Here are two options to go about becoming native to your place, using my hometown as an example:
You might read some objective traveler’s account, such as John Muir when he walked through on his way to the Gulf in 1867, commenting on the lack of industry and the beautiful scenery. Or William Least-Heat Moon, as he traveled the winding Route 127 down through the upper Cumberland river region. Or you might consult the tourism office, and learn about the best motels, and the rides, and the best diners and coffee houses.
Or you might listen to the stories passed down through generations, the ones told by your neighbors. Even the most nondescript town has these stories; the raunchy, the painful, the heroic. These stories are a complete unit. They need only to be told and heard, perhaps wondered about, but they are not for deconstructing, moralizing, or otherwise. They exist to fill out the consciousness of a community about itself. Perhaps they are embellished and refined by the telling of one or two generations, but doesn’t that also tell us something?
Here are a few stories of my town. I wouldn’t call them apocryphal, but neither am I vouching for their veracity. They are useless to you unless you are from my town. Go home, and seek out some of your own stories. You’ll never look at main street the same again.
Drive north on the old road out of town and there will be a sign to the left reading Purgatory Hollow. Here, according to the version I like best, a man was digging a well and said, “I’m going to dig until I hit hell or water, one.” He hit oil, a gusher that shot oil to the tops of the trees, perhaps the first crude oil well in Kentucky. He did not know what it was; he was expecting water. Some say he dropped his wrench, which sparked on the well casing and lit the crude oil on fire. Some say this cremated him standing up. Others say he left town and never came back, fearing the wrath of the underworld. Others do not mention it when they write history.
The oil ran into the creek, out to the river, and burned the top of the water for three days. A riverboat steaming from Nashville was coming up when the fire was coming down, and a negro standing on the prow of the boat said, “Cap’m, hell is coming down the river.” They nosed the steamer into a backwater while the fire burned past them.
Troy Gene moved here in ’76, he said, when he was seven. Lives on the family farm, splits wood with a maul, and eats a steady diet of potatoes and pork. “Hard for me to figure out.” he says, “Why people say you can’t eat that.”
My brothers and father built a house for Troy Gene once, when he was engaged to be married. He paid us in hundred dollar bills that smelled like mold and dirt. Troy Gene’s marriage was not forthcoming, however, and the house sat empty for fourteen years.
“You know the Black Hollow?” he says. “There was some Blacks lived there. That’s why they call it the Black Hollow. Some whites come and harassed them and they flushed out and went down there close by you, you know those old trailers across the road? That’s them. That was before I got here, I think. But that was how they told it to me.”
Two negro boys, named Little John and Uncle Cal tried to elope to Indiana with two white girls, Molly and Nan, who lived at the mouth of Mud Camp creek. The girls veiled their faces, but were found out on the train at Glasgow and the boys were arrested and the girls were sent home. Interracial marriage was against the law. The marriages never did work out, but the blood simmered for a long time.
Like folks did back then, before third-party music and entertainment satisfied their need for story and song, they made their own. Here’s a variant of this one:
Get off the train, boys
Get off the train
Don’t you see old John and Cal
Crawlin’ off the train?
Walk up in jail, boys
Walk up in jail
Don’t you see Cal and John
Getting’ up that jail?
Pick up your guns, boys
Pick up your guns
You oughta see Cal and John
Pickin’ up their guns
Three Johnson brothers lived in the vicinity of Purgatory Hollow, just out a bit from the farm where the Cheek boys grew up who developed Maxwell House coffee, and downstream from where one old boy traded a sack of corn and a mule for thirty acres.
Anyway, one Johnson brother owned a store. We’ll call him John. Another brother, named Jamhead, was a thief, and everyone knew it. “He was mean. They was all mean.” The narrator tells me. Jamhead would steal chickens from his own brother, then sell them back to him. This didn’t bother Jamhead a bit. It did bother John.
The third Johnson boy wanted to kill Jamhead, but John said he wouldn’t do him like that. So John fetched up some rat poison and put it in a glass candy jar on the counter, and the next time Jamhead came in he said, “Hey Jamhead, I got some new candy here.”
Jamhead reached himself a handful and filtered it into his mouth. “I don’t ever pay for nothing.” He said.
About the time the poison hit his stomach, John said. “Jamhead, that ain’t candy. That’s rat poison.”
Jamhead picked up and ran a mile and a half up to where the old Cherokee woman lived, who had married a white man and had fourteen half-breed children. She was old by then, but still knew all about the herbs and things. “I’ve been poisoned.” Jamhead said. The Cherokee woman brought him a bucket of lard* and told him to eat as much as he could.
The next morning, Jamhead woke. The Cherokee woman was rocking on the porch and drinking her coffee. “Well, you made it.” She said. No one knows if there was elation in her voice.
Master Jesse Coe had too many slaves, sold one named Riley, but the slave escaped his buyer’s grasp and snuck back to his family on the Cumberland River. They dug out a spot for him under the cabin, carrying away the diggings in buckets and dumping it into the stream when it was muddy so as not to betray their activities. He hid there for eighteen months. His family gave him food and water and brought him into the cabin when it was safe.
Master Jesse Coe struck a deal with the new slave owner, buying Runaway Riley back for one-third of initial sale price under the condition that if Riley could be found he would belong to Jesse Coe once more. Not long after, Riley was mysteriously found in a patch of woods nearby.
Jess Coe murdered a police officer in Indianapolis, then ran home to hide in a river cave. There was a bounty on his head, dead or alive. Little John and Uncle Cal slipped him food, as did Claude (Monkey) Anders. Monkey Anders was a shifty character. Jess’s uncles warned him to stay away from Monkey Anders.
Monkey Anders and Jess did some squirrel hunting together. One day, they went on a hunt and Monkey pointed to an invisible squirrel in a Shagbark hickory. “Stay here.” He said. “And I’ll ease around the other side and get that squirrel back to you.” Monkey Anders moved away, and a sheriff’s posse hidden in the woods opened fire on Jess Coe. Thus Monkey Anders secured a bit of spending money for himself.
There’s more where those came from. Many a valuable story has been lost, but when all of them are have been forgotten, then surely we are abandoning a useful—no, vital—part of our community. There’s no replacing stories that happened inside a ten-mile-radius and have been embellished and retold by two generations. It’s not just a mere clothing of detail draped over timeless themes—although they are that, too—these are what made my neighbors to be who they are. You won’t find that kind of knowledge on display in a glossy brochure, because tourism offices are not interested in making inhabitants of you.
*fun fact: lard binds toxins and neutralizes poisons. I didn’t know that either.