The Kindred Spirits of Pamela Duncan

Abstract

The Kindred Spirits of Pamela Duncan George Brosi Pamela Duncan remembers that when she was growing up in small North Carolina towns, she thought of authors as being either dead or living in New York City. Nevertheless, she recognized herself in the stories she read about girls who became writers. I identified so strongly with writers in books and on TV. Jo March in Little Women, Anne in Anne of Green Gables, independent girls who grew up to be writers. I didn't know at the time that it meant I wanted to be a writer. I only knew I recognized them as kindred spirits. My daddy used to go around to the library when they'd be getting rid of books, and he'd bring me home boxes. And then John Boy Walton came along and would sit in his window writing on his tablet. I don't know if I wanted to be John Boy or marry John Boy. The first of three children born to Carl Jerome Duncan and Patricia Yvonne Price, Pamela Duncan comes from a long line of working-class mountaineers. Her father's people were from South Carolina, but he was raised in Buckeye Cove near Swannanoa, North Carolina. He graduated from Owen High School and worked first in a blanket factory and then, when Pam was a baby, joined the army. After he was discharged, he found work for the corrections department, first at the Craggy Correctional Center near Swannanoa and then moving the family to Shelby, at the edge of the mountains, to work at the Cleveland Correctional Center when Pam was seven. Pam's mother's people were from Madison County, North Carolina, high up in the mountains near the Tennessee line. Pam's maternal "papaw," Nealie Woodard Price, temporarily lived in Shelby for about a year as a boy when his family left Madison County in search of mill jobs. Nealie served in World War I, and when he returned to Madison County, married a local girl, Eloise Davis, then [End Page 20] only sixteen years old. They had eleven children, the first "set" in Madison County and the second set, including Pamela Duncan's mother, Pat, after they moved to Swannanoa to find factory work. Eventually both Nealie and Eloise got jobs at the Morgan Furniture plant (later Drexel and now defunct) and lived in "Morgan Village." Because he had been born in the 1800s, Nealie wanted very much to live to see the new millennium, but he died in 1999. He never had a birth certificate, but the family "reckoned" he was 106 years old when he died. Pamela Duncan's mother, Patricia Price Duncan, grew up in Swannanoa and graduated from Owen High School. Her first job was at the Kearfott plant in Black Mountain. After she got married, she worked at the Morgan Furniture plant where both her parents and a couple of her brothers worked. When she and her husband moved to Shelby, Pat got a job at J&C Dyeing, a textile mill supplier. Pamela Duncan's life changed dramatically in 1972. She was nine, and her brother, Kelly, was seven when a little sister was born in March. Then in June, their father was killed in a car wreck. Although raised by a single mother from then on, the family enjoyed the support of legions of kinfolks, especially Pamela's maternal grandmother, Eloise Davis Price, known to her as Nanny. In 1979, Pam graduated from Crest Senior High School, the same high school that graduated Ron Rash a few years earlier. She then enrolled at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she majored in journalism because she believed it was the only way to earn a living as a writer. During the summers she worked at Camp Golden Valley, a Girl Scout camp up in the mountains near Bostic, North Carolina, and during the school year, having been raised with a sister almost ten years younger, she was in demand as a baby-sitter. During her last two years at UNC, Pam worked on the Daily Tar Heel student newspaper, but journalistic writing never appealed to her, so, when she graduated...