The Granny Mountains
I have lived in the Blue Ridge off and on for about 29 years, I have left to serve, I have left for love, and I have always returned. Every time I have returned, she has always welcomed me back with cool misty mornings and a reminder that home is always here.
In the wrinkles of her shawl live her children. They are survivors, fighters, lovers, still water philosophers, and madmen that call the hollars home. Granny has always been there for her children, though her definition of “her children” is quite loose. In the strictest sense, you don’t need to be born here to be a child of the Granny Mountains.
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While I would caution against asking her, her age, I will say she predates organized religion. She reminds us all the time, when you go far enough back up the valleys of ancient beings guarded by brick walls and platoons of stone markers, regimented against the growing ranks of marauding kudzu. She likes gardening and she’ll turn anything into a planter, if given the time, like barns, coops, trailers, and ’37 Ford Trucks.
Education, traditionally in Appalachians, has been experiential. It usually takes a single bad winter for some of her children to catch on, maybe two. Canning a little extra at the end of season, or taking one more deer for the freezer meant the difference between starvation and making it to spring. Its also meant learning, the hard way, enough acorns can make a meal for batter, but it’s not a living. Yet generations survived on what she could scrounge.
But of all the stereotyping and myth that surround Granny Mountain, the most persistent and damaging, has been the depiction of her children to the rest of the world. Hollywood using plain falsehoods about the mountain folk to create entertainment on the one hand, but ignore the richness of her people. The language of her children is that of the valleys and hillsides they known all their lives. They speak the tracks of animals that are near by, the petrichor before, during, and after a storm. Its the language of the clouds before the snow and the wind before the frost. I want to see the Clampets do that. And don’t even get me started on Earl Hamner Jr.
What those outside do get right, is that we are not a rich people. Granny herself only had so much. She gave some to the land, when her children feuded. Then again during the fight to free her children, which took even longer than she wanted. She gave to the war to end all wars, twice, again, to every battle. She planted her sons in Matewan and Blair, in Memphis, and in Asheville. So her children don’t have much in the way of riches, but they were rich in the way of family. Everyone here has enough blood in the clay that the trees, rocks, and plants are all distant relations. And that is all that matters.
