“Home Is Where We Come From”

by Jayne Anne Phillips

2005 Recipient of the Appalachian Heritage Writer’s Award

*This essay was the keynote presentation at the 2005 Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence Scarborough Society Awards event, Thursday, September 29, 2005, 8:00 p.m. at Shepherd University. All rights to the essay belong solely to Jayne Anne Phillips.

What role does home play in cultural and personal identity? Specifically, what is the concept of ‘homeplace,’ as we define it in Appalachia? In the highly mobile, media-saturated, homogenized America of today, how do we continue to define ourselves as connected to place? How do we protect ‘place’ and nurture our artists, writers, musicians, cooks and crafts people? How do we keep business opportunities and jobs from bypassing our small towns, forcing untold numbers of Main Streets into the shadows of corporate fast food strips? What about those malls located conveniently off exits that bypass locally owned restaurants, theaters, bookstores, and shops? What is place? What is Appalachia, and how has this place enriched and shaped our individual identities? If biology is the first destiny, place is certainly the second. We could come up with a formula: Identity = gender and place squared. Places change over time. Appalachia exists in part because the mountains unified and isolated our culture. Settlers who came to Appalachia from various countries and bloodlines shared certain characteristics, vocations, traits; we are their descendents. They were stubborn, determined, resourceful people, people who worked their own land and made their own art. They evolved their own music and a cuisine to support hard physical work. Physical survival and familial, rural independence took priority over formal education; Appalachia’s early artists were craftspeople who made usable art: quilts, hand turned furniture and houses, gardens. Appalachians persevered in settling land that was hard to farm and hard to mine; they grew passionately connected to the land, to the seasons, to dramatic, changeable weather, and they persevered even when jobs were scarce because generations of family had carved out this homeplace. They took on the nature of the land itself: the depth, the stoic beauty, the tendency not to give up secrets, the layering of history, the weight of time.

In my own work, I see place as a major determinant of destiny, of character, of male and female identity. In Machine Dreams, Danner’s perceptions of her parents, Jean and Mitch, are drenched in the associative, sensual details of place.

From Machine Dreams:

The branches of the lilacs in the August night looked furred with black and didn’t stir. By day the leaves were a deep and waxen green. Jean, come and get these kids, don’t either one of you ever stand near the driveway when you see I’m backing the car out, goddamn it, I’ll shake the living daylight out of you: what it meant was the State Road construction and the jackhammer, shaking a grown man’s body as he held the handle and white fire flew from the teeth of the machine. Endless repair of the dusty two-lanes progressed every summer, but the roads were never finished; they kept men working who had no other work and Danner liked to watch; at night she saw those men in the dark corners of her room, tall shadows with no faces. Even if there aren’t prisoners anymore the workmen are nearly the same thing, her mother said, and they did look different, dangerous, though they wore the same familiar khaki work clothes her father wore to work at the plant. Your father and Clayton own the concrete company--they don’t work for a wage, do you understand what I’m saying? The workmen were from Skully or Dogtown and their families got assistance, a shameful thing; in those shabby rows of houses on mud roads they kept their babies in cardboard boxes. But that was just a story, Mitch said; they were trying to get along like anyone. You’d say that about any man who worked on a road, wouldn’t matter if he was a lunatic, and Jean turned back to the stove, always; she stood by the stove, the kitchen cabinets, the sink, the whole house moored to earth by her solid stance, just as the world outside went with Mitch in the car. He carried the world in and out in the deep khaki pockets of his workman’s pants. When Danner and Billy were with him and the road crews were out, Mitch waited with no complaint for the flagman’s signal and kept the windows rolled down. Yellow dust filled the car and caked everything with a chalky powder. Big machines, earth-movers and cranes, turned on their pedestals with a thunderous grinding as two or three shirtless men pulled thick pipes across the asphalt with chains. Mitch held both children on his lap behind the steering wheel, the three of them crushed together in a paradise of noise.

In the Appalachia that formed my identity, the dignity and pride of male manual labor was everywhere necessary and respected. The stubborn perseverance of the constant female labor that supported male labor was everywhere necessary, and it was more and more necessary, in hard-pressed economies, that women work outside the home as well. The loud, grinding, dusty world of construction is male. The female locks out the world from the encapsulated safety of the car, yet insists the children never seal themselves off from her protective vigilance. It’s women who smell of shredded flowers and windblown seeding weeds, of mown grass ground to powder along roadways by machines; they’ll end as dust softer than starlight. The consciousness of the child who will evolve into the writer, already distinguishes between the daylight world -- the appearance of reality -- and its night time counterpart -- the hidden world, the eternal truth, all that lies beyond family, time and place, yet is expressed in the natural world defined by place.

The fields surrounding the house were full of light, scrub grass grew tall, and the milkweed stalks were thick as wrists. Wild wheat was in the fields and the crows fed, wheeling in circular formations. Milk syrup in the weeds was sticky and white; the pods were tight and wouldn’t burst for weeks. Where did the crows go at night? They were dirty birds waiting for things to die, Danner was not to go near them; when the black night came she was in her bed to wake in the dark and pretend she saw the birds, rising at night as they did at noon, their wingspan larger, terrifying, a faint black arching of lines against the darker black; even the grasses, the tangled brushy weeds, were black. Danner heard the house settle, a nearly inaudible creaking, ghostly clicking of the empty furnace pipes; her mother, her father, walking the hall in slippers. They walked differently and turned on no lights if it was late. Danner lay listening, waiting, fighting her own heavy consciousness to hear and see them as they really were. Who were they? The sound of her father was a wary lumbering sound, nearly fragile, his heaviness changed by the slippers, the dark, his legs naked and white in his short robe, the sound of his walking at once shy and violent. Danner heard him ask one word and the word was full of darkness: Jean?

The mystery of identity is tethered to place, to the psychic landscape of home and land. Just as place holds in its contours our knowledge of the natural world, place influences community ritual -- the holidays, the small town parades and festivals.

In a mostly rural world connected by two lane roads with passing lanes, place influences class and ritual expresses it. Danner’s parents work in town and her mother has a college education, but she lives on a rural road and rides a school bus the few miles to town. In Appalachia, a few miles can separate one class, one future, from another. From Machine Dreams:

Mornings before classes, older boys from the country had to change school buses to get to the high school; they waited on the massive stone steps of the junior high. They scared Danner; they were like men, big and grown, with shadows on their faces and big hands like her father’s hands. They had no money for cars or they wouldn’t be riding the buses; they wore shabby coats and laced-up farmers’ boots, combed their oily hair forward and then back in out-of-style pompadours, smoked cigarettes in defiance of the rules. Danner walked past them, up the worn steps to the big double doors of the school, stealing glances at their mysterious faces. Always, they were watching her, their expressions guarded, sullen, angry. What did they know about her? No one else ever paid any attention. Hey, they sometimes said, softly, appraisingly. Their smiles were sneers. Though she dressed like a girl from town--in penny loafers, full skirt, ankle socks--they watched her openly. She was ashamed and lowered her eyes; the boys looked away then and continued talking as though she were invisible. She heard phrases, snatches of words, as she passed. How many times she give it up? or dead before you know it. Who was dead? Most of them joined the Army or the mines as soon as they turned eighteen. You never saw them except on the steps--not at dances or the movies, or at the carnival in summer, not at the festival parade.

Ritual is just as layered as sediment or history. Machine Dreams takes to heart the belief that “the personal is political.” Appalachia sent more boys to die in Vietnam than any other region of the country; boys who needed jobs, or the GI Bill, or who just wanted to be men, learned their faith and trust and unquestioning loyalty watching those beautiful parades, pounding those base drums, wearing football or braided band uniforms, the same dark blue as military dress. Billy, the brother in Machine Dreams, follows this trajectory. Danner, his sister, leaves home after he’s listed MIA, and so alters the trajectory laid out for her in the stations of women’s lives. In Machine Dreams, Billy describes those lives against the backdrop of place -- a state park whose use is shaped by the culture of the people who live in the valleys and mountains and towns.

The summer before he started college, Billy worked as a lifeguard at the State Park, a wilderness of rhododendron and pine crossed with trails. The trails were steep and rocky above the winding river, dotted with bridges, picnic tables, stone-hewn barbecue pits, fireplaces built in the Depression by CCC men. The river wound or rushed according to season; every spring someone drowned in the rapids.

Families stayed farther up where there were guards, where the river was cordoned off. Billy sat there in his tall white chair, a silver whistle on a chain around his neck. Weekends the park was crowded, the stretch of paved riverbank spread with towels and bathers. Transistor radios blared pop legends. Young mothers, high school girls a few years before, lay insensate, their faces blank. They listened to Top 40 and oiled their thighs. Sometimes they started conversations. Hey there, aren’t you Billy Hampson? What class was it you were in--two years ago, right? Or I knew your sister. Where was it she went off to? Billy watched toddlers in the wading pool, a shallows roped off with plastic cord and multicolored floats. Even on weekends, the young mothers were alone. They were girls whose husbands worked Saturdays or watched TV ballgames; they bought new bathing suits every summer at K-Mart and read romance paperbacks. Already they seemed transformed into an isolated species; groups of boys who came to the park in such numbers never glanced at them. The older women, whose children were eight and ten and twelve, came in couples and played cards. They refereed their kids’ quarrels, drank iced tea from a thermos, smoked endless cigarettes; they were stolid, asexual, and self-contained. They didn’t notice Billy unless he reprimanded their children. Then the women stood up in their solid-color, one-piece suits, shouting threats and directions, snapping down the legs of the suits to cover a half-moon of sagging derriere.

By four in the afternoon everyone was gone. Billy locked up. He stood looking at the water and then went in, swimming underwater. He cleared the river to the opposite bank in five powerful strokes and long glides, surfaced, and moved back across with a regular butterfly stroke, hearing only the quick, flat impact of his limbs cutting water.

The character and form of Billy, golden, alone in the river in his scant time left at home is akin to the Appalachia that existed before mine drainage, strip mining, mountaintop mining, changed the landscape. For Danner, the emotional landscape is rendered uninhabitable by the loss of Billy and the betrayal of the war. She leaves, becomes an ex-pat, but she never leaves her culture or her perceptions of home.

Billy never got around to writing me the facts about trees in Vietnam, but maybe he never took a really good look at Asian trees. Not from ground level the way grunts, the foot soldiers, did. Guys in the Veterans’ Caucus at the University talked to me about trees, about Lai Khe, about choppers. They would answer any question and their answers were detailed. The leafy branches of cultivated rubber trees start at about twenty feet up the thick trunks; the leaves are long and shiny, a waxen, glossy green.

Trees in Bellington are oaks, elms, chestnuts, maples. These trees are the green world of Bellington, of the county surrounding the town, of the mountainous state. In California, I live way up north, near the sea. The trees are different there. The land--the beautiful cliffs, the ocean, and the waves of the surf--seems foreign. When I think of home, I think of a two-lane road densely overhung with the deciduous trees of a more familiar world. The real world.

In MotherKind, the protagonist, Kate, is the Appalachian expatriot Danner might have become. Kate flies home to tell her mother she is going to have a child. Her divorced mother lives alone and is terminally ill.

Ah, death. Words in English were not life or death. They were only messengers, impulses traveling on a nerve, bearers of tidings. “Here,” children said when the roll was called, as it was every morning, a ritual in the grade school Kate attended, the school her mother had attended before her, a two-story brick monolith with high ceilings and wide-board wooden floors. Generations of roll calls, as though the teachers couldn’t make out who was absent without the recitation of names, the voices answering, “Here.” Here, the doctor had said, indicating with his pointer the spots of shadow on the X-rays of her mother’s lungs. And here, and here. Here. Katherine had sat wordless in her chair, in her hospital gown, as Kate stood behind her, gripping her shoulders. Then Kate moved to sit beside her and took her hand. Without chemotherapy, six months to a year. With chemotherapy, a few months more. No chemo, Katherine said quietly. Radiation will halt the spread in the spine, they were told, and it was true; within days, she was pain free. The disease encroaches, then sleeps, alive in its sleep like the sleeper in a coma whose hair and nails grow long. Kate closes her eyes and the plane’s wheels bump reliably on tarmac. A smattering of polite applause runs through the cabin. And yes, here it is. Kat’s landscape: no plateaus. Appalachian scrub hills wild with flower, the dense foothills and humped mountains, valleys, small skies, hay smell, cicada and locust, generations of farms and mining towns, the winding dirt roads and fields in dense shade or brilliant sun, silos and barn board, choke of sumac and bramble: all she sees in her mind’s eye when she remembers home.

MotherKind is about change and transformation, about birth and death and the definition of home. Kate has known other cultures, other places, but those same black birds exist everywhere. Everywhere Kate goes, the metaphor of home takes the form of the Appalachian road, the dirt road curving up and down through dense green forest, through forested snowfield, the glittering two-lane road moving over rivers and past homesteads. Home has been located in those images, and in her mother, so identified with place.

Kate drives. The old road home is a two-lane winding past clustered houses and abandoned coal tipples. Closed roadside gas stations still wear the weathered, upright jewelry of their empty pumps. No trucks rumbling through, no travelers stopping to buy sandwiches and soda pop. Here the same battered green metal signs are peppered with BB holes, lettered with the names of settlements and the legend “Unincorporated.” Across the hilly yards of the houses Kate sees chickens strutting, laundry hung out. A kid with a wagon. The air, the sky, the leaning buildings, all seem less dusty, the land more green, the storefronts preserved and oddly alone, as though they will vanish beyond this deserted grace into a future that already exists, shimmering where the heat meets the road.

“I suppose people will begin to leave these places now,” Kate says.

“Oh, eventually,” her mother answers. “But the school buses still bring plenty of kids in from these hamlets, and from hollows farther in, the ones up dirt tracks. That will disappear in another generation. Everything will be paved, after a fashion.”

“I love this road,” Kate tells her mother.

Kate discovers a changed Appalachia, a place more like the rest of the world, but with important differences.

The world Kate knew is gone. Kroger’s Grocery, down by the old train station, closed years ago. Main Street has emptied out, the locally owned stores replaced by chain franchises and a new mall. Open fields between town and the high school are now parking lots fronting warehouse-size concerns with floodlights: Kmart, Pizza Hut, Bonanza Steak House, CVS, NHD, Blockbuster, a vast Purity Supreme open twenty-four hours. The giant lights stand storklike on gargantuan poles, their flat, rectangular faces downturned and glowing pale yellow in the ocher afternoon. Kate wonders if the timers are off as she follows her mother into the bright market, with its air-conditioned aisles and piped Muzak. People who worked downtown have taken jobs at the huge new stores, her mother has told her, and that is a good thing. Even though the stores are so much bigger, you can still buy from people you know.

Appalachians have long memories, and to many of us, certain elements of the modern world seem a corporate mirage superimposed over the truth. The truth of memory itself operates as a homing device, no matter how far we go from home. Eventually Kate cares for her mother in a city far from Appalachia, and her divorced parents relate to one other for the first time in many years, when her father visits to see Kate’s baby. In literature, as in Motherkind, place is truly expressed in character.

Kate did laundry and tried to remember her parents’ marriage, way back before she’d realized there was anything wrong with it. Vacation road trips were the only time the family spent uninterrupted days together, captive voyagers in the capsulelike space of the car. Katherine packed the backseat floor with coolers of food and drinks and arranged mattress and pillows overtop so the kids could take turns sleeping. Wherever they went--Myrtle Beach, Deep Creek Lake, Atlanta to see friends--Waylon drove straight through. They stopped at rest stops for picnics, never at restaurants or motels. Waylon had a habit of reading highway signs aloud while driving. “Rest stop, two miles,” he would announce, or “Danger, falling rock.” Rocks fell onto highways only in Appalachia, Kate assumed, from the sheer stone cliffs blasted apart for roads. He read signs in a tone of mild amusement: “Wheeling, 25 miles,” as though he knew worlds the terse words represented.

Men Kate knew weren’t like her father. It was as though his kind comprised a vanished world, a time when sexuality was mute stored power and isolation. Men like Waylon lived by touch, and wordlessness, and custom so ingrained it seemed instinctual. Waylon came from working people. Working people were the town then, and Aunt Raine’s family figured prominently. Education was apprenticeship. Vocation was blood ties when men worked with their hands, brought family into a business. Kate remembered some of those men, or thought she did, from photographs and stories--her father’s uncles, and Raine’s husband, and the husbands of the other aunts. Big men of Welsh and English descent, they’d seemed a singular tribe possessed of quiet dignity and understood beliefs. Men Kate knew talked, existed in a range of options, deliberated, vacillated. Workingmen from home had shared fraternity rather than freedom; they made of necessity a respected code. Waylon’s masculinity was like an elemental gravity.

Home grounds us. Place functions in identity as spiritual gravity. Kate’s father leaves Kate to her new life, new child, new marriage, to the nurture of her mother and the process of losing her. So specifically Appalachian in habit and temperament, he achieves eloquence in very few words. I’ll end with this scene from MotherKind.

Before driving to the airport, Kate pulled into the parking lot of the construction site opposite the river, at the bottom of the hill. “Look,” she told her father. “There’s a new sign up now, with a picture. See? They’re going to be nice apartments.”

He shook his head. “Honey, I don’t think I want to be living with any bunch of old people.”

“You could have as much or as little to do with everyone else as you liked.”

“I’m used to being on my own, Miss.”

“I could find you a place of your own, then, but here. None of us are living at home anymore, Dad. I hate for you to be there by yourself.”

“Why, it’s what I’m used to. What would I do here?”

“What do you do there?”

“I make the rounds. Coffee of a morning with the fellows at McDonald’s. Couple of cousins I still see--you remember Nella, lives in a trailer over by the river. She’s near blind now--since her husband died, she don’t get out. I do her shopping.”

The air conditioner continued emitting its gradual hum, breathing into the small space of the car. Beyond Waylon’s profile the little river shone, nearly coppery in bright sunlight. The light was incongruous, Kat thought. There was dusk all round him, the hour when gold light darkens.

Waylon took his hat from his head and placed it on his knees, smoothing the taupe brim with his fingertips. “Everything’s there,” he said, “houses I built, streets I laid down, Raine’s grave. You’ll be bringing your mother back. I’ve been in that town sixty years. It’s home, no matter who’s left it. Your home too.”

“My home is here, Dad,” she said gently.

He turned to look at her. “This is where you live. Home is where you come from.” He reached to cover her hand with his.