FEATURED AUTHOR—JAMES B. GOODE Burning the Question_________________ Joseph C. Anthony James Goode is guilty. He and his wife, Donna, work hard on their little farm in Anderson County, their fingernails blue with blackberry juice, but it's no matter. He's still guilty. Those fingernails get clean after a soaking or two. His daddy's never got clean; his granddaddy's nails stayed black. Coal men. James Goode escaped into the world of books. His punishment is exile and the exile's longing. Survival guilt. Watching his brothers drop off, one by one. Like his buddy, Mike, in "Late Afternoon," a poem in his collection Poets ofDarkness. I was with him minutes before he got killed. It should've been me. . . But he was in the right spot at the right time. The right spot at the right time, language usually reserved for good fortune. Ambiguity is part of it: survival not all that great. Death not all that bad. Poets ofDarkness has a photograph of an old coal man, a double for John Lewis, but with the smudged face of someone just up from the mine. The old man has the same Lewis chaos of eyebrows. They frame deep scowling eyes. Anger like a Calvinistic smudge on the soul. Life's hard. And short. That's a man's lot. And awoman's.JamesGoodehasbeenwritingpoetryandshortstories about the "lot" ofAppalachians for decades now. He comes ofnative stock. That means you canprobably assume he's related tojust about everybody. Even the SOBs. Though Goode occasionally gives us a soft-focus Appalachia where the Mamaws are ever ready to feed you "smokedjowl" and goldenbrownpotatoes, there's often a drunkenPa or husbandnearby. Coalmines are only the most obvious way to get lost inAppalachia. I had a good friend among the Appalachian intelligentsia when I lived in Hazard. Educated above his raisin' and feeling it. Loving Appalachia, hating it. Never feeling more a stranger than when living where he was born. Similar to my feelings about New Jersey, but it's the common denominator of homegrown Appalachian intellectuals. My friend was critic/lover of his region, a living embodiment of 14 flight/flight syndrome. And guilty. Educated Southern Baptist Appalachians are the guiltiest people I know. But James Goode is no tortured angst-riven artist. His tone is more gently elegiac. He observes from the inside out. He's the child, the returning son, the watchful father. He's the teller of the story that had been told to him, the museum archivist, snatching up a phrase and wrapping a story or a poem around it as in his story, "An Ace-in-theHoIe " (page 6). Goode built his story around those words shooting out of the story's minister/ politician: "ace-in-the-hole." They're his people and his people's language that he's writing about, but he's left them. He observes and he remembers, but he's left them. He's no foreigner like me, but he's not quite a native anymore, either. All the more reason for Goode to celebrate his home. In writing stretched over thirty years, he brings alive the homely features. Descriptions of food abound in his writing. It is not haute cuisine. The smoked jowl had been fried and placed in the warmer above the cook stove. Kennebec potatoes sliced length-wise had been placed in the hot bacon grease and fried to a golden brown. She had seasoned and boiled some home-canned kale in an old iron pot. She waited for the cornbread which had been placed in an iron skillet on the top rack of the oven." ("The Christmas Snow Angel") Goode is extolling all the energy, the ingenuity and skill it took to produce and cook that food in "primitive" conditions. She removed the eye from the stove with the lifter and selected some short pine kindling wood from the wood box. Granny had an uncanny ability to control the temperature of the oven by choosing the right sizes of split wood and setting the stovepipe draft in just the right place. (Christmas Snow Angel) Food takes on more meaning in those circumstances. We know how hard it was...
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Jul 28, 2005
Kaarina Viljanen + 3
Open Access