"We were the Snopeses": A Writer and Her Piedmont

Abstract

ESSAY "We were the Snopeses" A Writer and Her Piedmont by Doris Betts he late C. Hugh Holman had been my undergraduate teacher at the University ofNorth Carolina, so when in 1966 I returned to the English department as a lowly part-time lecturer, I took his every word the way Moses accepted every graven one handed to him on Sinai. Still, it was a surprise when he said, "You and Flannery O'Connor are both Piedmont writers." I couldn't see it. Milledgeville, Georgia, was not Statesville, North Carolina. Catholic was not Associate Reformed Presbyterian. Rural was not milltown. The closest I ever owned to a peacock was a crippled chicken that even in the hungry thirties nobody had the heart to behead and fry, whereas even a pullet would walk backwards for Miss O'Connor. Later, reading his critical essays, I realized Holman was merely resisting the simplistic notion of a monolithic South: Thomas Wolfe's South was not Faulkner 's; Harriette Arnow's was unlike Truman Capote's, and Shelby Foote says even Mississippi has seven distinct areas. Holman had cut the Southeast into thirds and set O'Connor and me in the same slice geographically as well as temperamentally. Others have defined Piedmont {literally, the "foot of the mountains") as that biggergeographical region stretching from New York's Hudson River to central Alabama , the broad foothills of the Appalachians, averaging 1 25 miles wide up and down that rolling country with hurrying rivers that seem to have waited centuries for hydroelectric power to be invented. Holman restricted his region to the southern Piedmont alone, the "upcountry ," where this century's local Babbitts have lived out their particular capitalism producing cigarettes, furniture, and textiles-a territory smaller than the Confederacy but larger than the "Cotton Piedmont" sociologist Howard Odum managed to squeeze between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Greenville, South Carolina . My own state, North Carolina, is often divided into mountain, Piedmont, and coastal plain, with forty-four of its one hundred counties in the more populous and prosperous Piedmont. Here, historical and political differences follow geographical lines, as do serious quarrels between barbecue eaters who prefer the sauce as it is prepared in Piedmont Lexington or coastal Wilson. The Piedmont region. But Holman's Piedmont was the right size and type to encompass the red-clay farms ofboth sets of my grandparents and also to suggest that such farms faced some ofthe same problems and were worked by some ofthe same "good country people" whom O'Connor saw in Georgia on her farm, Andalusia. When I was growing up there, my own Piedmontwas even smaller—no bigger than Iredell County's 591 square miles of rolling ridges and small creeks, though spurs of the Brushy Mountains do extend into its northwest corner and McHarcrue 's Mountain reaches an elevation of over fifteen hundred feet. Such names — "Brushy," "McHarcrue,"—were assigned by German and Ulster-Scot settlers who were earthy, pragmatic, and nonpoetic. By and large these backcountry yeoman farmers worked like slaves without owning any, on land that originally looked like grassy prairie and was considered a "new Mesopotamia" between the Yadkin and Catawba Rivers. The state's WPA guide claimed that in North Carolina plantations disappeared at the fall line, an overstatement, but true for most piedmonters. Several years ago when I was trying to capture their use-it-up, wear-it-out, make-it-do essence for Cathy Newman, an editor from National Geographic then writing an essay on the state's Piedmont population, I described myself and my kin as "scrub oak people," lacking the grandeur ofsequoias, perhaps, but capable of holding the world together. DORIS BETTS Thomas Wolfe, whose South was not Faulkner's, as a student at the University ofNorth Carolina. Courtesy ofthe North Carolina Collection, University ofNorth Carolina Library at ChapelHill. Old Statesville neighbors are still mad at me. I wish now I had compared us to that higher exemplar of the Piedmont, ThomasJefferson, who identified less with tidewater Virginia and its institutions and more with daily practical progress made among rising hills and by rushing rivers, who not only built domes but owned the first threshing machine in America and...