Issue 2:2 | Featured Artist | Thomas Rain Crowe
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TRIPLE NEGATIVES
Thomas Rain Crowe
“The speech of the Southern Mountaineers bristles with strong language, pungent metaphors, vivid similes, and vigorous personifications--“beastifications”--that are tricks of language that have in many instances served the highlander and his ancestors since before Chaucer.”
-Cratis Williams from Mountain Life & Work, 1962
“Wul, sar, whilest he uz a-sankerin’ along, a-thankin’ abaout first one thang an’ then t’other, he jist happened to spy a survagerse big yaller-stripedy-bellied buj’lebee a-smaoulin’ over a blossom ‘at uz a-growin’ on a mornin’ glory vine on one of the post-es thair by the side o’ the big road.”
From “The Fox and the Bum’lebee,” North Carolina Historical Review, April 1978
Love of place and love of language go hand in hand. Or, as my old friend Zoro once said; “Who you are is all about where you are from.” As a boy growing up over in Graham County, my first language was what has been called “Southern Mountain Speech”--a rich blend of Scots, Chaucerian English, and a witty Irish lyrical structure when spoken coming from Scotland and Ireland. This Appalachian dialect was inherently rich with poetic idioms and colloquialisms, lyrical inflections and natural rhythms, making it unique as well as almost incomprehensible to any outsider. I can still remember a rainy Saturday in the Snowbird Supply General Store in Robbinsville and an old fella talking about the same summer thunder storm that had me and my buddies holed up inside drinking RC Colas and eating Moon Pies, and him calling it (the storm) a “sizzly sod-soaker.” And later during those years hearing references to such “thundery weather” as “a Devil’s footwasher” and a “nubbin’ stretcher.” There was no lack of colorful speech. Surrounded by such language, it’s no wonder that as early as the third grade I had already become interested in poetry, and by the fourth grade was writing my own.
But during the summer of 1962, my parents moved our family out of Milltown in Robbinsville to the northern end of the Blue Ridge Parkway just west of Charlottesville, Virginia--thus segregating me from the culture and the language I had grown up with.
Moving away from the place where I had consciously begun to identify and know myself was nothing less than a kind of “removal.” A forced march. My own “trail of tears.”
As I said my goodbyes to my Cherokee and Scots-Irish friends and my life in the Mountain South along Snowbird Creek in Graham County and the particular, if not peculiar, culture there, little did I know that I was also saying goodbye to a tradition and the way I linguistically viewed the world.
As my father uprooted our family, time and time again in a march of migration further and further north, with each move I lost more and more of my contact and association with my cultural roots. By the time I had finished high school in the steel town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I had become little more than a rolling stone--one that had not had time enough in any one place to gather moss. And as years went by, and as I moved myself further and further west on my own, I effectively learned to distance myself from any semblance of a southern accent--so strong were the prejudices I encountered from people from other parts of the country against “southern speech.” Tired of being castigated and denigrated, I taught myself a generic American speech that was dialect-free and therefore without character--a final act of acculturation.
Even though I continued to write poetry, it had become a poetry unaffected by place whereas language was concerned. Instead of the organic lyrical and idiomatic poetry that might have come easily had I remained in Graham County, I was, by the time I was twenty-five, writing in rhetorical rhythms a kind of message-based poetry more influenced by Russia and France than by the Mountain South. People who met me were always astonished that I had come from “the South,” so well had I hidden my past in my newly-formed language and speech. Only once can I recall slipping and falling back into grace--during the time when I was living an apprentice’s life in San Francisco surrounded by many of my Beat generation idols--on the occasion of meeting a young musician from Berea, Kentucky named Wayde Blair in a North Beach cafe. Because of his strong southern drawl, I reverted back to old speech patterns which had become buried in my subconscious, but which had broken ground almost instantly upon hearing his voice and the familiar language. I would, I was told (for I was totally unaware of the shift in my speech at the time), lapse into dialect and even old Appalachian metaphoric idioms when I would run into Wayde and we began talking casually about “home” and “the past.” Aside from these few San Francisco slips, I was and remained dialect free.
To make a long story short, I am back here in western North Carolina again, many years after leaving the region as a young teenager. Now, the cultural life, as well as the language, is dying out, as more and more of my generation have moved to larger towns in the region or further to the north, south or west to search for greater prosperity. One can only hear good old Southern Mountain Speech from the elderly, who have decreased in number as each year has passed. This being the case, upon returning to the western North Carolina mountains, I found myself gravitating towards and spending time with the old folks like Zoro and Bessie Guice, Mose Bradley and Gelolo McHugh over in Polk County....and more recently, Claude and Mary Jane Queen, here in Jackson County. But now, at age fifty three, my recall of my native tongue is faulty, if not almost non-existent, as I taught myself too well, over the years while I was gone, how to speak sans dialect. And no matter how hard I try to converse on an equal basis with my sept and oct-agenerian friends, I am only able to give lip service to my former language.
Here in the mountain farming community of Tuckaseegee, where I now live, I have been moved to try to return to my cultural and linguistic roots and to incorporate these back into my daily speech as well as into my writing. Since moving to Jackson County, I have continued my habit of spending time with members of the elder generation as well as the remaining few of my own age who have held tight to traditions, culture and speech harkening back to the past. In addition to those between my Little Canada neighbors and myself over the years, there have, also, been many memorable conversations with characters such as now-deceased Cherokee medicine-man Amoneeta Sequoyah and historian/arts dealer Tom Underwood over on the Qualla Boundary. I remember a conversation that took place on the back porch of an old mountain saw-mill shack looking out into the woods, not long after moving to Jackson County back in 1984. The talk was about gardening, mountain farming, and the old days, and could have been straight out of a story or mountain fable by James Still.
“Folks are livin’ out of cans and pokes these days. Why, when it’s on the table, hit’s not fit to eat,” said my old friend with an impish scowl on his face. “What I look forward to in spring hain’t garden sass. Hit’s wild greens. They grow where God planted them. What you want to look for is plantain, bird’s toe, fiddle-heads, speckled dick and sour dick, lamb’s-quarter, mouse’s ear, blue root, hen pepper, creases, polk, wild lettuce, wooly breeches, and blue thistle. There ain’t no man-made greens that can beat these!”
And as the time-frame began slipping back into the past, the conversation continued.... “During hard times, I remember we’d eat what’s called “sour sop.” Buttermilk poured into hot grease with corn bread crumbled in. But we always had something to eat, even in hard times. Why, we’d cook the dishrag if we couldn’t find nothin’ else!”
There have been many such colorful conversations as this over the years with younger generation story-tellers (“yarn-spinners”) such as Paul Rhodes of the Saluda/Fork Creek Rhodes, and Keith Monteith--of the Fontana/Cullowhee Monteiths--whose “lickety cut” mind and quick wit, when coupled with his mountain drawl, has caused me to “rar” back in my boots with laughter, or a broad smile.
Since returning to the mountains of my boyhood, I’ve begun to re-establish my identity, my sense of belonging to a particular place and culture, by utilizing Southern Mountain Speech in innovative and creative ways, mainly through my writing. While it may be true, metaphorically and metaphysically, that you can’t go home again, the fact is that I HAVE come home again and am finding that I can call up the past in bits and pieces and bring it into the present-day voice in which I write. Can pull up, like from a Chaucerian computer, the triple negatives, the “don’t make no neverminds” and the “not nary a any’s” to lyrically grace the images that my poems and my fictions address.
During the winter months, when I have concentrated time and energy to read and write at length, in poems with titles such as “A Beatnik Wanders Into Appalachia and Learns the Language of Earth and Sky,” “Crack-Light,” and “Who-Shot-John,” I’ve been able to re-live the past as well as to bring it to light (life) and into the present for myself. When I write “Dig the Big-Eyed Bird in swag or hollow/of locust and locked wood,” I am back in Graham County on the mountain behind my family’s little house in the Milltown community along Snowbird Creek, and, at the same time, I am here along the Tuckaseegee River experiencing a kind of time-travel generated by language. A leap of some forty years--- Or when I write “I make a match to this wick of words,” I can feel strength and satisfaction coming from the heart. In these moments it seems as if I’ve got the best of both worlds: past and present.
As a gardener of both legumes and language, I know that a time will come when I’ll have to lay down my hoe, and my pen, forever. But until that day comes, I aim to keep on diggin’. Harvesting the bounty afforded me by good organic food and this beautiful Southern mountain speech.
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A BEATNIK WANDERS INTO APPALACHIA
AND LEARNS THE LANGUAGE OF THE EARTH AND SKY
Climbing cold streams’ wet weave of root
& rock a warm murmur breathes beneath
a pool of song where water and wilt shine
on green tendrils moist with deep moss
and dew.
Dig the dance of vine
climbing circle of stone.
Dig the blue bloom of rose
cut to caress torrents of rotting soil.
Dig the ripe wave of evening that touches flame
& breaks blood’s slow boil of mulch & rain.
Walking green trees’ coppered limbs of stairs
& canopy a thrush of whistles rises in
a swoon of sunlight when thunder slaps and
color arcs in clouds’ turbid mood of limber logs
and leaves.
Dig the skiff of snow that preeks soft
near the rabbit’s lair.
Dig the Big Eyed Bird in swag or hollow
of locust and locked wood.
Dig the heave of new ground and the golden comb
of honey with winter rye.
Dig the dogtick and the rowan tree.
Dig the sky!
HERE WITH WHO-SHOT-JOHN *
for Jim Wayne Miller
Come here where the nary and neverminds
don’t give a shuck or a jive
‘bout the bees in the branch or
the billies in the blind that
come clear, come hell or high water
and dabble down at the spring house
where the ducks lay their eggs
and I write.
Here where the burnt-out dog lies
on the porch bull-raggin the bugs
til he is bit and bawls like a lunk-head
and lopes down the yard and
through the garden greens and taters
til he is out of sight.
Here where the beauty of the hills
holds sway over my pricey thoughts and
my puny pen makin’ its way across paper
like it was a goat in the grass
goin’ nigh into the newground that
we cleared this week for more corn.
Here where this night in my noggin
names notions that no furriner ever knew
and no gabby gal ever let slip from
her sweet tongue that wouldn’t melt butter
or swaller no shine.
Here in this creekbed of moonlight whar
a wetrock won’t even sharpen my words,
woozy and wrangled from Who-shot-John
and I wrastle with the devil in the winder
like an old windbag
who is pert-nigh petered out
and wild outen his eyes.
* colloquialism of Southern Mountain speech for “moonshine”
CRACK LIGHT *
for James Still
Where rocks grow and mud cracks on the logs and
there is a little light at dawn or a cold burst of
wind ‘round dusk, comes through and burns a candle lower than
a man that would brag on his lies, suck sour sop from
an old bowl with nary a any spoon-- I touch the daylight and
the pline-blank moon of my mind in this crack light as if to
spark the white-skinned girl up the branch with these words.
With my heart kilt like a plate of creases and greens,
I make a match to this wick of words gone a tad soft
in the head like a sad loaf or a sass patch of polk
after a killing freeze. I can hear the no-never-mind that
it don’t make that she looked at me and said;
“Why you can’t dance?” that night in the jenny barn like
I was standing there in long-johns and the size of a piss ant
bigger than the tadwacker I was there in that moment
of jubious grace.
Now, here in this warmhouse and sure as hen’s pepper
ill-famed in the eyes of any booby-owl or Big Eyed Bird, I
chew cud with this ink and the dibble-dabbles of the sounds
in my head, that bull-rag my sleep, that lost I can’t keep,
in this lack of skewbald light and rowan logs that the
light shines through like a peeping tom called a house that
in another time or life she might see in this light or dark
and even though I can’t dance call a poem.
* metaphor from Southern Mountain speech referring to the light of day which
comes in through the cracks between the logs in a log cabin
