ANOTHER ADDITION TO WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA’S LITERATURE OF PLACE a review by Brent Martin Jeremy B. Jones. Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 2014.
BRENT MARTIN lives in the Cowee community of Western North Carolina and is the author of three chapbooks of place-based poetry, Poems from Snow Hill Road (New Native Press, 2007), A Shout in the Woods (Flutter Press, 2010), and Staring the Red Earth Down (Red Bird Press, 2014). He is also a co-author of Every Breath Sings Mountains (Voices from the American Land, 2011). His poetry and essays have been published in such venues as the Wildbranch: An Anthology of Environmental and Place-Based Writing, Kudzu Literary Quarterly, Pisgah Review, New Southerner, The Fourth River, and elsewhere. Read his essay “Hunting for Camellias at Horseshoe Bend” in NCLR 2011. He currently serves as the Southern Appalachian Regional Director for The Wilderness Society. JEREMY B. JONES earned his MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and now teaches at Western Carolina University. His essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines and have twice been named “Notable” in Best American Essays.
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COURTESY OF JEREMY B. JONES AND JOHN F. BLAIR PUBLISHER
North Carolina Literature in a Global Context
The mountainous landscape of Western North Carolina is rich with music, art, and literature, along with a history of conflict and change. It is particularly rich with literature of place, and Jeremy B. Jones’s debut book, his memoir Bearwallow, makes a significant contribution. Jones takes the reader on a journey to his native Bearwallow Mountain, near the Henderson County town of Fletcher, and draws for the reader a literary map both internal and external, that reveals the complexities of being native to a place and the threats and changes this place faces today. Bearwallow begins with the author’s family moving into the region in the early nineteenth century, displacing the native Cherokees who had made Bearwallow home for centuries, and ending with the current arrival of developers marketing their gated and exclusive mountaintop developments as “communities.” Adding to the growing complexity of the place is the new Hispanic working class who provide both developers and the area’s remaining farmers with cheap labor.
ABOVE Mark Gilliam, Jeremy Jones’s great-
grandfather (fifth man standing from left) in front of one of the first combines in Western North Carolina, 1914
In between are vivid portraits and stories of conflicting family loyalties during the Civil War, tales of nineteenth- and twentieth-century local mountain class dynamics, family feuds, and searches for lost graves and POW camps, all accompanied by introspection and the questioning of Jones’s own identity and rediscovery of his past. The book is also part lamentation. “I’m trying to return to a world that no longer exists” (165), Jones tells us as he goes further into the story of attempting to reconnect with home and history. The Appalachia of yore is but a remnant, and he must place himself within what the historian Marcus Lee Hansen called the “principle of the third generation interest” (qtd. in Jones 163).* Accordingly, modernization, affluence, and outside influences have led the generation of Jones’s mountain parents to new customs and ideas. The author identifies himself as the third generation of Hansen’s theory, “curious, backward looking” (163), he says; he sees the remnants of Appalachia but is unable to hold on to them. Jones returns to his native Bearwallow Mountain following
*
See Marcus Lee Hansen, The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant (Rock Island, IL: Augustana Historical Society, 1938).