Lee Smith | Articles

Terrain of the Heart

Although I don't usually write autobiographical fiction, my main character in a recent short story sounded suspiciously like the girl I used to be: "More than anything else in the world, I wanted to be a writer. I didn't want to learn to write, of course. I just wanted to be a writer, and I often pictured myself poised at the foggy edge of a cliff someplace in the south of France, wearing a cape, drawing furiously on a long cigarette, hollow-cheeked and haunted. I had been romantically dedicated to the grand idea of 'being a writer' ever since I could remember."

*Lee, at her home in Grundy, VA*

I started telling stories as soon as I could talk--true stories, and made-up stories, too. My father was fond of saying that I would climb a tree to tell a lie rather than stand on the ground to tell the truth. In fact, in the mountains of southwestern Virginia where I grew up, a lie was often called a story, and well do I remember being shaken until my teeth rattled with the stern admonition, "Don't you tell me no story, now!"

But I couldn't help it. I was already hooked on stories, and as soon as I could write, I started writing them down.

I wrote my first book on my mother's stationery when I was 9. It featured as main characters my two favorite people at that time: Adlai Stevenson and Jane Russell. The plot was that they went west together in a covered wagon, and once there they became--inexplicably--Mormons. Even at that age, I was fixed upon glamour and flight, two themes I returned to again and again as I wrote my way through high school, fueled by my voracious reading. My book choices proceeded alphabetically: the B's, for instance, included Hamilton Basso, the Brontes, . . . At St. Catherine's School in Richmond, during my last two years of high school, I was gently but firmly guided toward the classics, but my own fiction remained relentlessly sensational.

Photo by Susan Raines

The small building behind her Grundy home where as a child she wrote her stories.

At Hollins College, I wrote about stewardesses living in Hawaii, about evil twins, executives, alternative universes. I ignored my teachers' instructions to write what you know. I didn't know what they meant. I didn't know what I knew. I certainly didn't intend to write anything about Grundy, Va.

But then Louis Rubin, my teacher, had us read the stories of Eudora Welty, and a light went on in my head. I abandoned my stewardesses, setting my feet on more familiar ground, telling simpler stories about childhood; though I was never able, somehow, to set the stories in those mountains I came from.

This never happened until I encountered James Still--all by myself, perusing the S's in the Hollins College library.

Here I found the beautiful and heartbreaking novel River of Earth, a kind of Appalachian Grapes of Wrath chronicling the Baldridge family's desperate struggle to survive when the mines close and the crops fail, familiar occurrences in Appalachian life. Theirs is a constant odyssey, always looking for something better someplace else--a better job, a better place to live, a promised land. As the mother says, "Forever moving, yon and back, setting down nowhere for good and all, searching for God knows what . . . Where are we expected to draw up to?"

At the end of the novel, I was astonished to read that the family was heading for --of all places!--"Grundy."

"I was born to dig coal," Father said. "Somewhere they's a mine working. I been hearing of a new mine farther than the head of Kentucky River, on yon side Pound Gap. Grundy, its name is. . . ."

I read this passage over and over. I simply could not believe that Grundy was in a novel! In print! Published! Then I finished reading River of Earth and burst into tears. Never had I been so moved by a book. In fact it didn't seem like a book at all. River of Earth was as real to me as the chair I sat on, as the hollers I'd grown up among.

Suddenly, lots of the things of my life occurred to me for the first time as stories: my mother and my aunts sitting on the porch talking endlessly about whether one of them had colitis or not; Hardware Breeding, who married his wife, Beulah, four times; how my uncle Curt taught my daddy good liquor, how I got saved at the tent revival; John Hardin's hanging in the courthouse square; how Petey Chaney rode the flood . . .

I started to write these stories down. Twenty-five years later, I'm still at it. And it's a funny thing: Though I have spent most of my working life in universities, though I live in Chapel Hill and eat pasta and drive a Toyota, the stories which present themselves to me as worth the telling are most often those somehow connected to that place and those people. The mountains which used to imprison me have become my chosen stalking ground.

This is the place where James Still lives yet, in an old log house on a little eastern Kentucky farm between Wolfpen Creek and Deadmare Branch. Still was born in Alabama in 1906; went to Lincoln Memorial University in Cumberland Gap, Tenn., and then to Vanderbilt; and came to Knott County, Ky., in 1932 to "keep school" at the forks of Troublesome Creek.

After six years, as he likes to tell it, he "retired" and turned to reading and writing full time. As one of his neighbors said, "He's left a good job and come over in here and sot down."

Last summer he told me he had read an average of three hours a day, every day, for over 50 years. His poetry and fiction have been widely published and praised; his Wolfpen Notebooks came out in 1991 from the University Press of Kentucky.

In the preface to that fine collection of sayings and notes he has made over all these years, Still says:

"Appalachia is that somewhat mythical region with no known borders. If such an area exists in terms of geography, such a domain as has shaped the lives and endeavors of men and women from pioneer days to the present and given them an independence and an outlook and a vision such as is often attributed to them, I trust to be understood for imagining the heart of it to be in the hills of Eastern Kentucky where I have lived and feel at home and where I have exercised as much freedom and peace as the world allows."

This is an enviable life, to live in the terrain of one's heart. Most writers don't--can't--do this. Most of us are always searching, through our work and in our lives: for meaning, for love, for home.

Writing is about these things. And as writers, we cannot choose our truest material. But sometimes we are lucky enough to find it.