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U.S. Of Appalachia? Goodbye, stereotypes
It was Washington Irving of “Rip Van Winkle” fame who suggested in 1839 that this nation needed a name tied to what was then its signature geographical feature. Though Irving’s proposed “United States of Appalachia” did not materialize, journalist Jeff Biggers is on a mission to prove that the peaks and valleys that make up our region are more than a “Sleepy Hollow” that’s a century or two behind the rest of the nation.
He’ll be in Sylva Saturday spreading his revolutionary message that Appalachia – long dismissed as either “Deliverance” or Dogpatch – is instead the region that has led many of America’s vanguard movements.
Biggers’ new book, “The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture and Enlightenment to America,” celebrates the groundbreaking contributions the region has made to American history and culture. He will be at City Lights Bookstore for a 7 p.m. reading Saturday, Feb. 25.
According to Biggers, America has followed Appalachia’s lead from the pivotal Battle of Kings Mountain, which turned the tide in the American Revolution, to the Highlander Folk School’s role in training 20th century civil rights activists.
Far from being the nation’s backwater, Appalachia has been on the cutting edge of history, Biggers says.
As he travels around promoting the book, Biggers is initially met with attitudes that are positive, but patronizing, he said. People start to come around when he tells them that before Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence a group of mountaineers had set up their own government in the area that’s now Johnson City and Kingsport, Tenn. Thumbing their nose at both the British Crown and Colonial Virginia, residents of the “State of Washington” negotiated their own deals with the Cherokee and wrote their own laws.
The British, fearful their colonial empire might crumble, termed the well-educated and fiercely independent outpost “a dangerous example for the people of America,” Biggers said.
In addition, the first abolitionists were found in the Southern Appalachians, and Biggers includes information that the late Rosa Parks, heroine of the Montgomery bus boycott, attended a workshop at the Highlander Folk School in the Tennessee mountains a few months before she famously refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger.
Biggers gives equal space to reminding us of Appalachia’s cultural contributions as well as our region’s political and social ones.
From Sequoyah’s development of a written language for the Cherokee to noted authors like Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe and Hillsboro, W.Va.’s Nobel Prize-winning Pearl Buck, Biggers makes a case for the legacy of the Appalachian literary community. And from Dillsboro’s legendary Samantha Bumgarner to Saluda’s Nina Simone, he demonstrates the region’s vast musical legacy.
“People just don’t know the history,” Biggers said during a telephone interview Monday. “That’s part of the reason for my book. Let’s get beyond the pity or depravity people usually think of in connection with the mountains and throw those out. Let’s have a new set of history.”
According to Biggers, the cliche is that nothing in Appalachia has changed for 200 years, but he sees the region as a great crossroads.
“People are going up into the mountains and coming down from the mountains – it’s a crossroads of influence.”
The book has been a 23-year project for Biggers. Its genesis came during a 1983 hitchhiking trip he took through the region.
“I got a ride and the first thing I did was make a joke about ‘hillbillies,’” said Biggers, who’s from the (Ozark) hill country of southern Illinois. “The driver told me to either get out or get ready to learn about Appalachia.”
The driver, a Connecticut transplant named Warren Doyle, took Biggers to the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem, W.Va.
“Thrust into the farm life and cultural activities of the folk school, which had been founded by the legendary labor activist and poet Don West for the summer, I learned firsthand not only about the need to champion progressive cultural traditions and values, but also how to sort fact from fiction in defending them from the nefarious versions of outsiders,” Biggers writes. “Few people had done more than West ... to nurture an Appalachian identity. He had churned out stacks of articles, poems, stories and pamphlets on the history of ‘the other Appalachia.’ He was certainly controversial, often cantankerous, but committed to getting the story right.”
Through what Biggers calls a “life-changing summer,” West forced him to consider the “role of writing in reclaiming the hidden histories and stories of the maligned and misunderstood regions in our society.”
According to Biggers, West told him “If you do not know your history, others will provide it for you, often in a version that is wrong, belittling and misleading. This is what has happened to Appalachia.”
It was West who first reminded Biggers that some of the nation’s most important authors rose out of the mountains of Appalachia. Once they arrived on the literary scene, many were reclassified as “southern” writers in the manner of Wolfe and James Agee, even though Agee’s Pulitzer Prize was for “A Death in the Family,” a novel based on his childhood in Knoxville, Tenn.
According to Biggers, three authors best known for their writings about the American West – Willa Cather, Edward Abbey and Cormac McCarthy – also trace their roots to the Appalachian Mountains.
“The United States of Appalachia” is a follow-up to Biggers’ earlier book, “No Lonesome Road,” which is a collection of the writings of his Appalachian mentor, Don West.
“I wanted to go beyond that book to capture a national vision of how Appalachia has changed America,” Biggers said.
When asked why Jackson County’s most notorious innovator – Dr. John Brinkley of goat-gland transplants and radio advertising fame – didn’t make his book, Biggers replied that he was only been able to include about a tenth of the information he wanted to put in.
“There are so many people and chapters I left out,” he said. “Appalachian music could be 10 volumes by itself.”
Biggers, who has worked in radio and as a writer and educator, said he’s excited about his upcoming trip to Sylva.
“I love coming to your area,” he said, mentioning his admiration for Western Carolina University writer/poet/professor Ron Rash, who Biggers describes as “the next Robert Penn Warren.”
During the author’s Saturday visit to City Lights, he will read from his book, discuss his research, answer questions and sign books. For more information, call City Lights at 586-9499.
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