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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
graduate school and a teaching stint in Honduras to discover that the mountain faces the threat of development. Accompanying this threat (to so many rural Western North Carolina counties) is the loss of tradition and consciousness of place. As Jones moves the reader through these various internal and external struggles, he subtly juxtaposes these recent changes with the more violent removal and cultural upheaval of the Cherokees, and the change his own Scotch-Irish family inflicted upon the land and culture with their arrival. While visiting old family haunts and reacquainting himself with the mountain’s history and people, Jones works in a local elementary school as an ESL teacher for both American-born and newly-arrived Hispanic students. Adding a significant dimension to the story of modern Bearwallow, Jones examines the lives of this new generation of immigrant students and their parents, people who have also lost connection to their homeland and place, adrift in a landscape where the language and culture are unfamiliar. The diminishment of “local” culture that is lamented in Bearwallow is
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the result of outside influences and forces, including an influx of immigrants both legal and illegal (developers, retirees, migrant workers), resulting in a much less violent form of disposition than Jones’s ancestors forced upon the native Cherokees, but a disposition nonetheless. This tale of cultural displacement is all the more poignant juxtaposed with the author’s time teaching in Honduras, himself a visitor in a strange land and unfamiliar culture, wrestling with his own attempts to communicate effectively, influence change, and make connections to tradition and a foreign place. Jones adds another interesting dimension to his struggle by comparing himself to the missionaries and teachers who arrived in Appalachia a hundred years ago to save what they considered a backwards people. “The only thing that is constant is change,” Heraclitus said, and there is considerable irony in the history of a place where change was so brutally inflicted upon PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK FILE, ROMANTICASHEVILLE.COM
the native Cherokees, leading to their removal and destruction of identity, and where, two hundred years later, change, removal, and destruction of identity is being inflicted upon Jones’s own Appalachian heritage (sans violence and destruction, although mountaintop developments could arguably be described as a form of carnage). One can only wonder how Hansen’s theory will be applied to the third generation of Western North Carolina Hispanics, or the affluent descendants of those inhabiting the newly gated communities of wealth and isolation. Yet Appalachian identity will likely continue in some form for the foreseeable future, albeit a more commoditized and marketable version. There is still a strong sense of place in the region even if it now exists largely in the form of crafts, music, literature, and the mass production of legal moonshine. Bearwallow will serve as a reminder, though, of the many dimensions of history that lie beneath this facsimile version and make us all the more aware of the dynamics that are serving it up. n ABOVE Fourth-grade students dancing during Mexican Independence Day festivities at Edneyville Elementary School in Hendersonville, NC, 16 Sept. 2005 LEFT View from on top of Bearwallow Mountain (See
more of Mark File’s photographs of Bearwallow here.)