Snakehunter (review)

Abstract

At the heart of The Border Men is a description of the Battle of King's Mountain in 1780. Being partial to Wilma Dykeman's account ofthat battle in her book With Fire and Sword (1978), I wished for less anecdote and more historical texture in Judd's account than I got. In his afterword, however, Judd admits that "this episode alone could easily be developed into a large novel; my treatment of it in this broader-scoped work is brief and somewhat simplified." True. But I felt a bit deprived, just as I remember feeling disappointed when Richard Waverley missed the entire Battle of Culloden in Scott's Waverley. That progenitor of historical fiction is certainly no War and Peace, and I suppose the dilemma for historical novelists faced with such a huge moment as a major battle has always been either omit it, simplify it, or devote a thousand pages to it. Cameron Judd, to his credit, does give his readers some of the high moments at King's Mountain, with historical accuracy. Best of all in this novel, as in the first, are the stories of Joshua's interaction with the Cherokee. Cameron Judd handles the sensitive issue of Cherokee/ Anglo relations very well, but the shadow of the coming Trail of Tears (1838) looms ahead. Dragging Canoe, Oconostota, Nancy Ward—all have their parts to play in Joshua's life. If Judd's hero lives to a grandfatherly eighty-eight years, he will see the events of his youth play out with tragic results. With his major characters off to Kentucky at the end of this book, there is opportunity for yet another volume; whether Judd would take it as far as 1838 is questionable. The Border Men is a novel that can usefully be extra credit reading for a course in Tennessee, North Carolina, or Virginia colonial history, or Appalachian history. It has both the exciting pace that a New York subway commuter enjoys in a book after a hard day's work, and the historical authenticity even a DAR member would demand. For a second time, Cameron Judd offers Appalachian history to a wide audience: entertainment with style. —Parks Lanier Chuck Kinder. Snakehunter. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1991. 224 pages. $10.50. In the finest Appalachian tradition of James Still's Pattern of a Man, Gurney Norman's Kinfolks, and John Jacob Niles's ballads, Gnomon Press has published another major Appalachian work, Chuck Kinder's Snakehunter. Kinder's novel, which first appeared in print in 1973, details the coming of age of Speer Whitfield, who grows up in the town of Century, West Virginia, located on the Kanawha River. Three generations ofWhitfield family members, many ofwhom 68 are dead, are important in the life of this child whose father was killed in World War I. Snakehunter is full of interesting Whitfield characters—notably Aunt Erica, Grandpaw Clint Whitfield, and Hercules, Catherine, and Speer Whitfield. Aunt Erica, who owns the house in Century where the whole family lives, has money and political influence. Tobacco-chewing Grandpaw Clint Whitfield likes to talk about the old days during the coal boom when Century was called Hundred Mines and there were dams and locks on the river, and he pulled coal barges down the river in his own boat, the Snakehunter. Hercules, who is Speer's older cousin, is the meanest brat in the town of Century. Aunt Catherine is Speer's star relative. She shows an early interest in the boy, taking him with her to the library, letting him read while she is at work, and to the theater to see westerns and horror movies. Later, from a sanitarium, she writes in a language he cannot understand for years. In addition, he has a copy of her unsuccessful novel, in which a page index containing her symbols and archetypes was dedicated to all "Assistant Professors on the make." Speer concludes that she was a caution. The main character and narrator of Snakehunter is, of course, Speer Whitfield, a character of mythic proportions who tells us how he grew up in a diseased and dying family in a West Virginia coal town. He is always haunted...