"Nowhere Else On Earth" by Josephine Humphreys, One Helluva Novel!

This is a tremendous novel! This is one of the best novels I have ever read! This is, by far, the best novel I have read since I read "Wilderness" by Robert Penn Warren. I haven't had enough time to read everything I have ever wanted to or should have read. But it still amazes me that I never heard of Josephine Humphreys until I blundered into this novel by accident. The novel is a story of the late Civil War and Reconstruction just as is "Wilderness" and a couple of other things I have read and written about on this blog lately. But I have not set out on any conscious effort to read a lot of novels about the Civil War. It just happens by accident when I am not deliberately reading for a research based purpose. But I have never been more pleased to find a great writer by accident. Humphreys novel is a masterpiece of southern literature. Her plot work is astounding in this book. Her character development is tremendously detailed, written into the flow of the novel with purpose and without visible intent. It just happens which is what great writers do when they are writing at their best. The novel is set in the late years of the Civil War in coastal North Carolina and the heroine is a daughter of a Lumbee Indian woman and a Scotsman. She is intelligent, hard working, committed to her family and her place in the world. She is in love with a fellow Indian man who is becoming the leader of the local resistance to both the Union and the Confederacy in a community which they call Scuffletown. Scuffletown is one of the great names ever created for a place where poverty is king, starvation common, discrimination a daily reality, and the development of what we victims of discrimination like to call "backbone" is the one essential quality which will keep you alive. In those ways,Scuffletown is a sister to every impoverished coal camp in Appalachia, every row of slave cabins on every plantation in the Deep South, and every ghetto in a northern metropolitan area. The people of Scuffletown know how to survive, how to adhere to each other in tough times which are guaranteed to get tougher, and how never to mistake collusion with an enemy as cooperation. Most of the people in Scuffletown live in one room cabins scattered throughout a pine woods swampy world where turpentine making from pine trees is the one way to make a living in a better way than just being a hunter gatherer or scavenger or robber. Scuffletown is located not far from Hell but always has a bit of Heaven in it. It is a place where Love of Place, loyalty to your peers, and generosity no matter how poor you are is a fact of life.

Rhoda, the heroine, falls in love with Henry Lowrie, a young man her own age who grows up to lead the local resistance to both the Union and Confederate forces neither of which has any respect for the locals. As the war degenerates toward Lee's surrender, times just keep getting harder and Henry and Rhoda's two brothers become key members of the resistance with Henry assuming the top position. They are opposed by a local sheriff, his top deputy, and a group of their henchmen who will stop at nothing to maintain control of the populace and pillage as much as they can. The resistance fighters leave home to live in the swamps and strike whenever and wherever they can in order to feed both themselves and those who are dependent upon them. The novel is regularly improved by an event of such striking oppression, suppression, and sometimes resistance to the other elements just mentioned that the reader is spellbound. It is realistic and true of nearly every war of oppression ever waged in the world. In the end, Henry is branded as an outlaw and a reward of $20,000 is placed on his head with the production of himself or his dead body as necessary to collect the money. The war ends before the novel but it does not improve conditions in Scuffletown. Bad goes to worse! One of Henry's loyal men is hanged and Rhoda takes her children to proceedings where she stands in front of the gallows with the condemned man's mother as he falls to his death. But that is not the end of the story. I have never seen a novel I am more happy to recommend. It is a beautiful and often chilling piece of work. This author, Josephine Humphreys is a tremendous writer. I realize full well that one novel is not sufficient platform on which to build monuments to a writer, but this novel is a fine start of the foundation. If her other work is as strikingly wonderful as this novel, she deserves to have her name mentioned in the same breath as Flannery O'Connor, Hemingway, Pearl Buck, and Steinbeck.

"Wilderness" by Robert Penn Warren, A Novel Of The Civil War and Early American Immigration

"Wilderness" is a 1961 novel by Robert Penn Warren. The protagonist is a Jewish immigrant from Germany who has been born with a club foot but desires to immigrate to America and "fight for freedom". The story begins in his native country where he decides to leave for America after realizing he has little hope for a good future at home. His father was killed in riots in Berlin while fighting against government troops. He has been supported and assisted by an uncle who is also a rabbi. As Adam Rosenzweig prepares to leave, he is given several religious objects by his uncle which he carries, but uses little, during the length of the novel. The uncle also provides Adam with the address of an old friend who had previously emigrated to America and become wealthy as a businessman after beginning his life as a pack trader. Pack traders, many of whom were Jewish, traveled the roads of America carrying and selling a multitude of common household items in large backpacks. In order for Adam to get to America, he signs on with a human trafficker who is providing immigrants to both sides of the Civil War to fight as soldiers. The most important object Adam owns is a very well made leather boot which a cobbler friend made for him to help compensate for is club foot. While on the ship to America, the other men learn of Adam's disability and he becomes the "least of the least"on the ship since he is now known as being very unlikely to be accepted as a soldier. He is now forced to do the most menial chores aboard ship to compensate for his passage and the captain intends to actually prevent him from leaving the ship and retaining his as slave labor for the return voyage to Germany. But one of the crew gives Adam some advice just before the ship comes to port in New York which allows him to escape the vessel. He lands in New York with nothing and a very powerful scene ensues in which Adam, lost, alone, and hungry, finds the body of a black man hanging from a lamp post where he has been lynched in ongoing race riots. Adam finds himself the next day being dragged into one of those riots which is engaged in the murder of another black man. Adam finds himself being pursued by some of the rioters but manages to escape by running into the door of what turns out to be a house in which several black people are hiding. The rioters break in and Adam finds himself in the basement hiding in the dark where no one's race or color can be recognized. The rioters flood the basement and Adam finds himself being pulled above the waterline by a black man who turns out to be an employee of the man Adam was told to seek out when he got to New York. When the rioters disappear, the black man takes Adam, who is very ill, to the home of their benefactor, the rich Jewish trader. The trader has had a son killed in the Civil War and offers to make Adam his adopted son. Adam refuses the offer and is, instead, placed with a very abusive and coarse trader who needs a wagon driver to drive a wagon load of supplies south to sell to whichever troops of either side they might contact. The group consists of Adam, the trader Jed Hawksworth, and his black employee Mose who is actually an escaped slave as the book reveals in the long run. The three characters make a slow trip south to connect with fighting troops and are a truly odd collection of equally damaged characters who have simply fallen into each other's company. Mose, who has been savagely beaten by previous owners, becomes a friend of Adam but eventually kills Hawksworth and runs away. Adam, fearing that he will be blamed for the murder, buries Hawksworth in the woods, takes one of the wagons, and heads out to find Union troops which he can join to live out his dream of "fighting for freedom". I won't spoil the ending for you by fulling disclosing what happens from here on out. I will say that I have read several of Robert Penn Warren's books and this is just as good a novel as any the man who won two Pulitzer Prizes ever wrote. It addresses issues of war, racism, hatred, segregation, immigration, disability, and discrimination as well as any novel I have ever read. It is a powerful book which has fallen by the wayside of American Literature even though it is a fine piece of work by a man who should have been another of America's Novel winners. Robert Penn Warren is, in my opinion, just as great a writer as Hemingway, Steinbeck, Buck, or any other American who has ever been described as great. If you read the book, be forewarned that the novel does use the language of the time in which it was set and you will encounter several of the epithets which are not allowe in polite society today. But the novel is far greater than any of its detractors claim it to be simply because they are prejudiced against the language of America in the 1860's. Read it and you will see that I am correct.

"100 Years Of Appalachian Visions, 2nd Edition" Compiled by Bill Best

Once in a while, I stumble into a book which is exactly what I am looking and hoping for at the time and this is one of them.  It is even more interesting that I found this one and bought a copy at roughly the same time I located and bought two others which have been wonderful for both myself and many of the readers of this blog.  The first such book was Cratis Williams' "Tales From Sacred Wind: Coming of Age In Appalachia" which I have written about extensively in this blog and which has been greatly appreciated by a multitude of my readers.

I have also bought, very lightly perused, but not fully read, a wonderful book called "Decoration Day In The Mountains: Traditions of Cemetery Decoration in the Southern Appalachians" by Alan Jabbour & Karen Singer Jabbour.  I will complete reading that one before I write about it.  But based on the reception for what I had to say about the Williams book, many of you will eagerly anticipate knowing more about the "Decoration Day..." book.  But right now, let's talk about another of the wonderful Appalachian books by my friend Bill Best, "100 Years of Appalachian Visions...".  

Bill Best edited, or compiled, this book more than twenty years ago and I had never heard of it until I strayed into it on a used book website and ordered it immediately. In a show of his genuine humility, Bill had never spoken to me about this book until I told him I had located a copy.  I had earlier read and written about more than one of Bill's other books which I have enjoyed greatly.  Bill is a friend of mine although we have not known each other very long at all and that is my loss.  But even though we have not known each other at length, I am proud to say that I wrote the "Afterword" for Bill's next book which will be released in a very limited edition before the month is out.  I will write about it also as soon as it is officially available for purchase.  But, to repeat myself, let's talk about this book, "100 Years Of Appalachian Visions", which is a compilation of short, but wonderful essays by native Appalachians, both famous and relatively unknown, about growing up in Appalachia, primarily in the twentieth century.  The book contains essays by numerous well known, even famous, Appalachian writers along side works by other individuals whose names were not known to me before I read the book.  Among the better known authors in this book are my friends and mentors Don West and Loyal Jones whose works are also accompanied by contributions from other famous Appalachians such as former Georgia Governor Zell Miller, Gurney Norman, James Gifford, Jim Wayne Miller, George Ella Lyon, Sidney Saylor Farr, Ron Eller, Jesse Stuart, Chuck Yeager,  and Wilma Dykeman.  There are a total of more than 55 essays in the book and every one of them is well worth reading.  

These essays are all personal epistles from a wide variety of native Appalachians from all around the region about the experience of growing up in Appalachia.  They are sometimes funny, sometimes painful, and always educational and worthy of your time and effort to read them.  They discuss the feelings many of us have felt when we traveled outside our homeland and found ourselves being "othered", made fun of, belittled, embarrassed, and mistreated because we spoke with that wonderful accent which is rooted in the British Isles of several centuries past or because we dressed a little quaintly, or because our apparent poverty was making an outsider uncomfortable.  These essays are all written by Appalachians who sought education, self-improvement, and a better life and most of these authors realized along the way that it was more valuable to them to become proud Appalachians rather than to change to suit the tastes of those who belittled and shamed them.  As I read this book, I was reminded of the occasion about 1969 when I was sent on a college exchange winter quarter to the campus of Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.  During my one month stay on the campus, a local student who lived in Cleveland invited me to come to his family home one weekend for dinner, which had always been supper to me.  I will never forget being introduced to his parents who were apparently fairly well off and lived in a home which was considerably larger than nearly every home I had ever seen in Knott County Kentucky.  We ate in a formal dining room and the parents probed me with dozens of questions just like those most of the authors in Bill's book and most of you native Appalachians have heard at some point in your lives somewhere in the north, northeast, southwest, or northwest when we left the region.  But the part of the entire affair which left a lifelong impression on me was the numerous times the family members would ask me to repeat some common word I had used in the conversation.  As I recall, there were a few occasions in which I was actually asked to spell what I had just said.  It was if they thought I spoke a foreign language and I was humiliated.  Somehow, I got through that meal and the remainder of the evening before I had to catch public transport back to the Oberlin campus which was the first time I was ever on public transport alone and was, of itself, another experience which I will always remember.  I also saw and ate my first bagel on the Oberlin campus during that winter quarter. The cafeteria style student dining areas on the campus were a far cry from Hunger Din at Alice Lloyd College where all students were assigned to a particular table with a faculty member and several other students and served family style much as we would have eaten in our own homes. 

But, just like most of the authors in Bill Best's wonderful collection, I got through the challenges of that trip to Oberlin, swore I would not change my accent, and also swore to learn how not to be embarrassed by being me, a native Appalachian who was seeking to gain education and self-improvement while maintaining an identity I knew was real, made me the person I was, and would carry me through all such challenges I ever met.  I hope all of you read this book, learn from it as I did, and choose to be a proud Appalachian.