Mountain Fatalism in Wiley Cash’s: A Land More Kind Than Home

Abstract

Mountain Fatalism in Wiley Cash’sA Land More Kind Than Home Erica Abrams Locklear (bio) In 2003 Wiley Cash had the initial idea for the storyline of his debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, when his “professor, Reggie Scott Young, brought in a news story about a young African American boy with autism who’d been smothered during a healing service on Chicago’s South Side.” Cash elaborates that he “wanted to tell the story, but [he’d] never been to Chicago and knew [he] couldn’t represent the experience of those living on the South Side.1 [End Page 110] Instead, Cash set the novel in Madison County, a region in Western North Carolina that has long been associated with both positive and negative stereotypes about Appalachia. On the positive side, those interested in traditional ballads often connect the county with the hit movie Songcatcher, since both Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp collected ballads in the area in the nineteen-teens. Photographers Rob Amberg and Tim Barnwell have also documented the beauty of the landscape and its people in their image collections, while musicians including Laura Boosinger and Sheila Kay Adams have brought major recognition to the area for its performance arts. Adams, for example, was recently named a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellow, one of only nine in the United States. But Madison County also seems to function as a distinctly Appalachian space onto which cultural anxieties about poverty, drug use, unruly evangelicalism, and all manner of negative stereotypes are projected. It was the site of the Shelton Laurel Massacre in 1863, garnering the nickname “Bloody Madison” that still resonates today. In 2009, for example, journalist Rob Neufeld wrote an article for the Asheville Citizen-Times newspaper about a true-crime novel called Unfinished Business by Mark Pinsky. The novel re-creates the unsolved rape and murder of a VISTA worker, Nancy Morgan, in Madison County in 1970. According to Neufeld, a Madison County native named Ellen Banks told Pinsky, “We’ll never really rest in Madison County about Nancy’s death. People really liked her,” and “We’ve had enough problems since the Shelton Laurel massacre.”2 Banks’ mention [End Page 111] of the massacre—almost one-hundred-and-fifty years after the incident—signals that residents remain acutely aware of the associations people inside and outside of the region make between the county and violence. I often tell my students that Madison County serves the same purpose for North Carolina that West Virginia serves for the rest of the nation. Scholars including Anthony Harkins and J.W. Williamson have hypothesized that the rest of the nation—or in this case, the rest of the state—uses such areas to imagine a population of “them, not us,” prompting Manly Wade Wellman to write in 1973 that Madison County was “surely among the most misunderstood and most interesting of all counties in North Carolina,” and certainly that still holds true today.3 This classic blend of binaries perpetuated since the late 1800s of the rustic pioneer inhabiting the same beautiful mountainous space as the degenerate hillbilly coupled with a rich history of Civil War conflict, tourism, and a little-known World War I internment camp serves as rich literary fodder for contemporary authors: Charles Frazier, for example, sets several scenes of Thirteen Moons at the Warm Springs Hotel, while writers including but not limited to Pamela Duncan, Terry Roberts, Rose McLarney, and Ron Rash place much of their fiction and poetry in the county. The fact that Wiley Cash uses Madison County as the setting for his novel about a snake-handling congregation who smothers a boy to death while trying to heal him of his muteness (though readers soon learn that the preacher’s motivations are likely far more sinister) is a loaded one. At first glance, it might seem as though the novel perpetuates problematic notions about the county: after all, where else would one find a stereotypical Western North Carolina snake-handling congregation in the 1980s? But a closer inspection reveals that much more is at play in Cash’s novel than a too-easy reliance on...