Author Archives: cynthiaberryman

Gypsies, Maligned and Misaligned

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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.

 

My Blue Ridge Family Tree (Album)

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This is the last, part Nine of My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction series. Be sure you read parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six,  Seven and Eight. 

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 9

Blue Ridge longThe Blue Ridge Mountains got themselves into the blood of five generations of my ancestors.Ola_Florence_Ruth_Jessee_and_other_Mericas_and_Comers_Shenandoah..CU.r

Those once-giant peaks, which formed when Africa and North America collided more than a billion years ago, and then rivaled the Himalayas in majesty, also helped to form my Blue Ridge ancestors, and me.

The granite and gneiss stone that lay beneath the mountains’ thin soil hardened our ancestors’ backbones.

The thin layer of gray loam and tenacious red clay made farming difficult, but built our ancestors’ perseverance.

We are who we are today in great part because of who the mountains made them.

Those mystically blue mountains shaped two sets of my fifth great grandparents way back Ruth Merica (rt) & Phyllis Grimsley c1940noborderin the 1700s: Francis Meadows and his wife, Mary; and Martin Crawford and his wife, Elizabeth McDonald.

And seven sets of my fourth great grandparents: John Phillip Dietz and Catherina Heck, Martin Alfred Collier and Mary Williams, John McDaniel and Elizabeth Crawford, Bird Snow and Polly Mayhugh, William Breeding and Susannah Tanner, William Lamb and Mary Gear, and James Meadows and Catherine Boswell.

They shaped seven sets of my third great grandparents: Johannes Markey and Elizabeth Dietz, Preston Collier and Elizabeth Haney, Ellis Turner and Susannah Smith, Levi Lucas and Elizabeth Utsler, Thomas Meadows and Elizabeth Breeden, John McDaniel and Martha Snow, and Zachariah McDaniel and Nancy Lamb.

And they molded four sets of my second great grandparents: Mitchell Meadows and Verinda McDaniels, George Merica and Catharine Wagoner, Smith Collier and Frances Ruth Merica and Parents, Shenandoah VA, c.1940.CU.rMcDaniel, and David Turner and Catherine Lucas.

As well as my great grandparents, William Durrett Collier and Mary Meadows, and Joseph W. Merica and Elizabeth Turner.

And my grandparents, Thomas Austin Merica and Florence Elizabeth Collier.

They all lived and died within a few miles of each other up in the Blue Ridge.

They worked the soil, raised their families, danced, praised God, leaped in joy, crumbled in sorrow, stood for what they believed and ignored the rest for upwards of 300 years.Ruth Berryman and Teddy 1943 Shenandoah.r

They shed their blood, sweat, and tears in those mountains.

It’s where they lay their bodies down to rest each night, and at life’s end.

And finally, 80 years ago, they walked down those mountains, into the valleys below, and never went back.

Their time passed. That gate locked against them forever.

Pick up a handful of soil within Shenandoah National Park today and hold it. You can practically feel their hearts beat.

You can smell their blood and sweat, taste the saltiness of their tears. That earthiness, that is them. And us.

Mary M. Meadows and William Durret Collier wedding photo

William Durrett Collier and Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows, my great grandparents, married April 27, 1884, Page County

 

Thomas_and_Florence_Collier_Merica_wedding.r

Thomas Austin Merica and Florence Elizabeth Collier, my grandparents, married July 22, 1906, Page County, Virginia

 

Ruth__Ted_Berryman_c.1941-r

My parents, Ruth Virginia Merica and Theodore Newton Berryman, married May 29, 1940, Washington, D.C.

And we continue, happily, and grateful for our Blue Ridge Mountain ancestors.

The end.

What Really Happened?

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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, Four, Five, Six, and Seven.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 8

Blue Ridge long

Memory is a trickster, always pulling pranks and distorting what we think we know.

When I was a tiny girl, no more than four years old, I remember our family driving from San Diego to Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles to see one of the first Dodgers games since they girl-at-the-windowleft Brooklyn.

Ours was a baseball family, so I already had a sense of what was happening on the field, with balls being hit and caught, players running this way and that.

But then something out of the ordinary caught my eye. A baseball player started to run from the field toward his dugout, and as he did, fans from the stadium poured over the wall and onto the field, chasing, then mobbing him.

I asked my father what was going on, and he explained that the man was a famous baseball player, Jackie Robinson, who would not be playing anymore, and people loved him and wanted to say thank you, and goodbye.

I’ve told that story many times. Then, about a year ago, I mentioned it to my brother, who was also there. He’s ten years older than I am, so would have a much better memory of the event.

But instead of corroborating my story, he said, “Un-uh, you weren’t there. That’s my memory, the-study-houryou heard me tell the story and then remembered it as though it was your own.”

Is he right? He thinks so. Am I right? I certainly feel right, the memory is that vivid.

Is it my memory? I hope so. But I can’t guarantee it is. That’s a bit unsettling, and in some part I wish my brother had not challenged me. It would have been easier that way. I don’t like the confusion I have now where once I had a treasured memory and an interesting story.

Memory is a funny thing. It doesn’t stand still. It changes in ways so small that we don’t know it’s changing. Details blur, and so do causes. But never mind those, it’s the meaning of the memory that matters, not the accuracy of details.

We may forget exactly what happened on 9/11, the sequence of events, the hour of day, but we will never forget its significance. Or we might remember the events so vividly that our trickster memory convinces us we were there.

It’s called the illusion of truth, or confabulation, and it is what may or may not account for my Jackie Robinson story.home-comfort

Silent film actress Mary Pickford once recalled her fear when filming a scene alongside alligators. But she wasn’t there. The alligators were shot separately and that film was run as a background to her scene.

Ronald Reagan several times talked about when he filmed the liberation of Nazi concentration camps as it was happening, in Germany. But the closest he ever got was making World War II training films in Hollywood.

Both of them confused their own experiences with the vividness of the event in our collective memory.

I have a similar memory of the Blue Ridge mountain home evictions for the making of the Shenandoah National Park. Not that I was there. The sensation isn’t that strong. But I feel it in the same way that some other descendants of the evictees do, of the emotions that tore at our ancestors. Almost as if we ourselves were evicted.

I feel the pride of place, that they lived somewhere so special that the government wanted to make a park of it.meditation

I understand the anger of being told they had to leave their mountain home, to give up their property against their will.

I have the tinge of shame at how people came to view these mountain folk after the media and social workers portrayed them as hillbillies, illiterate and slovenly, instead of independent, self-reliant, and true to our pioneer heritage.

And finally, I feel the comfort and happiness my grandmother got from her new home, nearer her family and in a community of friends.

Are all these feelings valid? Of course. But are they accurate? No. No memory is perfect, no retelling of an event is the complete truth. We mean for it to be. But our trickster memories have been at work.

We are influenced by events of intervening years, accounts told by others, the happy person’s tendency to remember only the positive, the depressed person’s tendency to remember only the negative, and a host of other memory tricks that work to distort everything we think we remember as the truth.an-idle-hour

I’m lucky. I “remember” through what my mother tells me; that my great grandparents were at peace, even happy about leaving the mountain. That’s the memory I carry, and so I’m at peace with the Park.

Some descendents aren’t so lucky. They carry a more troubled memory of the evictions, and I can understand why.

If I knew my ancestor was bitter,  it would not be so easy to have a good memory of the Shenandoah National Park’s creation. Being loyal to the blood, I would feel outrage at my ancestor’s treatment, and frustration at not being able to correct it, even decades after they are dead and gone. It would be an affront to me, to my blood.

How does someone with a bad family memory of the park’s creation shed themselves of those feelings? I don’t know. And should they?

Many times anger comes from powerlessness, the inability to do something about a problem.dear-old-grannie So some descendants have taken action, working with the Park to ensure that our ancestors’ histories are told to Park visitors, and told in the right light; building memorials outside the Park, maintaining Park-land cemeteries.

I would also want markers where some of the homes or communities were, and to see that graveyards are kept neat. That’s about all we can ask.

I applaud those who feel they need to do so for taking action. It takes commitment.

The strength of these people’s ancestral memories is a phenomena I haven’t experienced before. The bond these Blue Ridge evictees’ descendants have with their ancestors is remarkably raw, fresh.

To compare, on my father’s side I can trace my family back to the first (non-Native) settlers in America. I’ve been to New England and seen the houses they lived in, the meeting houses and churches they filled with their voices, the plaques that engraved my ancestors’ names in history. It was exciting, thrilling even, but it did not captivate me as these bits and shards of Blue Ridge family history have. I did not feel their experience.boat-builder

Perhaps, like an unburied body, there is something unsettlingly undone in the Blue Ridge. Perhaps those homes that were vacated, suddenly and on someone else’s terms, eventually crumbling without their families, or being torn down, haunt us with that sense of unfinished business, that lack of closure.

Or maybe we see that time has stood still in the Blue Ridge. With no subsequent development, and with the mountain woods and meadows remaining untouched, we can almost see our ancestors in their daily work, their farming and cooking and hunting, their mending and fixing and building and tending to children.

We see the trails they took to go “a’visitin'” or to church. We see those old photos from the National Archives that let us look right into the kitchens and living rooms of our the-village-cobblerancestors, and we can almost see ourselves right there beside them, conversing in their ancient language, living between our time and theirs.

Or perhaps it’s these mountains themselves, haunting and lovely, creaking with age and whispering the secrets of our ancestors in every breeze.

I don’t know what memory binds me here, but whatever it is, it has me. The Blue Ridge and her people are beating in my blood, beating in my heart, and for that connection I am grateful.

What was Lost in the Blue Ridge

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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, Four, Five, and Six.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 7

Blue Ridge long

Every 14 days, somewhere in the world a tribal elder dies, the last of his or her kind, and with him goes his culture’s language, folklore, crafts, and beliefs. Half the world’s languages are in danger of disappearing in the next 90 years as children leave the old ways, wooed by bright lights and big cities.

In China, traditional villages, some of them from the 13th century, are vanishing at an astounding rate of about 300 per day, Cliser evictionbulldozed to make way for urban cities, the old people moved carelessly to apartment dwelling or some other unfamiliar government convenience.

For the Blue Ridge mountain people of Virginia, it’s too late. Their culture scattered to the wind when they were evicted from their mountain homes.

Without the cohesion of place they were simply swallowed by the larger culture of America, along with their way of life.  Like drops of water in the ocean, they were absorbed, and then forgotten as a unique group.

Years ago I traveled to the island of New Guinea. To get there I had to fly from Los Angeles to Hawaii, then Guam,then Sulawesi, then Bali, then Irian Jaya, all on successively smaller planes. There was no direct route to where I was going.

MountainFrom Jayapura, Iryan Jaya I boarded a small Canadian-made plane, a Sea Otter, and flew out over the ocean, where we turned back 180 degrees, picked up air speed, started climbing, and that plane gave it everything it had to fly over the mountain range that jutted 15,000 feet into the sky nearly straight from the ocean’s edge.

Our destination was the Baliem Valley, a place 11,000 feet high and surrounded by those 15,000 foot peaks, which were nearly constantly hidden in clouds, though the valley was bright, sunny, and tropical.

Within the Baliem Valley live a people called the Dani. No one knew they were there until recent times. They were first spotted by the Western world in 1938 from an airplane, but it wasn’t until 1961 that a team went in to explore.

Baliem villageMichael Rockefeller, of “those” Rockefellers, was part of that team until he disappeared, his body never to be found.

The Dani were headhunters and cannibals until recent decades, and even recently there were rumors.

I needed to obtain special permission from our State Department to visit there because of ongoing wars between tribes. The police in Denpasar measured my bones before I left, in case they had only bones to identify me later.

The Baliem Valley and the jungles that crawled up its surrounding mountains were the whole world of the Dani.

Tribes were like states unto themselves, complete with different rulers and dialects of language, even though two tribes may live only a mile distant from each other. Baliem Valley, Dani village, Cynthia Berryman Mulcahy

Each tribe had its own way of speaking; its own customs and history. Language dialects changed from village to village.

Maybe each of them used herbs and plants as cures a little differently. Raised their children differently. Hunted differently. Sang different songs.

When I was there no hotels or restaurants were in the Baliem Valley. No natives wore clothes, except those living at one local Christian mission, or in the dinky military barracks in the valley.

I stayed in the village, introduced to the tribe by my guide, and slept on a hard floor alongside the porters who carried our supplies. One morning we were confined to our hut because a battle raged outside, with bows and arrows, one tribe against the other because someone stole a woman and a pig.

Why do I bring this up? Because Irian Jaya’s government, far away on Baliem Valley, new road, Patrick Mulcahy 1984a distant island, decided to build a road over the mountains and into the Baliem Valley, where the primitive Dani lived.

The nation’s other islands were getting too crowded, and they wanted to relocate those people to the Baliem Valley.

I saw the giant earth movers while I was there, a stark contrast to the naked, spear-carrying natives who lived there.

Today there are vacation resorts in the Baliem Valley. The natives panhandle for cigarettes, and demand money in return for taking their photo. There are hotels and restaurants employing natives, who must wear clothes, something that until recently was foreign to them. Their native culture is disappearing, a victim of the easy lure of Western pleasures. Soon it will be gone altogether, save for native performances at events and cultural centers.

Will the Dani survive the oBlue Ridge stillnslaught of popular culture? No. I can say that unequivocally. It may not be tomorrow, or next year, or in ten years, but it will happen.

They’ll be lost to history, just as the all of Virginia’s Blue Ridge culture was lost with the Shenandoah National Park’s building.

Sure, my great grandparents and other mountain folk carried their customs down the mountain with them, but once out of the mountains, their distinct ways were quickly diluted by the larger community’s ways. That’s how it works.

There are still mountain cultures here and there in pockets throughout the South. But each is distinct from the others, if only in subtle ways. Barbara Allen lyrics

As with the Dani in Irian Jaya, there are different lyrics to the ballads, different ways of strumming a guitar, different ingredients in foods, different quilt patterns, and ways of tying rag rugs, and different herbal potions or superstitions to drive away freckles or curly hair.

I know there is a distinctive banjo technique that can be traced only to Grayson and Carroll counties in southwestern Virginia. I know that my grandmother believed whatever a newborn baby touches first, that is what profession they will be. She made sure her youngest, Bobby, touched a bible. He did not grow up to be a minister, but he was the kindest, gentlest man you’d ever meet. I have no doubt there were many unique practices in our part of the Blue Ridge that are now gone forever.

Old cultures are being mowed down to make room for the new. And more and more, the new culture that takes their place is becoming the same all over the world.

Maybe that is inevitable. Maybe it’s even a good thing; differences between people are what causes war, after all, and so maybe the ultimate result will be the end of strife between nations or peoples. ZerkelImage

I can hope, anyway. Because otherwise, loss is simply loss.

The Blue Ridge are the oldest mountains in the world. And the culture of the people who lived there was one of the oldest (non-Native) cultures in America.

The world around them was changing rapidly in the early 1930s. The car, the airplane, the electric light and telephone – the country was giddy with change, and so it looked with suspicion on those backwards people who didn’t welcome it. It was all too easy to marginalize them, and to ultimately decide their fates for them.

Today the mountains remain, but the people are gone. The forest reclaimed its land. Vines twined in and over those old cabins and twisted through crumbling mortar. Saplings Blue Ridge shack remains - Jon Biloussprung from between their fallen walls, and 80 seasons of fallen leaves have covered their remnants.

Our Blue Ridge ancestors are long gone, and so are their homes. Their culture is lost, save for a few old folks who still remember. Soon they’ll be gone too. I want to learn what my ancestors knew, and continue telling their stories.

You can find Part Eight 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: How Would I Like Eviction?

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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, Four, and Five.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 6

Blue Ridge longIn 1934, all 465 families who lived in the future Shenandoah National Park were evicted from their homes.

Many of my relatives were among them, including four of my great grandparents, and a great many uncles, aunts, and cousins, the McDaniels, Turners, Colliers, Meadows, and Mericas. But this part of the story is about the Colliers.

Florence Collier Merica, Annie Collier Harris, Emma Collier Merica at mother Mary Meadows Collier's home, Jollett Hollow VA, c.1920Durrett and Mary Collier gathered up their belongings, walked out the door of their mountain home for the last time, left their garden and orchard and the springs and brooks that had sustained them, and went on down the mountain to start all over somewhere else.

They used the settlement cash from the government to buy  a house at the base of Green Mountain in Jollett Hollow, set about building a new life, and there the family stayed for another 60 or so years until the last of them, a great grandson of Durrett and Mary, Kenneth Meadows, died.

I don’t know who owns the land now. Perhaps Kenneth’s children. Or perhaps that land fell out of the family. I was not offered the chance to buy it from those third cousins, who would not remember ever meeting me or even recall that I exist. Still, a bit of me belongs to that place, for the times I visited, the stories my mother has told me, and the blood ties I shared with its inhabitants.

My great grandparents and their community of neighbors missed their mountains. They didn’t move to the valleys; they built their houses at the edge of the new park, where their homes clung like barnacles to the sloping mountain bases.Emma Collier Merica, Jollett Hollow

There are mountain people, and there are valley people, and I guess you know who you are. If clinging to its base was as near as they could get to their mountains, so be it.

Some of them moved on with their lives, but some could not let go. Eviction is a powerful tool, and should never be used lightly. That’s why our courts have set up stringent requirements before evictions can be initiated, in any case.

And that’s why some mountain dwellers’ cases went all the way to the highest courts, where the government itself was put on trial and made to justify its case. The mountain peoples’ claims eventually failed, but the courts agreed there was enough at stake for our loftiest judges to hear their claims.

Can I blame Roosevelt and the others who wanted a national park? Not for a minute. What more beautiful place is there? We have Yosemite and Yellowstone with their grandeur. The Everglades and Redwoods with their irreplaceable wildlife and habitat. Zion and Bryce Canyon with their awesome geological formations. Rocky Mountain and Olympic Parks with their pristine alpine meadows.

They’re all beautiful, and all different. The Blue Ridge had to be added to that noble family of wild American places. It was inevitable, nearly preordained by the mountains’ singular beauty.

That my grandparents and 464 other families were made to leave, I am sorry. I try to put myself in their place, because I am not so different. I grew up in a place whose beauty eventually led to its ruination, Southern California, before the crowds.Elsie Watson Dean - Maggie Collier Watson daughter

We had a small ranch two miles from the ocean. Ours was the only house in the valley, and we children ran free as wild horses, either in the canyons and mesas or down to the ocean.

To me it was just where I lived, and I didn’t know until I left my parents’ home when grown that it was special, that other places weren’t like it. As a child, I loved where I lived, but I knew it was not normal: Other kids lived on streets, where there were other kids to play with, and stores to walk to.

Today I cannot even drive through the area without a sense of profound sadness at what was lost, a lump in my throat over what it has become. I could no more live there again as I could drive over my grandfather’s grave every day.

Now I live in an equally ruined place, but at least it isn’t that place; it is not a reminder of the distance I have fallen from that Wonderland.

But what if someone wanted to evict us from our home back then to make a park? Would I have given up a few years of living there in exchange for the preservation of our valley, the wooded canyons and seasonal streams, the flowered mesas and bird-filled marshlands, and the seashore? From today’s perspective, absolutely, positively, unequivocally yes.Thomas A. Merica c.1960

I would feel lucky, honored. It would be affirmation of the specialness of our home place, and assurance that it would remain that way forever. Today I would be able to visit it and feel the specialness, walking the river bed after the storm rains recede, seeing a pack of coyotes running through the field on a moonlit night, wandering up to the shadowed clay hill to see it covered in shooting stars in early spring, or hiking to the mesa to see an ocean of lupine and cornflower covering its meadows.

Like the pristine forests of the Blue Ridge, these singular places need to be preserved, they need to be experienced by more than a few lucky souls.

What I would want in return is more tricky than the choice to give my home up for its own preservation. After all, it was my home. I would want to be relocated somewhere just like it, and back then there were several places that could have been possibilities. Not exactly the same, but maybe close enough.

Couldn’t that have been done for the 465 families of the Blue Ridge, or at least the 197 of them who were homeowners? A sympathetic government could have worked harder to find comparable locations for those who insisted on mountain life. Even if most of them eventually walked away of their own accord, none of them should have had to walk away bitter. They were treated as if they were in the way, not as if they were being asked to do something unnatural to our instinct to put up house and nest. The government should have, and could have worked harder.

Francis Meadows barn Swift Run Gap VA 1750-1800.2.bwBut for the tenants, I’m not so sure. I lived many years in rentals before buying a home. Renters have few rights, no matter where you are. That’s simply the way it is, dehumanizing as it may be.

What was lost by those forced to move was a terrible lot: Their homes, their community, their very way of life. But they are not the only ones who lost. The government lost a chance to honor the mountain residents, even as they forced their leave. But more so, the world lost another of its unique cultures, and that is a loss to us all.

You can find Part Seven 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.

A Complex Tangle of Emotions

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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!

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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.