Songs of the Whippoorwill: An Appalachian Odyssey, Volume III

A Collection of Stories

from Southern West Virginia

by

John Blankenship

Published by John Blankenship

Cover Art by Raven Boykin

Copyright © 2018 by John Blankenship

jabbb@suddenlink.net

First Edition – May 2018

Distributed by Lulu

www.lulu.com (ID: 22963571)

ISBN: 978-1-387-84403-6

Disclaimer:

Information used in these articles was acquired by this author over a lifetime spent in the field of journalism. After these many years, it is difficult to recall where some of the information originated. There has been no intention to pilfer, purloin, claim or take credit for any material woven into this text from another source. I appreciate the influence that other authors have had on my writing during my career. Know that you have left footprints for me to follow.

–John Blankenship

Dedication:

When I was a little boy, my Grandmother was always saying things like, Your body is a temple of your soul. Or, You are only poor when you think you are.

Her proverbs didn’t sound very wise to me, when I was 10 years old, and had an idea that I knew more about the outside world than Grandma, who stayed in the house much of the time and washed our clothes and cooked our meals and changed our bed linens.

Things were tough in our Southern West Virginia community, with many layoffs and job losses because of thinning coal markets and mechanization of mines.

Nearly every day some poor soul would come to the back door of our home and ask for a sandwich or a handout. Grandma seemed to always have something for them, either in the way of canned goods or a ham biscuit or a cheese sandwich.

We never knew what was driving her, or what she might do next. Late at night, when I got up to go downstairs for a drink of water, I would notice Grandma sitting on the screened-in back porch, with a dimly lit cigarette she had rolled for herself out of Prince Albert tobacco.

Are you all right, Grandma? I might ask her.

Yes, I am, she would reply. Go back to bed. I’ll be along shortly.

Only she would still be sitting there, later on, when I got up to get another drink of water.

But why are you sitting in the dark, I would ask her.

It’s restful, that’s all. Now go back to bed and I’ll be along in a minute.

But why was it restful, I would ask myself, pondering yet not knowing the answer – not until I was grown and living alone at my apartment at college. I came across a short story, one titled My Father Sits in the Dark, and I began to see a similarity.

Sometimes, late at night I, too, would sit in the dark, listening to a transistor radio and watching the shadowy display of branches on my walls, shadows produced by the wind and from the streetlights below.

I remember Grandma telling me about her life on her father’s farm when she was a girl, growing up in the early 1900s. Her family used oil lamps, and often times would turn out the table and bedside glows early to save the precious light-giving energy.

So that’s why it was so restful, sitting in the dark and being able to relive those priceless recollections when all of her sisters and other family members were alive and sharing their dreams and visions and aims for the future.

I would laugh to myself, not a funny laugh, more out of wonder, I suppose.

Yes, Grandma could surprise us with her strange and astonishing antics. She seemed never at a loss, no matter the circumstances.

I remember one day when I came home from school early, I bounced into Grandma’s kitchen and saw her pouring tea and waiting on a man who had just lost his child. Grandma apparently wanted him to know that our family shared in his loss.

What a handsome young boy, the man whispered to Grandma.

Yes, he’s only a boy, but he’ll be a man one day and I want him to remember that we are all the same before God who made us.

Grandma’s words would echo in my heart and soul when I reached her mature age and began to reflect on the meaning of life and our purpose here on Earth.

I will never forget Grandma’s tender feelings for the less fortunate and the down-and-out. She never got above her raisin’, so to speak, at her family’s modest homestead during the lean years of the early 20th century. And I often wondered if she found comfort in the sacred psalms and proverbs of the dog-eared and tattered Bible that she kept by her bedside. One of the passages she had marked in red was Vanity of vanities, the same as our church’s minister was fond of quoting, during his Sunday sermons. All is vanity.

Time and again, I would think back on her sayings, her words personifying the joie de vivre of her forebears and the courage of a family that faced hardships of the Great Depression, her losses and sometimes her tears for promises unfulfilled, opportunities missed.

But mostly I remember Grandma’s charm and quick wit, her ready sympathy for the poor and powerless.

Her physical appearance wasn’t all that impressive. She was of middle height, slight of build, with the concerned, kindly, and caring face of a country person. But when she spoke, her tone revealed the pleasing gifts of her musical Lockhart voice. 

In most things in life, Grandma and I seemed to be on the same celestial page. She was my mentor and most trusted counsellor and adviser. She believed in me when others saw little value or substance of character.

For that and much more, I am eternally grateful to the former Rosa Ellen Lockhart, and for her profound refrains she recited by heart:

We ask for strength and God gives us difficulties which make us strong. We plead for courage and God gives us dangers to overcome. We ask for favors and God gives us opportunities.

This was the side of our family matriarch that few people saw, her probing, looking beyond the bend of the road, meditating on the back porch with her roll-your-own secretive smoke.

She was a woman always looking toward the future, making the most of life. After all, You are only poor when you think you are…

Foreword:

John Blankenship—author, feature writer, newspaper columnist, and photojournalist—is one of our most original thinkers on Appalachia and our culture of the hills: he spent a lifetime reinterpreting the myths and assumptions in print that have defined mountaineers for generations. We need to reclaim some of the wildness that is deep within us, Blankenship once told a reporter during an interview. We constantly need to reinvent ourselves if we’re going to keep up with mainstream America.

In the course of his literary journey, Blankenship takes us back through history and culture of the late 20th century, exploring mythology, religion, psychology and literature of the hill country of Southern West Virginia, considered by many as the epicenter of the Appalachian spirit.

Striking a perfect balance between objective reasoning and spiritual awareness, Blankenship takes his readers on a voyage of self-discovery in which, like the intrepid pioneers who settled the perilous provinces in an effort to tame the wilderness in the late 1700s and early 1800s, they must define for themselves what it means to be a mountaineer, define what it means to create a new image that will stand up in the 21st century – an image that does not betray their innocence or loyalty, vision or hunger, sovereignty or independence – an image that has been waiting to emerge since the first wanderers breached the backwoods and unlocked the winding mountain valleys to homesteads.

Beautifully written and stylishly illuminating, Songs of the Whippoorwill: an Appalachian Odyssey (Volume III) offers a new course for interpretation and development. The author gives Appalachians a context in which to place their intuitive yearnings, their instinctual longings. He seeks a new, authentic mountaineer identity, one that embodies the proud Appalachian passion, a signature theme that threatens to unravel the countless fibers of mainstream media that are intended to defile our sacred mountain heritage. That is the thread from which this literary work is woven, a truthful effort intertwined through a narrative quilt stitched snugly together with words, dreams and songs from the personal experiences of life in the hills.

In this delightful, nostalgic, and sometimes humorous memoir of imaginative mountaineer men and women, the award-winning journalist introduces the famous, and the not-so-famous, people he has encountered in his years of wandering through hills and hollows of his down-home Southern West Virginia. The author’s literary power provides an amazing tapestry of pastoral and rustic mountain characters that defy all attempts to categorize them as coarse and uncivilized. His curious combination of lyrical explicitness and artistic style makes us appreciate the uncommon innocence of folks we have come to love and cherish just for who they are.

Vaughn Rhudy, Ed.D.

Dr. Rhudy is a former award-winning journalist and educator. He has worked for The Register-Herald newspaper in Beckley, West Virginia, and The Dallas Morning News in Dallas, Texas. He taught English and journalism for more than 20 years at Shady Spring High School in Raleigh County, West Virginia, and advised the school’s nationally recognized student newspaper and yearbook. He has won numerous awards for his writing and reporting, as well as his teaching, including Raleigh County Teacher of the Year in 1992, Ashland Oil Teacher Achievement Award Winner in 1994, and the Milken National Educator Award in 2003. For the past nine years, Rhudy has worked in the Office of Assessment at the West Virginia Department of Education and currently serves as the Executive Director of Assessment for the state.

Preface:

For centuries, the seemingly transcendent woodland fowl of Southern Appalachia, with their downy feathers and spirited wingspread, have fascinated and intrigued the imaginative peoples of the hills.

Of particular delight are the Eastern Whippoorwills that sing as if their call had no ending; they sing as if their cry embodied a thematic likeness to life’s eternal song, whether they sing for joy or sorrow, whether they sing for birds, or gods or men.

The mythical whippoorwills remain a symbol of freedom, strength and wisdom in the forests of the night, where the vibrant Aeolian visitors of the heartland continue to enchant their human audience with their acrobatic antics in flight and their mysterious melodic cadence just after dusk, the melancholy music often serving as inspiration for song writers, poets and painters. The birds characteristically have personified a special relationship to man, who often perceived them as symbols of the life-essence itself.

Mountain folk are drawn to the birds’ seemingly misplaced music among the sycamores and pines, whenever the ghostly Sirens begin their beguiling songs after nightfall—their eerie, ghostlike call sometimes allowing the hearer to transcend the moment and discover an uncanny sphere of the mind through contemplation.

Unhampered by the burden of consciousness, the winged vocalists frequently have become the object of man’s envy, an envy that encompasses a special reverence for the fowl’s strength and sense of being.

So it is with the whippoorwill and its full-hearted evening song, infinitely rich and touching, a kind of prayer for protection and quiet repose through the night, sometimes repeating what seems a somber melody, replete with grief and sorrow, before it fades into the darkness.

In truth, it may be that we yearn to free our spirits from the heaviness of human cares and immerse ourselves in