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This article was published in the Yancey County News-Common Times Our Literary Heritage in Yancey County
As we prepare for our first Carolina Mountain Literary Festival, I cannot help but wish that certain Yancey natives who were influential in my own writing career could be here to see it all take place. My own mother, Rheba Maphry Tipton Young, was born and raised over toward Green Mountain and she was a proud graduate of Yancey Collegiate Institute and Mars Hill College. She was reared in a strict Baptist household by her grandparents. The grandfather was a stern old fellow, an itinerant preacher who never learned to read and write until after he was married. His was a religion of denial and don’ts, but he instilled in my mother a yearning for education which would eventually get her out of that rigid mindset and help to make of her a compassionate tolerant being. They had only 3 books in their home, but they read them religiously. Years later, my mother could still quote certain lines and stories from the Holy Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress and a children’s version of the Shakespeare plays by Charles and Mary Lamb. More important to me, she saw in the stories she’d heard as a child the same universal characters she’d encountered in all the great literature. Her beloved old great grandpa “Jeems Fox”, a fifer in the Confederate Army, and his pals, Sam Bennett and Sol Fox, were not ignorant hillbillies, backwoods rubes, they were real characters whose lives were every bit as dramatic and interesting as anybody created by Hemingway and Fitzgerald. In his first novel, Thomas Wolfe clearly shared his father’s disdain for “mountain grills.” However, Wolfe soon realized that his richest source of material lay in the stories passed down in his mother’s family, the Westalls from Yancey County. After an absence of seven years after Look Homeward, Angel was published, Wolfe finally came back home to face the folks in Asheville in 1937, but first he stopped off in Burnsville to transcribe the memories of his great uncle John Baird Westall. That would become the story, “Chickamauga,” which is considered one of Wolfe’s best. In a dozen different interviews, Wolfe had talked about one day settling down on a farm in Yancey County, but he died at age 38 before he could ever realize that dream. Among the manuscripts he left at his death was an epic novel that would begin with his great grandfather, William Westall (old “Bear Joyner”), up on South Toe (“Thumb Toe”) River. This and several other sketches from Yancey—including Wolfe’s actually witnessing a shoot-out on Main Street-- were collected in the posthumous book, “The Hills Beyond.” Others may have been brought up on the whimsical tales of Winnie the Pooh, my mother told me about a woman who cut her husband’s head off with an ax and burned his body in the fireplace. I have always been grateful for those stories and in recent years, I have tried to get as many of them into print as I possibly could—most recently in the books, Hanged By a Dream and The Untold Story of Frankie Silver: Was She Unjustly Hanged? Thirteen different murder stories are among the documents and legends recorded in I just wish I’d been able to set a tape recorder in front of my cousin Betty Byrd Ayers. I was always telling her, “Betty, if I could only write the way you talk.” She was raised up over near the Punkin Patch and Pigeon Roost in Red Hill and she knew quite literally where all the bodies were buried. She also delighted in reading great literature more than anybody I’ve ever known. I remember stopping by to see her once in the mid-1950s and she had just read a stack of James Baldwin’s books, a thing that would surely have aroused threats from her neighbors in many parts of our state at that time. Betty Ayers and my mother went beyond mere tolerance, they were curious about all kinds of people and all kinds of writing. But what I loved were their stories from our own ancestry. When the great Lloyd Bailey would publish one of his articles about Yancey history in the Burnsville newspaper, Betty would always send it to me—along with fascinating details longer than the original article itself. Sadly, Betty died before I ever did actually sit down with her and get her stories on tape. All of us who love old Yancey can be thankful for the life and work of Dr. Lloyd Bailey, who is happily still among the living and a featured artist in the literary festival. He’ll be talking about “Yarns from Yancey” at the Yancey History Museum at 9:30 a.m. Saturday. Although, his main career has been focused on Old Testament history and theology, from the time he was in college, Bailey has also collected and written down the stories of our own people here in Yancey County. In his books are all the names and dates of all the families, but here also are the documents and stories and legends that give life to those statistics. The five volumes of Lloyd Bailey’s Toe River Valley Heritage are quite simply the best local histories ever published in America. Most of these “heritage” books in other counties are an embarrassment; Lloyd Bailey’s are a treasure that gets more valuable with each year. Of course, Lloyd was not the first one in Yancey County to encourage the preservation of our heritage. Lusk Edwards valued the printed word and imported a printing press that had to be hauled over the mountain by mule team to his home on Mine Fork. I remember going to visit this legendary character once when I was a teenager. He was quite old by then, his printing press up on the hill long abandoned. I will never forget seeing the old fellow staring into the open fire, lost in the past, with the latest issues of The New Yorker and Esquire on the table beside his bed. Many others kept alive the spirit of the locally printed word here in Yancey. First there was the Black Mountain Eagle and then the Yancey Record. My cousin Trena Presnell Fox and her husband, Arne, ran the paper for many years. And for a while, Tom Higgins, the acknowledged world expert on NASCAR racing, came home to run the paper. Now, Jody Higgins has created the best smalltown newspaper in North Carolina. But you cannot speak of the literary heritage of Yancey and Mitchell counties without mentioning the late great Monroe Thomas. Although I never had the privilege of meeting the man, he remains a personal hero of mine. Born in 1903, Thomas taught for several years in the public schools in Kona, Crabtree, Hawk and Altapass. Sadly, he was afflicted by osteomyelitis, an inflammatory bone and muscle-wasting disease, that he had to give up teaching in 1939. He retired to the family home below the ancestral Silver family homeplace and burying ground at Kona and there he lived until his death in 1957. He was finally able to use only two fingers of his left hand. It took him two hours to write a single page. And yet, he wrote hundreds of pages of poems and family history and local legends under the most painful conditions imaginable. His meticulous penmanship is itself a work of art. Far from whining and complaining about his lot in life, Thomas eloquently described his “contentment” in a poem published in a 1958 article in the National Geographic, “My Neighbors Hold to Mountain Ways.” Monroe Thomas lived out his life in splendid isolation in a mountain cabin about as far back in North Carolina as you can get, and yet he influenced hundreds of people by his determined example and by his reverence for knowledge. I can grieve that Thomas and my mother and Lusk Edwards and Cousin Betty Ayers won’t be here to appreciate the Carolina Mountain Literary Festival, but they’ll be here in spirit because their faith in the written words endures among the many lives they touched and inspired. Perry Deane Young is the author of 10 books, including a New York Times bestseller, and two plays and one screenplay. His exhibits on Thomas Wolfe, Mount Mitchell and Frankie Silver are on display at the Yancey History Museum, and he will be discussing his books and his Yancey heritage at the museum at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday. HOME • COMMENTARY • BOOKS • PLAYS • CONTACT |