Brush Breaker

Abstract

Brush Breaker Ann Pancake (bio) I'll begin with a confession. I have The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake braced against a bookend where I can see it always at a glance from my desk. I'll confess further. On the other side of Breece's book is a copy of Given Ground, my own short story collection, its cover flush against his, just in case a little of what Breece has might take a notion to seep in. I first heard of him in 1983 or 84, shortly after his book came out, when my maternal grandmother—not my Pancake one—sent me an article from Huntingon's The Herald-Dispatch about a new local author. My grandmother sent it to me because the author's last name was the same as mine, and because she knew I had wanted to be a writer since I figured out what writing was. At the time I received the clipping, I would have been a junior at West Virginia University, "our" state university where I had, over the course of four years, exactly one professor from Appalachia; where Appalachian culture was recognized for exactly seven days a year during "Mountaineer Week"; where we West Virginian students were routinely derided for our accents and our hick ways by the huge out-of-state student population from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. Even though I was an English major, before I got that letter from my grandmother, I had heard of only one West Virginia writer, Pearl Buck, and she up and left the state at age one. When I learned about Breece, I was taking classes and working at a grocery store deli on the outskirts of Morgantown. I was depressed, alienated, as shy as a kicked cat, and carrying an inferiority complex like a hunch back, a complex partly personal but also the legacy of growing up in a culture where we "knew" we were lesser than people from outside. I had already won second-place in the university writing contest for a story, ironically enough, about my grandfather Pancake's suicide, but I still could not imagine that I would ever be a published writer. If by some miracle I were to become one, I believed it would be contingent on my leaving West Virginia and transforming into someone from someplace else myself. Then here was this book, written by a relative I did not know I had. Eleven years older than me, born and raised in West Virginia and educated entirely in West Virginia public schools, where I had been educated. And, [End Page 79] lo and behold, his work is admired by people outside West Virginia—every good Appalachian knows that non-Appalachian stamp of approval is what really counts. And all of a sudden I realized I had been in a thicket I could not see or feel beyond, the tangles and briars so close around my face I had not even known I was there. But I knew it now. Because the existence of Breece Pancake pulled a little of that brush back. Just far enough that if I narrowed my eyes I could see ... not a certain path to becoming a writer, not even a likely path, and nowhere any ease. But I could see a path was possible. For the first time, I saw that somebody like me might pass through. Reading the book was a revelation. Never before had I heard home in a page. For almost thirty years now, I have tried to hold in my hand, where I can see it, the secret of those stories, and the closest I've gotten is this. The question is not do they authentically represent West Virginia. There are many West Virginias, just like in a river there are different temperatures, different tempos, different colors depending on the light—and Breece is standing in one particular current. Further, what Breece does is dishonored by the word "represent." His art does not evoke. It invokes. Out of the immateriality of language Breece generates the rumple of West Virginia land, the texture of its trees, the smell of its weather, the taste of dirt...