Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

Appalachia Once and Future

“There really is no other way to describe it than as a communion — a communion with the land, with each other, but most of all, with family.” I’ve asked my mother what it means to be Appalachian, and she is studying the air in front of her while she tells me. “Really, it’s about being in harmony with the world God has created, with living things.”

Were it not for heritage — for the accounts our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers have handed down to us like an oral gospel — being young in Appalachia in the 21st century might feel like being young anywhere in the United States. Our America is the America that institutions, networks, and devices have built for us. We live in tension with the past and the future, and it can be easy to feel like we’re wearing someone else’s clothes. So, we ask our mothers. We borrow from them. We make our garments using their patterns.

My mom was raised a coal miner’s daughter in McRoberts, Kentucky (less than 100 miles from Tom Fletcher’s cabin, where Lyndon Johnson — all front-porch tenderness and sympathy — launched his war on poverty). In that part of the world, I am known not by my first name, but as “Donna’s girl,” and this carries weight, because my mother is “Leora and Oxur’s girl,” and our people are known to have always been firm in their principles and generous with both their efforts and their earnings.

Southern (and broader) Appalachia as it has been stereotyped in media, popular culture, and politics is a caricature of my mother’s Appalachia and the one that came before it. To the prophets and purveyors of industrial progress who “discovered” Appalachia after the Civil War, the Appalachian man and woman were relics of an ancient and backward-looking civilization. What excuse could be made for their stubborn self-reliance if not willful and unmitigated ignorance? Sensationalism started there, and it never really stopped.

In the last decade or so, the conversion story has come into fashion. It often (but not always) takes the form of a memoir. It gives readers a long last look at the sad state of affairs in left-behind Appalachia (or some other rural place) as the author concludes the social transformation from hillbilly to yuppy. By intention or accident, this account will make sweeping generalizations about the region and its people (a la Hillbilly Elegy). It will be met with a torrent of mostly-ignored responses from people who’ve made a life “back home,” and don’t shine to the suggestion that they are slow or antisocial or generally predisposed to failure.

In political sets, some see renewed interest in the region as a credit to themselves — a purely political phenomenon. Following the presidential election in 2016 that put Donald J. Trump in the oval office, the media — in a collective spasm of rural conscientiousness — flooded Appalachian towns, asking the folks they found there deep and serious questions about mountain life, like “Did you vote for Trump? Why?” and “Seriously … why?”

To the self-appointed and ill-equipped guardians of the modern man and woman in America, Appalachia is not so much a series of questions to be answered as it is a problem to be solved. Practical politics would keep us crouching on the front porch beside it, nodding earnestly at all its empty promises. What it offers is worse than the material poverty it clicks its tongue at. It is a poverty of the spirit.

Meanwhile, Appalachia is in its enlightenment period. That’s not to say — mind you — that Appalachia is only now finding enlightenment (whatever that means in this day and age). It’s to say that Americans who are outside the region’s physical boundaries are beginning to wise up to the authenticity, beauty, and sensibility of Appalachian culture.

What they’re finding here is a kind of dogged insistence on carrying on, and on doing it together. It is quite literally a cultivation. “Will that circle be unbroken?” A.P. Carter’s old tune asks.

The best of our new generation of Appalachian ambassadors understand that the survival of the culture depends on honoring the life cycle from birth to death and everything between. “The turning of the shadows,” my uncle calls it. It’s in the dishes that chef Sean Brock plates at his Nashville restaurant Audrey (a tribute to Sean’s Appalachian grandmother). It’s in Tyler Childers’ songs about generational loss (“Follow You to Virgie”), old-time religion (“Way of the Triune God”), and the choices we make for better or worse (“Nose on the Grindstone”). It’s with 49 Winchester at the old wooden sign on the Russell County line.

Lately, I’ve been spending evenings in a flat back in McRoberts with my mother’s oldest brother. He’s helping me put in a garden according to the way he was taught by his father. We are hovering in the dirt over heirloom seeds that have been passed down from generation to generation, to him and now to me.

Last year, my uncle thought he lost his seeds when Eastern Kentucky floodwaters tore through this bottom carrying with them car parts, teddy bears, and Christmas decorations. In the end, what he’d shared with his friends through the years came back to him, and now it has taken root in the rich Kentucky soil.

That’s our way here, isn’t it? What we love, what we take time to know and know well, and what we share with each other at our best and our worst, always comes back to us.

For my Appalachian mother and grandmothers and for every woman who has made a way for her family in trying times.

Farahn Morgan is a writer based in central Appalachia. You can find her at longroadhome.substack.com and on Twitter at @FarahnMorgan.