Appalachian Heritage

Great Smoky Mountains Park and made promises to the residents of the cove that they did not keep. It is also disturbing to learn that the Park Service was initally unclear on its purposes in the cove, first proposing that the formerly carefullytended fields be allowed to return to wilderness and then deciding to preserve the artifacts of this remarkable community , but only the pioneer material folk culture. Thus they erased evidence of the progressive nature of the people. An interesting theme in the book is the influence of the church on the life of the cove. The strongest body was the Primitive Baptist Church, which strictly regulated the behavior of its members, who were, for the most part, leaders of the community. Primitive Baptists shaped attitudes in regard to slavery, led a proUnion stance politically, and organized the people for defense against marauding Confederates from North Carolina. Members of this church refused to disband after takeover by the Park Service and continued to hold services in the church into the sixties. The portions of the book that deal with the church and golitical and moral issues make this ook a valuable tool in combating the egregious streotypes linked to the people or Southern Appalachia. In fact, Dunn devotes a great deal of space to stereotypes established by such writers as Mary Noailles Murfee and Horace Kephart and depicts a different image of Appalachian people. Here is part of his conclusion: If the history of the cove had any meaning, it was simply that the people followed regional and national patterns of development. Cove residents witnessed many periods of progressive development in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries . They were neither the picturesque, superhuman , and romanticized figures of Mary Noailles Murfree nor the wretched backward creatures living in depravity and degradation as presented by Horace Kephart. Rather, they were in the final analysis representative of the broad mainstream of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture and society from whence they came: ordinary, decent citizens who often acted collectively-and within their limitations, courageously and responsibly-to the enormous economic fluctation, social change, and political disruption surrounding their lives in the past two centuries within the American commonwealth. This book will be a valuable addition to the library of any student of the Southern Appalachian experience. It is a carefully researched and documented work, and. it presents a vivid and positive picture of life spanning more than a century in the lovely setting of Cades Cove. -Loyal Jones Miller, Jim Wayne. Brier, His Book. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1988. 68 pp. Hardback, $16.00. Paperback , $8.50. Has the Brier finally adjusted? In Harriette Arnow s The Dollmaker, getting children of migrants and immigrants to "adjust' is the educational ideal of the Detroit schools. As the sharptongued Mrs. Whittle, Reuben's teacher, tells his mother Gertie Nevéis, "It is for children-especially children like yoursthe most important thing-to learn to adjust." Mr. Skyros, the principal, states the ideal more tentatively (perhaps because he himself has secret backslidings ): "Yes, adjust, learn to get along, like it-be like the others-learn to want to be like the others." Most of us who have lived outside Appalachia, read Yesterday's People, or even attended Berea College are familiar with this educational ideal. Some of us have even been whittled down to it (though not much can be done to our accents). But we still have our secret backslidings, or at least harbor our suspicious dreams-of gardens, old barns, the deep woods, trout steams, and such. One of our last, best hopes was the 63 Brier, Jim Wayne Miller's "quintessential Appalachian," who first appeared in the poems collected in The Mountains Have Come Closer (1980). The name Brier, a midwestern epithet for Appalachian migrants, seemed to assert a sturdy resolve not to adjust, not to be whittled down. The Brier cried out in pain and protest at the sharp knives of change. In the face of a storm of adjustment sweeping over Appalachia, the Brier rejected the new pared-down image and preached that "you must be born again' in the ancestral shape. The Brier, we thought, would be a...