I Never Loved Her More

Snow came the night we reached Shenandoah in late December of 1968 after driving night and day from Southern California to make it while there was still time.

Two birds and holly.GIFIt lay shining on the fields in the light of a full moon, glistening on the trees, and falling softly before the headlights, whipped into small furies by the air displaced as we passed.

Uncle Charles and Aunt Ola were as excited as children that the first good snow arrived to greet us. Good luck, they said. It was late, nearly midnight when we arrived. My little sister Ellen was asleep in the back seat, sprawled out like a cat, limbs akimbo and face hidden in a bramble of long hair.

My father picked her up. Half awake, she put her arms around him and he carried her up the steps and across the wood slat porch. At the front door Uncle Charles reached out and took her into his own arms. She woke and hugged him tight while he cried, burying his face in her hair.

Ma lay in a hospital bed that dominated the living room from the middle like a hub, furniture pushed back to the walls and facing the bed as though on spokes. Her tiny body was shrouded by a thin white sheet and protected, in case she rolled over, by high rails on the bed’s sides. She hadn’t rolled over. She hadn’t even moved a finger.

Uncle Charles, my mother’s brother, had the ancient wood stove stoked up and pouring out heat so stifling that I could hardly breathe. Aunt Ola, mother’s sister, was general of the operation. She fussed over us, took our coats and pointed us to seats, all in the name of love, both of us and of order.

My mother had stood back until then, letting her siblings huddle around us first, embracing each of us in turn to erase the years of absence that had stood between us. That is her nature, to quietly observe and to talk only when there is something worth saying. Now she came to us, arms outstretched and smile wide. Winter birds.GIFShe had flown back several months before to be with her mother, the two of them caring for each other, the elderly mother and the daughter who had been recently ill. They had those few wonderful months together, taking walks as far as Naked Creek, sharing quiet meals, working side-by-side in the garden, before Ma had her stroke.

I don’t know if Ma knew we were there or not. She had the stroke a week before our arrival, had held out till then, but just couldn’t hold it off those final few days until we arrived. The stroke took her from us and put her in a coma. I gazed at her smooth face, pale and lineless, her white hair swept back and tucked behind her head.

She had worn a sun bonnet all her life, one of those pioneer woman types with full gathered cap, massive quilted brim, and short “skirt” in the back, all held on by a wide bow tied under her chin. That and a sun parasol kept her skin like a girl’s her whole life. She was so still now that I could not detect even her breathing. I leaned in and kissed her cheek. Uncle Charles put his hand on my arm; I turned and his thin arms encircled me next. We were not yet done with the greetings.Winter birds2.GIF

That night I slept above the living room, right about where I imagined my mother’s childhood bed had sat. The heat up there was just as unbearable as below, and I opened the window, pulling my light bed as close as I could to the cool air outside. Ellen and I watched a gentle snow fall, the fields sparkling in the moonlight. I breathed in the crisp night, so unlike the salt and dust I could taste in the air at home, near the Pacific Ocean in Southern California.

Sometime during the night lightning struck a nearby tree with a deafening roar. I bolted awake, my hair standing on end, the room shimmering with electricity. Ellen and I looked at each other with wide eyes. “Wow!,” we both said, California style, and crept to the window for some lightening gazing. There’s nothing like that in Southern California, and it was as good as a Disneyland ride.

The next day we explored the farm, my father, sister and I. We sifted through the old barn, gathering up the scythe and sickle, hay fork and cross-saw; examined the old worn wood, found a large draft horse harness with fat leather collar. In the house we marveled at the wood stove my grandmother still cooked on in 1969, and the flat iron she still heated on the stove to iron clothes. Bird cottage winter.GIFNot to mention the well-worn water pump that sat just outside the kitchen door, the outhouse just beyond the garden, the bedpans and washing basins that were still a part of daily life there.

My grandmother was never lured by the modern, never longed for the newest model washing machine or toaster. The only time I ever heard she wanted anything at all was after the first ride she took in an automobile. It belonged to Shenandoah’s physician, Dr. Shuler, who offered her a ride home from town one day. She came into the house grinning widely and said, “I’m going to get us one of those.”

Uncle Charles and Aunt Tessie, his wife, lived next door. Tessie loaned me magazines to read that winter, but my mother made me take them back when she saw that they were Hollywood gossip rags, Confidential, Screenland, Uncensored. I had never seen anything like them, much racier than the fan magazines you see today, full of lust and murder. Charles and Tessie lived in one of those upright old Virginia country houses whose only luxury was electricity, but theirs was furnished with the most salacious reading material of the day. The irony was not lost on me.Swifts.GIF

We settled into my grandmother’s house, my mother cooking on the wood stove, my father tidying up the farm, reading his newspapers and mumbling about the Vietnam War. He was a proud American and patriotic World War II vet, but was wholly outraged by this war. “Sending those boys to their deaths, and for what?”

Every day there were visitors, either neighbors bringing homey casseroles or family members coming to visit us and pay their respects to Ma. I loved every minute of it, wished we had kindly neighbors in California, wished we had more family there.

Ma and Pop, my grandparents, Florence and Tom Merica, were worried when their fourth daughter announced she was moving with her husband and baby to California. People didn’t leave Shenandoah, or not many did. Ma was especially worried. She and Ruth, my mother, had a special relationship. More than her other daughters, Ruth loved spending time with her mother, helping her in the kitchen or garden, going along when Ma went “a’visitin’.” Ma knew it would be many years before she saw her daughter again, and I know she grieved. Sure, we visited now and then. But not enough.Bird in snow.GIF

Now here we were and Ma didn’t even know. Or if she did, she could not communicate it. Occasionally I crept near and sat by her side, holding her hand. I was too self-conscious to talk to her, as Uncle Charles did, and did not feel intimate enough to stroke her hair and cheek, as my mother did.

I simply sat, awkwardly, until a closeness overcame me, a love for my grandmother who I barely knew, a longing for her to wake and turn to me with arms open to envelop me, making up for all those years away from her. After sitting with these feelings for a while, I could get up again and move on.

Ma’s brother, my Great Uncle Charlie, had a farm up at Number Two Furnace, just up the rise from Jollett Hollow. We drove over to his place one snowy afternoon to cut a nice Christmas tree, and were all delighted when he pulled out a full-sized sleigh and harnessed the big old work horse to it. A real sleigh, just like Santa had, even with bells around the horse’s collar. So there we went, dashing through the snow in our one-horse open sleigh, into the woods to find the perfect tree. Not Douglas fir, like we always got at home, but cedar, the traditional Christmas tree of Virginia.

The next few days were busy, what with Christmas around the corner. We shopped in Harrisonburg, and I spent a few days with my uncle Jesse’s family in Waynesboro. My Aunt Emily and I sat at her kitchen table and talked. I told her about the piglets at Great Uncle Charlie’s farm and she told me she would love to Bird with apples.GIFhave a lap pig, “They’re so cute. And smart.”

We went shopping and she gave me $5 to buy anything I wanted. I chose a yellow dress for Ellen. One afternoon, sitting in the kitchen, their son Tom came in with a friend. He looked to be a few years older than my 16. After introductions Tom nodded silently to me, then he and his friend disappeared into the back. “Well!,” I thought, “I came a long way to be here, I deserve better than that!” Years later we would be close friends.

When I returned my grandmother was yet there, quiet and still, breathing steadily, her face peaceful. My mother, Uncle Charles, and Aunt Ola took turns sitting by her side so Ma was never alone, though none knew if she was aware of the doting children who sat vigil. My mother took the evenings, pulling in a small bed to sleep beside her. That evening we gathered after dinner in the living room. Uncle Charles walked home, which was next door, just across the field. He stoked the fire again before leaving, as always.

Ola was gone, it was just the five of us. I pushed my chair near the thin-paned window to draw some of its chill, trying to offset the blasting heat. My father was on the couch reading a newspaper, my little sister on the floor playing. I looked up from my book and saw my mother standing over Ma’s bed, stroking her hair with tenderness.

Birds in holly.GIFShe spent her adult life in California, arriving with my father and their first baby, then a toddler, just after the end of World War II. We did not travel back to see her Shenandoah family as often as we would have liked. There were four children to raise, and cross-country travel was far more difficult then. My grandmother never learned to read or write, so intimate letters between the two were impossible. As for the phone, I don’t know why they did not talk more often, except that both tended to quietness.

And now my mother was like an angel at my grandmother’s bedside, her face as serene as Ma’s, radiating something so essential and chaste that it felt like an essence distilled to its truest form, that bond between child and mother, or spirit and body. Her hand lightly caressed Ma’s brow, slowly stroking her fine white hair back and to the side. It was the most simple expression of pure love I had ever seen, and I could not take my eyes from her. The room was quiet, only the occasional snap of sparks in the fire or rustle of paper. Robin in dogwood.GIFMa was as small as a girl, her form beneath the sheet barely more than a bas relief in cloth against the bed.

Mother brushed back a strand of Ma’s hair, tucking it behind her ear. She touched her brow, ran the back of her hand across her cheek. Then, her soft words, “She’s gone.” At that moment I had never loved my mother more.

Gypsies, Maligned and Misaligned

On a cool, late autumn day in 1930, or maybe 1931, Ruthy Merica and a small swarm of her grade school friends from the Fleeburg section of Shenandoah, Virginia, walked home from school as they always did, down the dirt road from their two-room schoolhouse, children dropping from the swarm here and there as they reached their front doors till it was just Ruthy, her brother Jesse, and her friend Helen. When they reached the Merica house, Ruthy invariably waved goodbye to Helen and ran around back to the kitchen door to find her mother.

But today was different. As the swarm made its way down the road one of the children spotted smoke coming from the woods. Gypsy encampmentThey all looked, and at the edge of the meadow they saw a gypsy camp, strange people with long dark hair and colorful clothes, mostly rags, lounging and milling about.

The children knew about Gypsies. They camped in the woods every autumn, then again in spring, migrating like birds south to escape the harsh northern winters and then back north in spring to some nesting grounds somewhere.

“Lock your children away, the Gypsies are near,” the children yelled, then ran ahead with shrill screams, arms outstretched and hearts thumping, racing in what they thought was a dangerous game to reach home before the Gypsies caught them.

By that night the news had spread. “The Gypsies are here,” people whispered to each other. Ruthy’s parents, Tom and Florence Merica, turned off all the lights, and kept them off so that Gypsy familygypsy marauders who sneaked by night would not see their house.

They kept the windows open all night too, so the family could listen for the chickens squawking, a sure sign something or someone was skulking about the property. They had been hit in years previous, a chicken from the coop, a ham from the smokehouse, vegetables from the garden, and they did not want to repeat those unnerving incidents.

It was different during the light of day. That’s when the gypsy women went door to door, selling expertly made baskets they wove from willows cut down by the streams. Ruthy’s mother bought one once. It was pretty, and she used it to carry vegetables from the garden.

The next day Ruthy’s older sister, Ola, drove her Model A Ford to Harrisonburg to shop. Ruthy went along, as Ola liked the company and Ruthy enjoyed seeing the shops in the larger town. That afternoon on the way back, after turning from Naked Creek Road onto Fleeburg Road, Ola pulled off to the side and stopped near the Gypsy camp. She turned to Ruthy and said, “I’m going to get my fortune read.”

Gypsy women Roma arrest New York 1934Ola was 13 years older than Ruthy and was married already to Raymond Grimsley, but she didn’t want her parents to think her reckless. “Don’t tell Ma or Pa,” she said, and jumped out.

She strode through the meadow, tall and confident, more so maybe even than Ruthy’s older brothers. Ruthy got out too, but went only to the middle of the road, where she stood to wait for Ola to return. She saw Ola enter the camp, then disappear behind a tent with a woman who must have been the fortune teller.

A few minutes later Ola returned across the meadow. She and Ruthy got in the car and drove the rest of the way home, where Ola dropped her off, picked up her baby, Ray, and drove back to her own home in Shenandoah. Ola never told Ruthy what the fortune teller said, and Ruthy never thought to ask her.

Seventy or so years later, I had my own Gypsy encounter. Six or seven years ago my husband and I visited Rome. I had been before, and knew exactly where in the city and its surroundings I wanted to take him.

OGypsy_family_from_Serbiaur hotel suite had a beautiful view of the Roman Coliseum on one side, and around the corner on the other was the spectacular Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. We decided to start our day there.

After touring this, the largest church in Rome, we were ready to eat, and so walked down the church’s massive stone steps and across the plaza to an osteria we had noticed before.

The plaza was crowded with tourists, even though we like to travel in off months to escape the crowds, say when it is rainy or cold, or both, as it was that day. Before we reached the osteria two mothers and their children approached us. The women both carried babies, and a half dozen children surrounded them. The mothers caught and held our eyes, pleading for money to feed their children, and then the children mobbed us, their hands out and cupped, pulling on our clothing and talking all at once in some language I did not recognize. We were sympathetic, but the scene was getting out of hand. We kept moving, but they bound themselves around us inescapably.

Their sudden appearance startled us, erasing any spiritual calm we absorbed while inside the church, and as these moments were just short of frightening, we frantically made our way to the osteria. Just before we reached it, they fell away and disappeared. All this happened over only a few seconds.

Once inside the quiet osteria we regained our calm over a relaxed lunch, planning where to go next. When we were ready to leave, Patrick, my husband, reached for his wallet. It was gone, as was his passport, his credit cards, and about $1,000 in cash, which we stupidly had not put in a safety deposit box that morning.

I immediately jumped up and ran outside to find the two mothers, or a policeman. roma-people1Scanning the street, I spied one of Italy’s tiny police cars rounding the church, and flagged it down. What ensued was a mad-cap ride through the streets of Rome in the back of a police car, with countless other police cars joining the chase, each going a different way. It was comical in a Buster Keaton, Keystone Cops way.

Long story short, we found the culprits, and they were arrested. The Roman authorities asked us politely if we would go to court the next day to testify. It seems that there was a terrible crime wave against tourists in Rome, and they needed our help to convict these perpetrators. Most tourists, they said, will not agree to testify, because they don’t want to lose precious and limited tourist time in the courthouse. We, on the other hand, thought this sounded like a wonderfully unique adventure, practically worth the cost of our losses, and so agreed.

I’m skipping many of the interesting details, but the upshot of our adventure was that once in court the prosecutor said the thieves were Gypsies, members of a huge group of refugees from war-torn Bosnia who came here with nothing and so turned to thieving to feed their families.

MontenegroRoma-people (Large)Once we found out more about these maligned people we felt compassion for their lifetime of misfortune. We decided we did not want to press charges, but by that time it was too late. The state had taken control. We didn’t even have to testify for those two women to be convicted, and for their children to be put in homes, though family members would be able to extract the children. The sentence was one year. We felt horrible. My husband kept track of the sentence, and on the anniversary of their release we hoped and prayed for their better lives.

The Gypsies are mysterious, and their origins just add to the mystery. We know they were originally from India, and their language even today, for any left who speak it, is based on Sanskrit. But we don’t know why they left India in the 10th century, migrating through Persia and arriving in Europe roughly 800 years later, where they were given the name Gypsy, because Europeans of the Middle Ages thought they were from Egypt.

gypsies._1923They came to America originally in the 17th and 18th centuries, banned as they were from England, France, Portugal and Spain. More arrived from Serbia, Russia, and Austria-Hungary after the 1880s.

Today there are between 100,000 (National Geographic) and one million (Wikipedia, PBS) Gypsies living in the United States, mostly in Los Angeles and Chicago, and about 12 million worldwide.

Governments around the world have always tried to ban the Gypsy’s way of life. They said, “You cannot live in wagons pulled by horses and travel in caravans.” Later they said, “You cannot live in vans and travel from place to place. You must have a house, and send your children to school.”

It is no better for the Roma (the Gypsy name for themselves) today. Right now, the anti-Roma sentiment is only growing. Hundreds of thousands of Roma fled the war-torn Baltic states into Western Europe. Now France and Italy burn their camps and deport them. In Romania their homes are bulldozed, even though the Roma may have lived in them for decades. The EU put travel restrictions on Romania and Bulgaria, hoping the stem the tide of Roma emigrants.

A backlash against the hatred is growing. Pope Francis spoke out against Roma discrimination. He said, “I remember many times here in Rome when some Gypsies would get on the bus, the driver would say: ‘Watch your wallets!’ This is contempt. It might be true, but it is contempt.”

Will the Gypsy culture survive? It has already lost much, and now, not since Hitler has there been such dedication to eradicating that way of life, if not those people themselves.

A revered Gypsy poet called Papusza wrote,

The time of the wandering Gypsies

Has long passed.

But I see them,

They are bright,

Strong and clear like water.

You can hear it

Wandering when it wishes to speak.

But poor thing, it has no speech

Apart from silver splashing and sighing.

Only the horse, grazing in the grass,

Listens and understands that sighing.

The water does not look behind.

It flees, runs farther away,

Where eyes will not see her,

The water that wanders.

GypsyRuthy, my mother, knew instinctively that the gypsies didn’t steal children, but our reactions to superstitions are not triggered by our rational minds.The mysterious “other” has always engendered fear.

Yes, my family’s only two encounters with Gypsies involved theft, and a culture of theft is intolerable. But with so many fears bestowed upon the Gypsies, do they even have a chance to live better lives? The world denies them their nomadic life, denies them the tradition of oral rather then written knowledge, says their children must attend school.

They have clung to their ways through centuries of the worst persecution. But can they survive this latest attempt at forced integration? demo-roma-youthThe Gypsy’s ways have always been misaligned with the cultures around them.

Perhaps that’s why they first took to the road. And maybe that’s why they stay on the road even today, because wherever they stop, they are eventually asked to leave. No wonder they are nomadic.

 

A Complex Tangle of Emotions

I did not set out to write a multi-part series on the Blue Ridge Mountain evictions, but as the original post became longer and longer, I decided to split it into parts, all of which I will post in upcoming days. Be sure you read parts One, Two, Three, and Four.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 5

Blue Ridge long

The Blue Ridge evictions were not so long ago. They happened within the lifetime of my mother, who is still alive, though she is the last of her family. She was 14 when her grandparents had to leave their Blue Ridge home, but has only a few memories of the event.

As a girl, and before the evictions, she and her mother walked through Jollett Hollow and up the mountain to her grandparents’ home for visits. After the eviction, the walk was easier, just into Jollett Hollow.Mountain child, Howard Simon

Her grandfather, Durret Collier, had a good amount of land. The Park records say 452 acres. In the spring, Durret and my mother’s father, Tom Merica, peeled the tanbark from their trees with a spudbar and hauled it to Cover’s tannery in Elkton. Durrett also managed a farm for a Mr. Moore, or Morris. These, to my knowledge, were his only sources of income.

My mother’s grandparents kept a busy house. As a young family, I can imagine the commotion on visiting day, with five daughters and one son. There must have been suitors aplenty! Later, with the girls grown and married, visiting day was still special. Aunts and cousins and neighbors came and went, some bringing casseroles or jelled salads, others sitting with plates of fried chicken or macaroni and cheese. Food was central to visiting, and a good host never got past “Come in” or “How are you?” without offering something nourishing.

With so many adults around, my mother sat quietly off to the side and listened to the grown-ups talk. She didn’t like playing with her cousins as much as she liked spending time with her mother, often coming in from play when there were visitors. She liked to hear what adults talked about, the community news, the gentle gossip that got her mother giggling.

She remembers some vague talk of the evictions, that her grandparents were pleased to be able to move to a better house to raise the young granddaughter who had been left in their care when her mother died. She remembers that others who talked with her grandparents were similarly pleased. Yes, she remembers some felt they were treated unfairly, but the impression she took away, filtered through these last 79 years, is that people thought it a net positive benefit to them.

Berry pickers, Howard SimonI imagine their very first reaction was negative though, on hearing that the government was condemning their property and evicting them from their homes. Who would be happy about that? But time, and the offer of money, which was in short supply for most of these people, won in the end.

Maybe those who went willingly are the minority. Or the majority. I don’t know, and probably never will. There are different levels of going “willingly.” But this I know: Not everyone was so pleased. A survey was taken in five hollows. Of the 132 families surveyed, 27 didn’t believe the park would ever exist, 17 were indifferent, four were hostile, ten showed anxiety, nine wanted to remain in the park, and 65 felt positive. Yet of those 132 families, 93 had no plan about leaving.

I can understand that, and I imagine the anxiety level was much higher than reported. Even under the best circumstances, moving causes stress and anxiety, and these were about the worst circumstances possible – eviction. Even if they did turn around to see it as a “net positive” as my ancestors did, I’m sure it wasn’t easy coming to terms with being forced by outsiders to leave their homes.

There was talk of violence. Some took the matter to court, hoping our legal system of checks and balances would prove the condemnation of their homes illegal. A cottage industry of books and college theses on displacement and the abuse of eminent domain sprouted up, many focusing on the loss of home and culture that these people suffered. Of course, there were also others that praised the efforts of Roosevelt and his New Deal to lessen poverty by moving subsistence farmers from marginalized lands to more fertile farms.

A 1930 census counted 150,659 subsistence farms in all of Appalachia. Of those, only about 465 were in the Blue Ridge, within the future park’s boundaries, and of those, 197 owned their homes or property. The rest were tenants, and a few squatters. Of those 197 owners, all were given cash buyouts and offered new homes outside the park boundaries, as were 93 non-property owners who were given moving allowances. These were mostly tenants or caretakers of mountain farms.Kitchen

There were 104 families resettled by state welfare, and 67 who either relocated on their own or were granted permission to live out their lifetimes in their park homes. I know that only equals 461, and I don’t know what category the missing four families belong to, but those are the statistics I found.

Of all the land bought and deeded to the Federal government for the Shenandoah National Park’s creation, only seven percent was owned by the displaced residents. The vast majority of the land, 93 percent, was owned by people who would be considered outsiders; in other words, people who did not live within the future park’s boundaries, and a few who lived there, yet owned so much property as to be wealthy landowners and tenant holders who could easily move elsewhere, and did.

But what a seven percent that was. These were not just suburbanites whose first goal on moving into a new house is to move to a more expensive house. Old house, Fred GearyThese were families who had been there for generations. Many lived in compounds of extended families, with parents, brothers, grandparents all with their own small homes. Some were so poor that they couldn’t afford to move anywhere else. Each family’s circumstance was different, but I guess that every one of them was a complex tangle of emotions, needs, desires, and problems that had to be dealt with before they could pull up roots and leave.

But eventually, one way or another, all but a few of those families packed up and moved out, forcibly or voluntarily. They resettled, for better or worse, and lived out their lives, hopefully in peace and with love. They either bought or were given new homes, and they made do. That’s what we all do. We make do.

You can find Part Six of My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction here. Or access the whole series here. To make sure you don’t miss the next installments, go to the “Subscribe” form at the top of this page.

Blue Ridge: Oh, How They Lived!

I did not set out to write a multi-part series on the Blue Ridge Mountain evictions, but as the original post became longer and longer, I decided to split it into parts, all of which I will post in upcoming days. Be sure you read parts One, Two, and Three.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 4

Blue Ridge long

When things are our own, they tend to become a little more valuable, a little more beautiful, a little more precious. Just like we believe with our whole heart that our team is better, even if the score shows different, and we will defend them, and our belief in their superiority, to the end.

This would be key, of course, when the men from WMountain cabinashington came calling on my Blue Ridge ancestors with their bags of pennies and chewing gum, thinking a few treats for the kids, a few dollars for their parents, and a rational appeal would lure them from the land.

They thought it only logical that these people would want to be upwardly mobile, to move to a newer home on more fertile land. But they would be wrong. It would not be that easy.

Mountain living isn’t for the lazy or unspirited. Up there the winds howl louder, and colder. The ground is nearly impenetrable, the few inches of soil stony and too young to be nutritious to non-native plants, and at any rate little more than highly acidic ground leaves or needles.

Temperatures fall about 5.5 degrees for every 1,000 feet higher in elevation, making growing seasons shorter and crops smaller. Pioneer home

Water is a constant source of worry, whether from solid bedrock that makes a dug well impossible, life-giving springs and streams that occasionally run dry, or life-sucking drought. Winters are cold, sometimes bitterly so, and neighbors and supplies that must be bought are, for better or worse, miles away.

I’ve read that the Scots-Irish and the Germans took to the Blue Ridge because the lower, more fertile land was all taken. If bottom land was available, it was at prices these mostly poor immigrants couldn’t afford.

So they came to the mountains, where only the hearty would thrive, and who were more hearty than the Scots-Irish and Germans? They carved their homes from the mountainsides and began life anew in the Blue Ridge, and after a few years or a few generations, could not even imagine living anywhere else.Koonz chimney

Work on a mountain farm is constant, as it is on any farm. But the results are more meager. Our ancestors could grow little past what was necessary to feed the children, though some years there was enough for a pair of new shoes for each of them.

Maybe the mountaineers didn’t work harder than we do. Everyone I know works hard. But the mountaineers’ work was more desperate. If my friends don’t work hard, they can’t afford $200 dinners once or twice a week. If the mountaineers didn’t work hard, they wouldn’t bring in enough food to last the winter. If my friends don’t work hard, they can’t afford their $400 shoes. If the mountaineers didn’t work hard, they couldn’t afford any shoes.

But to the hearty souls who carved into Green Mountain or Piney Mountain or Grindstone Mountain, this was not dispiriting. My grandmother, Florence Collier Merica, spoke of how hard she and her sisters worked on their parents’ farm on the mountain above Naked Creek. Mill, Rockingham

They, as I’ve written elsewhere, “hoed corn all day and danced all night.” They looked forward to “visiting day,” when neighbors from over the mountain, or from the next hollow up, would come a’visiting. Each family put out food, for every guest to those homes, invited or not, must be offered food. It was the Blue Ridge way.  You never knew who would come. They’d stay a while, catch up on news and gossip, then move on down the trail.

Yes, there was time for dance, and fun, and love, and they did all that. A cousin related at several points by both blood and marriage, Bela Lam, who went on to record his music in New YorkBela Lam 45rpm and Richmond, played music at their parties, as did others in this music-loving neck of the woods.

One year my grandfather cooked up the idea of a Halloween party to keep the kids from going out and getting in trouble, and asked Bela to play. It worked. A different cousin collected folk song sheet music and lyrics, and had a vast store of them in an upstairs bedroom of my great grandmother’s home. I wish I knew what became of them when she died.

On Saturday nights neighbors would come to my grandparents’ home because they had the community’s first radio. It was in the parlor, and my grandfather took chairs from the dining room and set them around.My grandmother put a couple of straw mattresses and blankets in the corner, and that’s where the children sat.

Later in the evening, after Amos and Andy, and well into the Grand Ole’ Opera, the children drifted off to sleep. After the show was over, their parents gently picked them up and carried them home. My mother’s mother let her sleep there the entire night sometimes.

Their home was farther out from the mountain’s base, down Naked Creek and around the bend at Fleeburg. Thold farmis is where Florence Collier and Thomas Merica built their home when they got married and came down from the mountain.

Even before the park evictions, most of the homes were not high up, they were in the greater valley, or gathered at the lower elevations, inside the hollows that cleave the mountains, the houses clustered there as if they all slipped down the mountainsides and came to rest nearly on top of each other at the bottom, dotted on opposite sides of a rough trail, or better, a streambed.

Even deep within the mountains, most residents lived in the hollows: Hensley Hollow, Weaver Hollow, Turner Hollow, Crow Hollow, Allen Hollow, Fox Hollow.

Around them, these farmers planted crops and gardens in the more fertile topsoil that flowed down from the mountaintops with every creek and cloudburst.

But whether on the mountain or in the hollows, they raised corn and beans, planted orchards of apples and plums, raised their famiZerkelImagelies and buried their old, and often their young too, in cemeteries just a few steps away. Midwives delivered babies, herbalists consulted on medicine, and occasionally, the fortune teller up in the woods near Waynesboro read nervous young women’s futures.

My great grandmother used mustard plaster for colds, wild cherry bark for coughs, baking soda for stomachaches, and a little brandy in hot water for winter’s chill. To this day, I use cherry cough drops, baking soda in water for stomachache, and warm brandy (without the water) for a deep chill.

The mountaineers supplemented their diets with food gleaned from the forest. Chestnuts, berries, morels, venison, squirrel, raccoon, horseradish, sassafrass. I think of horseradish as a relish or lightly-applied sauce, but my mother told me of a young poor girl she saw who had nothing but a bag of wild horseradish to eat for lunch. She never forgot that girl, and now I don’t think I will either.

In some ways Farm buildingmy Blue Ridge ancestors and their neighbors lived their lives nearly free from outside contact. That wasn’t unusual for many communities, mountain or not, before rail or the automobile. But changing ways was inevitable once the auto started to become popular.

That kind of progress can’t be stopped, and neither can the change that comes with it. Even if the government didn’t take their lands, change would have started happening more and more rapidly for my Blue Ridge ancestors, and maybe their culture would have been lost by now just the same. We’ll never know for sure.

What we do know is that hindsight is everything. Even the Park Service wishes now that the men and women who came to record how these Blue Ridge people lived would have hSpring house entrancead more respect for their customs and folkways; would have preserved the way of life as best they could, because now it is irretrievably lost.

But the park builders had their deadlines, and so we can never go back to see our great grandparents’ homes. But the shiny side of that coin is that today we can see the mountains as they were when our fifth and sixth great grandparents first saw them and decided, “Here we will live.” And, oh, did they ever!

Who else can say that?!

You can read Part Five of My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction here. Or access the whole series here. To make sure you don’t miss any installments, go to the “subscribe” form at the top of this page.

The Family Ties that Bind

I did not set out to write a multi-part series on the Blue Ridge Mountain evictions, but as the original post became longer and longer, I decided to split it into parts, all of which I will post in upcoming days. Be sure you read parts One and Two. I also want to thank Jon Bilous for the use of his exquisite Blue Ridge photos. You can see his entire Blue Ridge portfolio here.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 3

Blue Ridge longMost Americans blow away from their family trees like fall leaves in a high wind. They drift to wherever jobs and prevailing winds take them, commence flying the local colors and rooting for their new local team, and forget any loyalties they ever had elsewhere, remembering family only as a holiday obligation.

But we’re not all like that, are we? I was born of a 10th generation Virginian, my mother’s Meador ancestors first arriving in Virginia from England in 1636. They’ve now stayed in Virginia for 378 years and counting. In fact, the family name moved more than the family did, morphing from Meador to Meadows sometime over their first two centuries here.

By 1743 the Meadows family moved from Virginia’s coastal plains at the Rappahannock to the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, on Hightop Mountain, near Swift Run Gap, and thus I was born not just to a 10th generation Virginian, but to a fifth generation Blue Ridgian. Indeed, seven of my mother’s eight great grandparents were from those mountains, the origins of the eighth being so far unaccounted for.Blue Ridge - Big Meadows - Jon Bilous

This is not unusual in the Blue Ridge. In fact, it’s typical. What is unusual is that my mother moved all the way to California. It’s unusual because most people born to the Blue Ridge don’t leave. It’s unusual because she is the only one of nine children to leave. It’s unusual because… here it comes… 94 percent of those born in Appalachia (of which the Blue Ridge is part) are descended from families that have been there since the American Revolution, five, six generations ago.

I am from California, where everyone is from somewhere else, and so to me that is an astonishing testament to the bonds that tie my mother’s family and other Blue Ridge natives to their homes and families. I should add that I am not just astonished, I am envious. My childhood home is gone, vanished, my clan disbursed like dandelion seeds in the wind to take root elsewhere. From six or more related households within a few miles of each other in Encinitas and Leucadia, California, we blew outward to Oregon, Washington, North Carolina, the High Sierras, Alaska, and elsewhere. No one is left in our little hometown. Even our home is gone, torn down to make way for something bigger.

Blue Ridge mists - Jon Bilous.GIFWhat are these ties that bind some so firmly to family and place? Why are Blue Ridge natives (for I’m interested only in Blue Ridge natives, not Appalachians in general) so different from the rest of the country? I found a Facebook page that’s open only to those whose ancestors are from that one small area of Virginia. It’s an active site and its members are amazingly knowledgeable about their and even their neighbors’ ancestors. I’ve never seen that anywhere else. They are historians, and clearly love their work. They are also clearly proud of their ancestors. There are certain surnames that have prestige, the honor of a long history in the Blue Ridge. The Breedens, Lams, Eppards, Turners, Deans, Meadows, Hammers. And some, like the Hensleys and Shifflets, are genealogical royalty, their families spread across those mountains for centuries, like history’s icing.

We’ve all seen people who proudly announce their ancestors are this president, that king, some other inventor or explorer. When telling you, they have a pleased expression, as if thinking that genetic connection makes them smarter, or more important in the scheme of history. But it’s different in the Blue Ridge. When those descendents proudly point to a photo of their ancestor, you’re likely to find yourself looking at a worn-out looking man or woman dressed in old, maybe tattered clothes, maybe sitting in front of a barely-standing shack in a dirt yard.

Blue Ridge forest fog - Jon BilousI get that. Those are my ancestors too, at least on my mother’s side. Within this Blue Ridge genealogy group on a Facebook page, I have that same pride. The blood of these strong, determined, American pioneers runs through my veins. They climbed the mountains, hacked their homes from the wilderness, raised strong families, fended for themselves, helped their neighbors, never infringed on anyone else and asked only to never be infringed upon. Their clothes were raggedy, but yours would be too if you had just made America. While Thomas Jefferson and John Adams may have been the brains that created this country, these people were the backbone that gave America its strength and character.

They made their homes in the mountains of Virginia, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen on the five continents I’ve traveled, and so grand a place that their descendents have stayed through half a dozen generations, staying as close to those original Blue Ridge mountain homes as they can. They’re bound to that place by some undefinable force. Way out here in California I feel it too, pulling me back to a place I’ve never lived.

When I was growing up I would sometimes say that my mother was from the South. That gross inaccuracy always rankled her, and she would correct me, “I am not from the South, I am a Virginian.” That is an important distinction, something she’s always been proud of. She is equally proud to be from Shenandoah, and if there were some sort of shorthand way of saying it so others would understand, I’m sure she would proudly tell people she is from close to where her grandparents and great grandparents and great great and great great great grandparents lived their entire lives, back to five generations ago.

Unlike the 94 percent who remain there all their lives, she didn’t want to stay. She wanted all the experiences a bigger world could give her. But she took Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge with her, and then she passed them on to me. Like I say, I have Blue Ridge in my blood. I feel richer for it. And who knows, maybe some day I will live there.

You can read Part Four of My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction here. Or access the whole series here. To make sure you don’t miss any installments, go to the “subscribe” form at the top of this page.

Should I Display This Photo?

A few days ago I wrote about all the strange emotions I felt when I saw the first photo of my mother as a child. I showed the picture before, but I’ll show it here again.

Ruthy MericaAfter editing the photo to remove some of the shadow and enlarging the portion where my mother is visible I was overwhelmed with feeling. I felt the thrill of discovery because after resigning myself years ago to never seeing an image of her as anything younger than 22 or 23, I found her in the shadows of a photo of my Aunt Ola I’ve had all along. I felt joy that I finally knew what she looked like. Disappointment that she was veiled in shadow and I could barely make out her features. Confirmation that she was the same brunette beauty I’d seen in later photos of her. Delight that she looked like a happy, spunky little girl. And a twinge of shame at seeing her in a smudged and ill-fitting dress. I tried hard to fight off that feeling, but there it was. It overtook me before my rational side could jump in and block it. So I can toss in the feeling of disappointment at myself for that rush to judgement.

The shame went against everything I thought I knew about myself, that I observe objectively and do not judge irrationally or without considering varied facts. (I infuriate friends for refusing to take sides.) But the dirty dress went against everything I thought I knew about my mother’s family. Would I have to rethink it all?

I’ve always heard about the clockwork routine they lived to. The chores her parents expected the kids to do every morning. The hearty and complete meals that were laid out three times a day for this farm family of 12. Wash day was every Monday and ironing every Tuesday. Her mother did all that, but each Saturday the whole family pitched in around the farm. My mother’s job was to clean the upstairs. Every Saturday she scrubbed the floors, washed the basins and windows, dusted, and tidied up. Her little sister had the job of cleaning the downstairs, but since she was three years younger her mother helped her.  Then Sundays were for church and a big supper, the table laden with roast chicken, macaroni and cheese, green beans or peas, rolls, and if they were lucky, a berry pie or coconut cake.

Such disciplined routine typically means a clean and orderly household. The oldest child, my Aunt Ola, 13 years my mother’s elder, was fastidious to the point of obsession. No dirt dared enter her spotless house. And no grime dared step foot on her property. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear she washed the tire treads of her car after every trip to the store. Yet there was my mother in a photo of Ola and her tidy baby boy, with my mother looking like Pigpen from the Charley Brown cartoons. Of course, it’s easy for me to justify the way she looks in the photo. Maybe it’s Saturday and she just finished washing the floors. Maybe it’s a warm spring day and she’s been hoeing rows with her mother in the garden. Or a hot summer day and she’s been playing hide and seek with her Comer cousins down at the bend. Or she’s just back from the swimming hole. The kids swam clothes and all, and this would be a perfect swim dress.

It’s easy to justify a kid being dirty. But they’re not usually photographed that way. If we know a photographer will be present we dress our children to reflect well on ourselves. And if a photo turns out less than flattering we tear it up. It’s a small manipulation of reality that helps us shape the image we want to show to the world.  We take photos. We look at them and sort them, throwing out the bad ones, keeping the good ones, and choosing the great ones to display in frames. Or these days, as our home screens or screen savers. That is acceptable and normal behavior. All good, right?

Yet here I am with the only photo of my mother being one I bet her mother would not have wanted to last 84 years, as it has so far. As the only photo I have of her, I love it. And that pretty face and hair I recognize? I adore it. Pulling wider to show her leaning into the photo from over the porch rail? It makes me smile to see this joyous, impish girl who so wants to charm the camera. Even the composition of the photo is great, all angles and squares with the porch posts, house siding, chair back spindles, window frame, and my mother’s checked dress. Quite artistic. These things make me happy. Then I zero in on the dress and suddenly my emotions become very mixed. I don’t like the sour shame that creeps into my warm soup of emotions. Again, it’s easy to justify a dirty kid. But photos worthy of display can’t come with attached captions that explain the circumstances.

I sent the photo to a photo restorer and got back an improved version where some of the shadows were removed from my mother’s face and dress. It was now slightly improved, but still nothing I considered mantle-worthy. Here’s the cleaned-up version:

Ruthy_Merica_c.1930Her mother, my grandmother, would not want to display the photo. Aunt Ola wouldn’t either. And my mother would certainly have thrown it away. But it’s the only one I have.

Should I display the photo?

The Only Photo of My Mother’s Childhood

Mine is not a family of photographers. We don’t click pictures of every party or parade. We don’t all put on white shirts and jeans to sit on rocks at the beach for annual family portraits. We don’t even usually remember to document landmark events like birthdays, graduations, or meals that aren’t burnt. That requires a certain kind of self-consciousness that we’re short on. It may have originated with my grandfather, who rejected the “bourgeois life of Wall Street” and moved his family into a utopian community in the 1930s.

Whole decades are missing from our family’s life in pictures. I never thought about it much, but now that I’m older I’m beginning to think not just about where our family is going, but where it’s been. We humans nearly always feel that inexplicable connection with the homelands of our ancestors, and with our “roots.” We know there is a genetic imperative to favor family, but it’s more than that. There’s a sense of grounding, of the permanence, even immortality that comes from seeing the long line of ancestors that reaches behind you, then panning forward we can see that same line extending into the future and on over the horizon.

My family is probably better at knowing we’re related to, say, Sir Isaac Newton or steamship builder Robert Fulton, than we are at knowing our immediate ancestors. Thankfully, my father’s long-gone mother documented his every childhood phase. Flipping though the photo album I see him posed in his christening gown, a page later in his velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, then bundled in funny little coat and ready to go outside, then I flip the page and there he is with old Nell, the harness horse that pulled his grandfather’s buggy. In all these posed photos he was with his usually identically dressed fraternal twin brother.

But my mother? Fugedaboudit. I never saw a picture of her as a child. The earliest photo of her must be around age 22 or 23, and even then it’s just a snapshot from a distance far enough to have to look close to see it’s her. Of the few photos I have of her before age 45, none show a clear view of her face. This one, of her and my older brother as a baby, is typical:

Ruth Berryman and Teddy c. 1944I don’t care how good your photo editing software is, you’re not going to find my mother’s face in there. Which is why my heart skipped a beat when I peered into a tiny two inch by three inch photo of my aunt and her toddler boy and there, in the shadowed background, was a figure that might have been my mother. Might have been. As in, I felt a glimmer of hope. Aunt Ola is front and center in the photo. She’s in the yard of her parents’ Shenandoah, Virginia house, all smiles and looking modern in her short skirt, flapper cloche and baby Ray in her arms. He’s wearing his jumper with the big buttons and white shirt, high socks, and his Buster Browns. There’s a Model something-or-other Ford in the driveway behind them. I’ve had the photo for years but never stopped to examine it because, well, it was Aunt Ola, not my mom, and that figure in the background was too faint to see much of. This is what the photo looked like to me. Like I have glaucoma:

Ola Grimsley, my aunt, holding baby Ray at home of her parents, Tom and Florence Collier, in about 1930. Ruth Merica, my mother, is on the porch in background

No, the borders aren’t really that dark, but this is exactly how the photo felt every time I glanced through the album. Then a few weeks ago I decided to restore some of our old photos and get copies to other family members. I brought out the album for the first time in quite a few years and looked at the pictures with the idea that the newest restoring and retouching programs could correct some of their problems. I took another look at the photo of Aunt Ola and baby Ray.

Ola Grimsley, my aunt, holding baby Ray at home of her parents, Tom and Florence Collier, in about 1930. Ruth Merica, my mother, is on the porch in background

Could that be my mother? I had to move the lamp to spotlight the photo. I rested the heavy-handled and usually only decorative magnifying glass onto the edge of my keyboard, and practically stopped breathing to get an unblurred view. But yes, I was certain, that is my mother! I imagined she had just been out playing in the summer fields somewhere, maybe playing hide and seek with her Cardin cousins down at the corner. More likely she was with her mother in the garden. Unlike her sisters, she liked be out there digging holes with a hoe while her mother came along behind planting beans or peas. Or going along the bean rows with a stick in her right hand to knock worms off the leaves, dropping them into the pan she carried in her left hand.

Sometimes she climbed up into the big green gauge plum tree while her mother worked below. It was cool amid the leaves, and she liked to eat plums and watch her brothers out in the fields. Or sometimes she went in the kitchen and brought out the salt shaker, then poked around for the biggest, reddest, juiciest tomato, licking its silky skin so the salt would stick, then biting into its warm flesh till juice spilled down her chin and onto the front of her dress. No mind. Gardening is dirty work, and that’s what old clothes are for.

Whatever she was doing, it wasn’t being the star of any photograph. She may have looked up from whatever she was doing and seen Ola, her autocratic oldest sister, looking like the center of attention with her baby boy and having her photo taken by her husband, Raymond. Mom probably thought, oh no you don’t, it’s not just you and Ray and Raymond. I’m here too.” So she skipped up to the porch in her little black slippers, leaned over the rail, and smiled for the camera. 

I sent the photo to an expert photo restoration artist and asked her to give it all she’s got. A day later she emailed me back this:Ruthy_Merica_c.1930

The thick brunette hair and something about that barely-visible face told me this might be the one and only photo that exists of my mother as a child, this half-lit figure peering over the porch railing, crowding into a photo that isn’t supposed to be of her. She looks about nine or ten. The camera is oblivious of her, but she’s smiling for the photographer like the beauty queen she would later be. I’d recognize that alabaster skin anywhere. Her mother made her carry a sun parasol whenever she was out in the sun. And her gorgeous hair. She wore it shoulder length into her early 50s, and it always fell across her forehead in cascades of soft waves. She told me about those slippers too. Her father bought them for her before a church recital, and she loved the dainty little things. So different from the lace-up boots with thick stockings that she wore all winter. I don’t know anything about that old dress, except that the last duty for any bit of clothing, before being torn up for rags and rag rugs, was for wearing to do work like cleaning and gardening. 

This is the one picture to the thousands of words in the stories my mother has told me. The tomatoes and the plums and the bossy sister and the pretty slippers and the seed sack dresses and happy summers. It gives evidence to more than the stories too: To my experience of her smile and her soft hair and her impish humor. I am now the proud owner of exactly one photograph of my mother’s childhood. But that’s all I need, just the one.