LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

ISSUE 2

Dear Readers,

Most, if not all, southern writers have a keen sense of history and a drive to make sense of their personal and regional histories through their writing. Maybe this is the quality of their writing that draws us to their work-many readers of southern literature, too, are both haunted by the past of their region and drawn to examine their own personal past. In her introduction to Growing up in the South: An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature, Suzanne W. Jones reminds us of what critic Louis D. Rubin, Jr., observed about southern literature:

...to consider writers and their writings as Southern still involves considerably more than merely a geographical grouping. History, as a mode of viewing one's experience and one's identity, remains a striking characteristic of the Southern literary imagination...

This "striking characteristic" appears in the works of southern writers as diverse as William Faulkner, Kate Chopin, Eudora Welty, Flannary O'Connor, Thomas Wolfe, Lee Smith, Bobbie Ann Mason, and last issue's featured writer, Sharyn McCrumb. Many others could be added to this list, including this month's featured writer Lisa Alther. Though Alther no longer lives in the Appalachian South where she was born and raised, her stories often circle back to her southern upbringing and finally to her Melungeon heritage.

In Kinflicks, Alther begins her fictional journey "home" with a swarthy Melungeon character, Clem Cloyd. Clem has the distinctive physical traits and the mercurial disposition that mark him as a Melungeon. He and the main character, Ginny Babcock, keep company for a time when they are young. As the novel progresses, Ginny meets Clem again when she comes back to her home town to care for her dying mother. Clem has become a Pentecostal lay preacher who handles snakes and fire in his church.

In the opening pages of Original Sins, Alther pirates the story about the origin of the Newman's Ridge Melungeon colony that appears in the 1890 Will Allen Dromgoole article about one dark man who sells another darker man as a slave. This second darky escapes his owner, and both of them race off to the Appalachian mountains with the profits of their swindle. In Alther's version all five of "The Five" (the main characters of her novel) are descendants of these two scoundrels even though two of them are upper class in Newland, two are working class, and one is black. Books and articles about Melungeons tell and re-tell this story.

In Five Minutes in Heaven the references to Melungeon traits are more subtle. Jude allows that she grew up in "a rambling house of chinked logs built by [her] great-grandfather, a half-Cherokee herb doctor" and tells an embroidered tale of the same man's mother, Abigail Westlake, who learned English, wore white people's clothing, and hid in a cave while her family was rounded up for the trek west to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. Jude's father, who collects arrowheads of his Indian ancestors, despite "that copper skin and those mink-brown eyes" was labeled a hillbilly by her mother's family.

Her new book due to be released in April 2007 started out as an historical novel about Melungeon origins. After Brent Kennedy's manifesto, Melungeons, Resurrection of a Proud People, came out in 1994, Alther saw some of her family's experiences in Kennedy's narrative and discovered that she and Brent were distant cousins. I heard her read an excerpt from her historical novel about a young Portuguese boy on a galleon crossing the Atlantic sometime in the 1500s. In spite of her impressive success as an author, she could find no publisher for that manuscript. In the course the disappointing journey from one publishing house to another, an editor suggested that she turn the novel into a memoir of her search for the truth about her origins. The result is Kinfolks Falling Off the Family Tree: the Search for My Melungeon Ancestors.

In addition to the new short story by Lisa Alther, you will find in this issue of Southern Writers an essay on the Melungeons of Applachia by Dr. Katie Vande Brake and Dr. Dale Brown's interview with Silas House, author of Clay's Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, and The Coal Tattoo. Also included are book reviews of Sheila Kay Adams's My Old True Love and Ron Rash's Saints at the River. This issue offers a feast of good reading, and I hope that you find it as enjoyable to read as I do!

Kim Holloway
Editor Southern Writers


Katie Vande Brake
Guest contributor to Southern Writers