Ruralite Cafe: Published 10/24/02

By Lisa Majors-Duff - News Editor

Listen to them before they are gone

"Willa Mae was generous with her time and her memories," Lynn told us. "Thanks to Willa Mae, Sylva's record of its past is more complete."

A similar effort to recapture the past was under taken recently by filmmaker Tammy Hopkins and the Cradle of Forestry Interpretive Association. Through interviews recorded on video, the lives of three more Appalachian women, now in their 80s, have been preserved forever, while at the same time a picture of Jackson County when these women were children will be kept safe.

"Three Cultures of Appalachia," which premiered last weekend at the Cradle of Forestry, features the stories of three native Western North Carolinians, two of whom were born and raised in Jackson County. The women - Amanda Swimmer of Cherokee's Big Cove community, Mary Jane Queen of Caney Fork community and Elizabeth Allen of Hendersonville - all agreed to sit in front of a camera and remember their childhoods and what it was like growing up in this rural mountain region.

After telling us her name and birthday in her native Cherokee, Amanda Swimmer used English to tell how much she looked forward to visiting her grandmother on the weekends. She also tells us about her father's rules for eating the first corn of the season.

"They said if you blow it before you eat it, the wind will come and knock all your corn down," she says. "Even potatoes. You don't blow them when you first eat new potatoes."

Daily chores meant the boys had to chop wood and the girls had to carry water and help their mother around the house, Swimmer said.

"When she told us to do something, we had to do it right then," she said, describing how she and her siblings always minded what they were told. "We never did say, 'no,' to our mother."

When asked about her play time, Swimmer said, "all we done was go out and climb trees and make a swing out of grapevines. Mostly we just stayed outside and played in the woods."

Though her school went through the eighth grade, Swimmer said she only finished the fourth grade.

"We had to get up and walk on the railroad track all the way to school," she said. "I was the smallest one, and they had to drag me down the road.

"They didn't teach Cherokee at that time," she continued. "They only taught English."

Swimmer explained that the family's medicine came from the local medicine man, saying, "My mother couldn't doctor us; it wouldn't take if you doctored your own family."

Swimmer married Luke Swimmer in 1939. They have nine children, 22 grandchildren and 22 great-grandchildren.

"To get to Mary Jane Queen's house, you have to travel some 30 minutes from Sylva," the film's narrator says. "That's provided you don't get lost on the twisting, turning country roads."

Queen, a legend in these parts for her vast musical talents, was asked many of the same questions posed to Swimmer, and many of her answers were similar to those given by the elderly Indian woman.

Born in 1914, Queen traces her history - her mother's people were Scots-Irish, while her father's family came from England - for the interviewer.

"We had a living room, upstairs and a kitchen," she said of her childhood home. "But we always had room."

Going to school meant rising from bed at 7 a.m. "We had to walk. We didn't have school buses back then."

Chores were likewise mandatory for Queen and her 10 brothers and sister.

"We burned wood. The boys fixed the wood, and I was usually the one who carried it in," she said. "We carried water; we didn't have water in the house." When chores were finished, homework was next. Then, if time permitted, play was allowed.

"We got our exercise," she said. "We'd get out and run, we'd play ball, we'd pitch horseshoes.

"I've had people to ask me if it wasn't very boring when I was growing up," she continued. "I told them there was never a dull moment."

After interviewing Elizabeth Allen, an African-American woman from Hendersonville, director Hopkins brings the audience back to each of the ladies as she asks them about how times have changed since they were children.

"We didn't have any tourism until they built this road (the Blue Ridge Parkway)," Swimmer recalls. "That's when I started making pottery. I'd bring out my pottery and they'd buy them."

"They wasn't very many tourists until they got the parkway here," Queen agreed.

The tourism industry provided Swimmer a job at the Oconaluftee Indian Village.

"I sat there until I retired working," she says. "Thirty-five years there when I retired."

"In a way it's real good, and in another way it's not, or at least I don't think so," Queen said of the area's tourism industry. "When the tourist come in and they want to buy a home, they pay what some here in the community calls a 'small fortune.' They don't keep it always, and when they get ready to sell it, none of the people here in the community can afford to buy it back."

"Despite the fact that Amanda has worked for the tourism industry, and Mary Jane participates in heritage festivals, none of the women see their own lives in terms of a modern, tourism-driven economy," the narrator says. "They are simply mountain women who have endured with the changes around them."

And thanks to people like Tammy Hopkins and Lynn Hotaling, the lives of these "simple mountain women" will be forever accessible to those of us too much in the present to realize the benefits of the past.

Back to Archive: 10/24/02.