The Pride and Prejudice of Don West

Abstract

The Pride and Prejudice of Don West Jeff Biggers (bio) I spent several years obsessed with resurrecting the legacy of a largely dismissed Appalachian poet-activist. Not entirely dismissed: In 1946, Don West became a national literary phenomenon, managing to sell untold thousands of copies of a collection of quatrain folk ballads and labor poems, Clods of Southern Earth, which should have forever etched him a place in the literary canons of the region. Truth is, during the years I researched West’s wiles, interviewed associates, and collected his papers from the remote corners of the hills and hollows and urban back warrens—most of West’s personal papers had been lost in a series of mysterious fires—I was more in turmoil about how to deal with his hard times and its relevance today than his forgotten life. In the fall of 1999, seven years after Don had died, his books had gone out of print (and it grieved me that the generation of Appalachian scholars, activists, publishers, editors, and writers that came of age in his shadow had shamefully allowed his work to stay out of print for well over a decade), and his legacy had disappeared into the mountain fog; I embarked on a journey with one question: Does Don West still matter to Appalachia, and the nation? I first met West in the early summer of 1983. I was 19, a dropout from the University of California. I had just gone through a wild nine-month tour of duty in Berkeley’s corridors, spending more time in jail and at leftist political meetings than in classrooms. I failed to finish my last quarter. Returning from a stint in jail for a demonstration in central California, I was involved in a tragic car accident, which resulted in the death of a young woman. I was at the wheel. Still in a daze, I eventually took a Greyhound across the country, and then started hitching and hiking through the South, drifting into the Blue Ridge. I was angry, resentful, and adrift. I had lost faith in the power of education, politics, or even activism. Don West saved my life that summer. Here are his bona fides as I see them. Raised by sharecroppers from North Georgia, influenced as much by the self-reliant wisdom of his [End Page 11] mountaineer grandfather as the off-putting, patronizing education he received at the well-known Berry School, the dirt-poor but resourceful West put himself through Lincoln Memorial and Vanderbilt universities at the same time the Southern Agrarian literary movement took the stage in the late 1920s. But West was no backwards-looking antebellum sycophant; he wrote poetry as a way of giving voice to his own neglected heritage, traveled outside any academic comfort zone to face the violent strikes in coal camps and mill towns, earned a bachelor’s in divinity studies, journeyed around Scandinavia and Europe to examine the cooperative movement and adult folk schools, and returned to the South to launch his own revolution in the mountains. The youthful West was anything but artless, naïve, and malleable. He possessed a tremendous sense of place and self-confidence, at home among urban sophisticates in the United States and Europe, as much as he felt at ease among farmers and backwoods sawyers. Raised by radical Republicans in a part of Appalachia that had supported both the Union and Confederacy, West had rejected the emerging media hillbilly stereotypes for his proper place in the South’s progressive vanguard early in his life. Don West intended to make history, on his own terms, on his native ground. In 1932 he cofounded the Highlander Folk School, which became the training center for the Civil Rights Movement. As one of the lonely activists in the generation before the glorious Montgomery Bus Boycott, he went underground and defended a radical black (Communist) leader in Atlanta in the mid–1930s. Wanted dead or alive by the Atlanta authorities, he fled the state and became a union organizer for millworkers and miners in the Carolinas and Kentucky and was occasionally beaten and jailed, often forced to quietly return to work his farm in Georgia or...