Not Only the Hills Should Remember

by

Nicki Leone

There is a description in my latest seed catalog that goes like this:

Cherokee White Flour, Original: Seed collected by grower Tony West from an elderly Cherokee woman in the Tuskasegee area of North Carolina. Longer ears and taller stalks than the Brown and Robinson reselection of the 1980s. 11-12" long ears on sturdy 15' talk stalks. White kernels, 8-10 rows/ear, 50 seeds/row, white cobs. Makes great flour. Important historical variety.

I think at some point the writer James Still must have had the same catalog. In his short story “From the Morgue” the main character summons someone from the county agriculture extension service to test the soil in his garden plot. “...I had fought goat’s foot morning glories for years. I’d cut them down to a stalk, year by year, never allowing them to seed themselves. I told the agent of my victory over the goat’s-foot and said, facetiously, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to lose seed of them.’ The agent laughed and said, ‘We can’t allow that to happen.’ ”

Later, on the telephone, the man—a poet who knows he won’t be remembered for his poetry—asks to be remembered for saving the goat’s-foot morning glory from extinction: “I’ve started my own seed bank to save this unappreciated bane of the agricultural world.”

The funny thing is, I’ve got something very like the goat’s-foot morning glory that comes up all over my garden. I’ve forever ripping it off the lower branches of my fig tree, yanking it away from the rosemary bush, and disentangling it from the corn stalks in high summer. (I don’t grow Cherokee White Flour, but something more suitable for straight eating—Silver Queen). It never occurred to me that there was a story that went along with the weed.

Twenty years ago, I had just moved South, and in my life as a career bookseller I was making a point to read all the “important” southern writers I needed to know to get used to this strange new country I found myself learning to live in, just as I was attempting to grow all the “important” things in my garden. I read Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. I planted azaleas and Lady Banks roses. I read Carson McCullers, William Faulkner and Walker Percy. I grew Better Boy tomatoes and Blue Lake pole beans. I even made my way through Shelby Foote’s massive three-volume history of the Civil War while I was trying to grow California Wonder green peppers from the little six-packs of Bonnie Bell seedlings they sold at all the hardware stores. But James Still was not on the list. (Nor, for that matter, was Cherokee White Flour dent corn). He should have been.

James Still came into my life about twenty years too late and ten years after he actually died. Or maybe he came right on time, when I had finally begun to understand that there were many kinds of South in the South. It took awhile for me to grasp that I hadn’t just come south, but to a specific part of the south. That the sandy soil and low, muggy swamps of the coastal plains of North Carolina were a different place altogether from the hot red dirt farms of the piedmont to the west, or the high bright air of the mountains further west still. It was about the same time I realized I’d rather be growing my neighbor’s Cherokee Purple tomatoes than the Better Boys you could get at Lowe’s in the landscape section. Somebody had made point of saving those Cherokee purples. Somebody wanted them to be remembered. I suppose that is what is meant when people talk about regionalism in literature—the stuff we want remembered about the place we are in.

Still’s specific part of the south is the Ozarks, and the stories in The Hills Remember, the Complete Short Stories of James Still, (due out in March from University Press of Kentucky) are as faithful a portrait of his part of the country as the front leaf in anybody’s family bible or the pictures in anyone’s old family album. Still has been called the Dean of Appalachian literature—he may have actually created the genre when he wrote his great novel, River of Earth. But if his reputation as a novelist and a poet is unassailable, his reputation as a short story writer has been, perhaps, overlooked, except by the people who know where to look. It was partially to redress this imbalance that The Hills Remember was put together, although perhaps also such a volume of collected stories was inevitable. James Still is that kind of writer—the kind with the ring of the eternal in his sentences.

I had, much belatedly, discovered Still after reading and admiring several writers who all candidly talk about how much they admire him. Speak his name in the company of writers like Ron Rash or Silas House or Daniel Woodrell and you can almost feel their reverence fill the air between you. And in the odd serendipitous way that things happen when I am paying attention to the universe, it was not long after hearing Still’s short stories praised in a casual dinner conversation that an announcement about the publication of The Hills Remember came across my desk.

What does it mean, to read an author’s entire oeuvre, start to finish, over the space of a few days or weeks, in the pages of a single volume? I found myself wondering about this as I was reading. Normally I would have found my way towards Still in bits and pieces—a scrounged volume of stories in a used bookstore, a story published in an old edition of Prairie Schooner or The Virginia Quarterly Review, something included in an old edition of The Best American Short Stories. New (to me) writers tend to surface slowly into my awareness this way. But here was all the short stories of James Still in one place. Everything he’d ever published. A bunch of things he had never published. Over half a century of literary work crammed together into about four hundred pages.

The stories in The Hills Remember are arranged chronologically, but that might not be the most rewarding way to read them. I skipped back and forth in the book myself, reading stories based on arbitrary things like how much I liked the title, where the book fell open, where I re-opened it when I had lost my place. Still was in the habit of reworking and reusing material, as editor Ted Olson points out in his introduction to the collection, some of the stories becoming scenes in his novels, some of the language repeated and refined in later work. A straight front-to-back read of the book gives a good view of Still's evolution as a storyteller (something along the lines of “incredible” to “amazing and magnificent”) but it perhaps unfairly emphasizes the occasional repeat phrase and re-used scene, especially since Still’s writing is of the page-turning kind that will keep a reader up late into the night. Not because of the action or the fast-paced plots in his stories, but because the language is so achingly beautiful one can hardly bear to stop reading:

The sun was high above the hills when the sky beyond the ridge took on a yellow cast. There were no clouds other than a scattering of horsetails. At first the yellowness was only in the west, then it advanced, enveloping hilltop after hilltop until the sun-ball shone dully as through a saffron veil. It spread swiftly east, the hue of sulphur. It came without shape or sound bearing the molten glassiness of a sunset. Flaxbirds settled into the thickets. The dark hollow birds that warbled seldom in late summer sang not at all. Chickens went to an early roost in the sycamore trees, the prickly seed-balls hanging on twig-strings about their heads. They settled without sleeping, pale second lids opening and closing.

The beauty in art is in its specificity. In its precision and jewel-like clarity. The greatness in art is in its universality. There is much beauty in the writing of James Still—even the murders are beautifully told—but what clutches at the heart of the reader is the universality of his characters, their stories. A wife who wants to stay on the farm facing off against her husband who wants to move the family to the mining camp where he has work. A little girl who gets a bit lost in her head playing “house.” An old-time Bible-thumping preacher who has to come to terms with the stories soldier boys tell when they come back from a war. A high spirited boy who is in constant trouble with the law, but is devoted to his mother. A couple of teenagers who like to burn energy by causing a ruckus, and go too far.

The clothes are homespun and hand sewn. The people ride horses more often than they ride in cars. The mountains loom on all sides, shutting out the wide world beyond. And the dialect Still leaves in all of its strange and vivid glory; (“The boilers of hell would explode did this pair lock horns. Hard numbers, the both. Stubborn as peavies. Fellows who don’t care whether it snows oats or rains tomcats, they’re dangerous to be around.”) But the stories under the language and the beauty? Well they are familiar, universal, eternal. We know these people. The reader might not be sure how stubborn peavies are known to be, but he gets that the two young men are about to get in a fight over a girl, and the fight is going to be bad. And isn’t that a small drama that is played out in every corner of God's green earth?

So while the reason behind creating a complete anthology of James Still’s short stories might be to forever cement his reputation as the grand old man of Appalachian literature, I hope The Hills Remember reaches farther: Into the town houses and high rise apartment buildings of New York City or Chicago, the westward-facing villas of the California coast, and into the Spanish-mission-style houses in the Southwest Desert, where hopefully people will discover that James Still is a great Appalachian writer, a great Southern writer, and most importantly, a great American writer.

And I? I’ll let some of the goat’s-foot morning glories run wild in the garden this season—still a bane of the agricultural world, but no longer unappreciated.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Hills Remember: The Complete Short Stories of James Still, edited by Ted Olson  (University Press of Kentucky, 2012)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.