"Raft Tide and Railroad How We Lived and Died" by Edwina Pendarvis--Book Review

Pendarvis, Edwina. Raft Tide And Railroad How We Lived and Died. (Frankfort, KY, Blair Mountain Press 2008)

"Raft Tide and Railroad How We Lived and Died" by Edwina Pendarvis is labeled as memoir although I would tend to call it more of a historiomemoir if creating such a word does not bend the English language too far.  Eddie Pendarvis, as she prefers to be called, and I have been friends for a couple of years and the better I come to know her the better I like her and her work.  She is a retired professor emeritus of the Education Department of Marshall University, an Appalachian author and poet of some note, and the author of numerous books in several fields.  She grew up in several locations in Appalachia including the Left Beaver section of Floyd County Kentucky and Kopperston West Virginia. Several members of her extended family worked in company stores and the coal mines.  

This book covers the history of her family as it immigrated into Pike County Kentucky and then spread out over Appalachia, West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, and Central Kentucky.  The first several chapters are highly fictionalized which, while it may have been necessary due to poor or no documentation two hundred and more years ago, is a quality I do not like.  There is also some fictionalization in a few of the later chapters but it is of a much more creative and deliberate nature and much more acceptable in the work.  Ms. Pendarvis does an excellent job of researching and documenting the available records, both verbal and written, about her ancestors.  The book will be especially popular with individuals who have spent at least part of their lives in the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky and Southern West Virginia.  It is filled with wonderful stories and vignettes about the family, its many unique members, and the complex lives they lived.  Ms. Pendarvis, as a babe in arms, was present at the murder of her maternal grandmother on the porch of the family home in Pike County.  As a result, her maternal uncle Donald Johnson spent most of his remaining youth in Ms. Pendarvis' home under the care of her mother who was his older, married sister.  He grew up to become rich in the Pike County coal industry and eventually made and lost two fortunes.  He was also the breeder and seller of a Thoroughbred colt who set a world record auction price of $10.2 million dollars at the Keeneland Summer Select Yearling Sale in July of 1983.  In a mildly strange coincidence, I was present in the arena at Keeneland the night that colt sold since I had spent nearly twenty years working in the Thoroughbred industry of Central Kentucky.  

This book is full of wonderful moments which remind the native Appalachian reader of home, the old home place, mother's chicken and dumplings, and of the winter evenings when there was enough fire wood but maybe not enough pinto beans.  It takes us back to our youthful aspirations and memories of little failures we thought we had forgotten.  It is well worth the price of admission.  If you are a native Appalachian, buy it, read it, use it to remember the good times, the bad times, and those hopeful times when you knew in your heart that there were better times a coming.