I’ve Been a Foreign Lander

Abstract

I’ve Been a Foreign Lander Dana Wildsmith (bio) Listen! Do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell? Closer, let me whisper in your ear: I’m not Appalachian. Or maybe I am—it depends on who you ask. Or if you ask. No one asked me to show my Appalachian Green Card before I spent a week recently teaching the literature of the region at Radford’s Highland Summer Conference. The staff and students there sure didn’t [End Page 105] treat me like a poseur. They didn’t treat me any way other than graciously. We just dove right down into a deep pool of Robert Gipe and Jesse Graves and Darnell Arnoult and Jim Wayne Miller and Crystal Wilkinson and Ron Rash and Jane Hicks and Silas House and Jim Minick and Diane Gilliam, where we swam around together for five days, happily growing sodden with worthy words. So why did I feel vaguely guilty that whole week, as if an Inspector of Ethnic Authenticity might suddenly burst through the door of the SELU Conference Center, pointing his accusatory finger at me? She’s not who she claims to be! My students would gasp, clasp hands over their mouths, and slowly shake their heads in sad disillusionment. I’d then raise my quivering chin and bravely admit: It’s worse than you think. I can’t claim to be anyone at all. It’s true. When people ask me where I’m from, I tell them I’m not from anywhere. My daddy’s family grew deep roots in Florida back in the 1800s, but Daddy left to attend seminary at Emory University and then settled in south Georgia, where I was born. Mama’s family were Eastern Kentuckians—Sloans and Stampers—but her great-granddaddy got to feeling a bit cramped in the mountains so he piled his wife and six children (including my grandmother, Stamper Elizabeth Turbyfill) into a covered wagon and headed for Utah. Like the plot of a western movie come to life, he was shot in the back while riding into town to file the deed on his land. My great-grandmother moved herself and the children into a sod house until a relative in Florida convinced her to come live with them. The rest is history—my history. I was Little Miss Vidalia, Georgia. And I graduated from Savannah High, but South Georgians don’t really consider me to be of them, either, because my parents weren’t born in Vidalia or Twin City or Dublin. Daddy didn’t farm tobacco and [End Page 106] Mama didn’t teach school. And they talked funny, meaning they didn’t have a bit of funny in their talk. It had been a point of pride for both Mama’s and Daddy’s parents for their children to sound educated, whatever that meant. Mostly it meant not sounding Southern. Southern is the one appellation I do claim for myself, though I’ve been called down on that, too, particularly when folks find out I grew up in Savannah, They’ll tilt their heads to one side, narrow their eyes and say, “You don’t sound like somebody from Savannah.” I generally echo Gloria Steinem who, when someone exclaimed upon the occasion of her fiftieth birthday, “You don’t look fifty,” replied, “This is what fifty looks like.” This, I tell my doubters, is what Savannah sounds like. Any Knott County Mullins could tell you I’m not what Hindman sounds like—or Gate City, or Seco, or even Radford, but I’d wager a lot of folks who are from there don’t sound like there, either. My buddy Jim Webb is as Eastern Kentucky as they come, but his WMMT DJ voice could slide unquestioned into Jim’s big brother Rob’s New York City voice actor roles. It’s not the way I talk that’s at the root of my yearly impulse to add Thank you for inviting me to my nametag at the Appalachian Studies Association Conference. So what is the reason I’m so wobbly about plopping down onto the regional sofa like...