The Shadow Side of Appalachia: Mildred Haun's Haunting Fiction

Abstract

The Shadow Side of Appalachia:Mildred Haun's Haunting Fiction Lisa Alther (bio) In the interests of full disclosure I should probably confess up-front that Mildred Haun's The Hawk's Done Gone gets my vote as the most remarkable Appalachian novel ever written. When I first read it a decade ago, it knocked my socks off. I wondered why I had not heard of it sooner and why we had not studied it in high school instead of Silas Marner. When I was a teenager in Kingsport, Tennessee, I wrote my first short story and started looking around for role models. I found Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers and read everything each had written. The fact that both were Southern women, as well as wonderful writers, gave me hope that I, too, might be able to become a writer some day. But as I read O'Connor and McCullers, I had to adjust my inner dials to tune out some static. Much of their fiction was set in Georgia, not in East Tennessee, so the speech patterns and vocabulary were slightly different from those with which I had grown up. O'Connor's Catholicism lent her world an exotic tinge foreign to the evangelical Protestantism that surrounded me. The isolation of the characters in McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, published in 1940, the same year as The Hawk's Done Gone, did not entirely resonate for me, trapped (as I felt then) in a web of family and neighbors from whom it seemed impossible ever to escape. I found McCullers's and O'Connor's grim humor congenial, but they seemed sometimes to distance themselves from its targets in a way that left me uneasy, as though their characters were just laboratory specimens to them. The setting for The Hawk's Done Gone was neither their down-at the-heels Deep South nor my paternal grandparents' coal-mining Appalachia. The prologue and twelve linked stories that form the chapters of the novel instead take place just down the road from Kingsport, on hardscrabble hill farms like the one on which I had [End Page 30] spent my childhood weekends and summers. Its characters are similar to the people who had farmed the fields neighboring ours, whose relatives worked in the mills and factories of Kingsport and were my classmates at school. By the time I read The Hawk's Done Gone, I had been living in the North and in Europe for over three decades, exposed to many different versions of the English language. So some unique East Tennessee sentence structures that Haun records leaped out at me as they had not when I was immersed in them: "Sarah sent by Howard for me some shoes." "I wished there hadn't so many folks come." "Laying on the floor in that little old lean-to with no cover on her. And it snowing outside." I was also struck by the many earthy similes, some of which I had heard before, many of which I had not. A poor countrywoman looks "like the devil before daybreak." When an old woman sees her son's ghost, her eyes bat "like a frog in a hailstorm." A man's threat to kill his daughter's suitor "spread around over the country like polecat stink." A cruel mother stares at her abused daughter "like a snake trying to charm a gopher." The same mother describes her daughter as "blundersome as a blind buzzard." A mountain boy characterizes his romantic rival from the lowlands as not having enough sense "to pour water out of a boot—not even if it had directions on the heel." A conceited young woman plays the piano by holding "her hands up in the air like a sailing buzzard's wings and . . . pecking at the keys like a buzzard pecking at kyarn [carrion]." I would not go so far as to say that The Hawk's Done Gone was the reason I returned to East Tennessee to live part-time eight years ago, but I will say that it was a welcoming beacon along my path back home. Since then, I have thought a...