Still in the Holler

“If a stranger comes around, if he’s wise, he will keep to the road and announce his business soon, clearly and loudly, then you’ll see what’s what. You’re not against him, but you’re not automatically for him.”

My father, whose namesake I am, was born in a makeshift cabin in a holler in Rockcastle County, Kentucky. It was called The Hainted Holler because haints, or ghosts, who died in a tannery fire, were said to dwell there still, lamenting their fates. Nobody else in the tiny farming community of houses littered along the narrow valley known as Clear Creek wanted that scary patch of land, so my penny-starved grandfather claimed the steep, rocky acreage for himself. I used to drive out that way when I returned to visit Kentucky, to gaze upon the one-room, white plank schoolhouse my grandmother taught all the grades at once in, and I’d stalk the Hainted Holler, half-hoping for a ghost to appear.

As a young professor right outside Chicago, I co-wrote a musical, produced at Loyola University, set on Clear Creek in the 1930s. In one of its scenes, young women in long, white nightgowns holding lanterns, from behind a scrim walked out of that holler in half-light, toward the audience, singing in eerie and touching harmony how the Devil came to fetch each of them as his concubine. Some people in the audience wept for them.

A couple of years after I wrote that play, my cousin wanted to sell her five-acre farm right down the road from the Hainted Holler, and I bought it. My plan was to use it as a writer’s retreat, though soon I’d take a job in South Florida and so I rented it out instead.

Yet that area founded by my kin has kept a grip on my imagination and keeps reappearing in my writing. Even when all my ancestors had moved out, the place held me in thrall, and I’d find reasons to go back out there, to hike Anglin Falls, to visit a high school buddy who moved to Clear Creek, or just to drive its once-gravel, twisty roads, now paved and flanked by expensive houses where doctors and lawyers could build big, fancy abodes high on a hill, and have their privacy. In the end, everybody wants to live in the country. Most just want it to also be a city with all the amenities, where you can rent out your tobacco allotment and hire somebody to mow your acres of fallow fields.

Everybody who immigrated to Appalachia from Ireland and Scotland was looking for relative solitude. They were used to living in hideaway places tucked into hills, where nobody would bother you—not your neighbors and not the law. Even the preacher couldn’t hike up all those inclines. For what is a holler? It’s an area formed in mountains or foothills by the folds they make—the hollows. It’s where the creeks flow down toward the bottomlands and their banks are populated with elms, oaks, spruce and cedars.

It’s where you once could make moonshine whisky when the price paid for your corn cratered in the world market, and you were in the middle of the economic depression, and either the federal government wouldn’t give you a subsidy or help you out some other way—or else, you didn’t want them to, because of your damned Celtic independence and pride. A neighbor might holler up the holler to warn you that a revenuer was coming your way. You’d rather tote your rifle to shoot squirrels and opossums and rabbits and birds if you must, to feed your children, who are being taught by one single lady whom you’ve known for years, and you can predict exactly what’s going to come out of her mouth because it first went from God’s mouth to her ear.