining that it is normal for a writer and that she should just wait it out. He consoles her when her publisher declines her second book, and he suggests another publisher, who appears to have also declined it. This must have been discouraging for Haun, but many writers continue in the face of repeated rejections. Some propose that Haun's need to earn money to support her mother and herself sapped her time and energy for fiction, [End Page 37] but many writers much less talented than she find a way to cope with day jobs and family responsibilities.

Did the well run dry? Did Haun simply use up all the rich lore she had squirreled away from her childhood and have nothing left to write about? Or did the company she kept demoralize her? Her Fugitive friends were touting a Southern past that honored certain traditional values they felt needed to be preserved. Yet Haun's South, the East Tennessee version, was a world apart from the Fugitives' haunts at Vanderbilt and Sewanee, Breadloaf and the Iowa writing school. For all their admirable qualities, many of Haun's characters also exhibit a misogyny that no mentally healthy woman could honor or want to preserve. Did this clash between the Fugitives' agenda and Haun's personal experiences short-circuit her ability to keep writing what she knew to be true?

Donald Davidson's faithful correspondence with Haun mysteriously ended in 1950 when she was experiencing rejection for her second manuscript. Among his final words to her were, "Your stories obviously impressed the editors, agents, etc., but, obviously, also, they don't know exactly what to say, since you don't fit their formulas." The film of Gone with the Wind had premiered in 1939, shortly before the publication of The Hawk's Done Gone. This Confederate juggernaut immediately overwhelmed the popular imagination with its images of a glamorous plantation South, crushing any dissent. Even Faulkner's novels were out of print by the mid 1940s. It took a rare reader to be interested in hearing instead about the poverty of the Southern mountains or about persecuted mixed race enclaves. And who would have wanted to read about a weather-beaten granny midwife and her abusive deadbeat husband with Scarlett and Rhett swanning around on center stage?

Haun's inability or unwillingness to conform to the prevailing conventions of Southern fiction is one aspect of her genius. But it may also have prevented her from finding a publisher, which may, in turn, have robbed her of the confidence and cash to continue writing her Tara-taunting truths. We will never know. We can only wonder and speculate—and mourn the fact that her amazing voice fell silent far too soon. [End Page 38]