Light to the Hills: A Novel (86)
Sass made it through the eighth grade, the highest she could go in Vessel’s mountain school. After that, Rai and Beady saw to it that she applied to and attended the school and college in Berea. She couldn’t imagine where they’d found the money for such an extravagance. All they said was that the Lord had provided. And He might provide for Miles and Hiccup, too, if they studied as hard as she had. Fern had set her sights on a fellow from the next hollow, and sure enough, the two of them declared their intentions to marry and make a homeplace.
In Berea, Sass saw her first real library, one so big it couldn’t be toted on the back of a mule, with so many volumes of books she thought she might faint from the wonder of it. She learned of other mountains, mightier and taller than hers and much farther away, but none that called to her like the string of Appalachian hills she knew so well. After a time, she became a teacher and set out to teach her students the power of words. One day, she thought, she might write her own story and tell about the people and the mountains that had formed her.
News of Pearl Harbor lit a fire under Cricket, and he enlisted before Harley—and certainly Rai—could have a say-so. He traveled farther from the mountains than any of them had ever gone, shipping out to places with names they couldn’t pronounce, let alone find on a map. He trained as a pilot, the fascination that had begun with the Hindenburg zeppelin blossoming into a lifelong vocation. Before every mission he flew, Cricket hung from his instrument panel a small hound dog he’d carved from a hunk of coal so that if his plane went down, he might, in his last moments, remember the blue-green hilltops of eastern Kentucky and the mountains he would always call home.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Anyone familiar with the region knows that Appalachia is a paradox of past and present, areas of stunning beauty and a rich and storied people surrounded by crushing poverty and the scars of strip mining. Roadside signs proclaiming “Jesus Saves” rise a stone’s throw from the crowded opioid clinic where, it seems, too many modern-day residents have planted their mustard seed of faith. Yet, it’s still possible to witness creek baptisms, foot washings, and here and there, congregations brave enough to handle the region’s indigenous vipers. Folks still hold fiercely tight to family and land, and defending the honor of such is as much of a reflex as breathing the mountain air.
Talk to the old-timers, who still gather on porches and at Sunday picnics after church or at the cemetery, and they’ll spin hilarious, winding yarns about any given subject. They swear by the signs of the moon and dowsing for water and, though they listen patiently to more scientific explanations, will continue doing it the way they’ve seen it work with their own eyes. Listen to them pick and sing, their rhythms spot-on and their hands leathered and scarred from years of hard labor, and something about it is transportive—the melodies, lyrics, and voices a mix of shared experience and kinship with this land and its people, their struggles and simple pleasures.
And the food! If someone asks you to pull up a chair ’cause Granny’s nigh ’bout got supper on the table, I suggest you do so, and tuck that napkin ’round your neck. Appalachian victuals are drawn straight from the ground, hoed and tended all summer and put up in glass jars that reflect their bounty on windowsills dappled with sunlight. Historically, meals could be plentiful or lean, depending on the season and the Good Lord’s providence. Old-time Appalachians were well acquainted with gratitude and were strangers to laziness. They ate what they grew; made furniture, tools, and fences by the skill of their hands; and worked hard, above and below ground.
The southern Appalachian region was hardest hit during the Depression, when coal mines closed and left many not only jobless but homeless, as the mining towns often supplied room and board (such as it was). As part of FDR’s initiatives for the nation’s recovery, along with Eleanor Roosevelt’s encouragement, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Packhorse Library Project was launched to help ease the region’s isolation and poverty through literacy. Compared with other parts of the United States, Appalachia was much more remote and increasingly detached from literacy and access to reading material in schools, libraries, and certainly individual homes. The Packhorse Library Project operated from 1936 to 1943, employing mostly women to ride routes through the least accessible areas of the region. Resourceful and hardy, these women brought light to the hills, by way of words, reading, and news of a world outside of the region. The companionship and friendships formed along their routes must have been extraordinary.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It feels like I’ve held my breath for an untold number of years and, with the release of Light to the Hills and Sass and Amanda’s story, can finally exhale. I’m grateful—ironically—beyond words.
Thank you to Cate Hart at Harvey Klinger, my intrepid agent who loved this mountain story from the get-go and was determined to find it a home. She resonated perfectly with the place of the novel and its unique inhabitants. Her patient exchanges with me shaped the book into something wholly right, its best version. Gratitude, also, to Alicia Clancy, Tegan Tigani, and the extensive cast at Lake Union, who, much like in The Velveteen Rabbit, made Amanda Rye and Finn MacInteer finally become real. #TeamGoBigOrange.
When I first saw a tweet about the packhorse librarians several years ago, I was drawn to the subject. Horses! Books! The South! Three of my favorite things woven into one. Delving into the research that went into this story did not disappoint.