Your Chances to Choose Your Labor: Darnell Arnoult's Work

FEATURED AUTHOR—DARNELL ARNOULT Your Chances to Choose Your Labor: Darnell Arnoult's Work Lucinda H. MacKethan Inascenefromhisbriefbutexquisite autobiographyinContemporary Authors, James Still, who has been called "the epicenter ofAppalachian literature," describes what he sees one morning as he looks out his bedroom window: My neighbor across the creek is already up and busy with his saw and hammer, despite it being Sunday, despite his having worked in the mines all the other six days of the week, often in water shoe-mouth deep, as he tells me, and in spite of there not being a plank requiring sawing or a nail needing driven. He must be doing something .... The image is striking for many reasons, not the least of which is its respectful rendering of labor loved. The neighbor who "must be doing something" is of a piece with many other figures of James Still's fiction and poetry, and indeed with the characters whom we meet in much of Appalachian literature. One thing they don't seem to do much of is sitting around. As the speaker in Darnell Arnoult's poem, "Work," begins with the words, "You wake up knowing you'll work" (What Travels With Us, 55)To the somewhat compulsive lists that have been written to delineate the common elements of Appalachian literature — the sense of local place, the reverence for story, the reliance on memory to call up a past that can't be ignored, the connections for good or ill of family and small town community, the power and pull of plain people and country things—might be added what James Still's neighbor dramatizes in the sweat and pain as well as the beauty of his Sunday morning labor. Most studies of Appalachia, literary as well as economic or sociological, begin by noting the region's higher than average unemployment statistics, yet a factor that is equally significant to both its past and its present is the distinctive nature of Appalachian work, as much a part of life in the region as the mountains, the dialect, or the remoteness that are all causally connected. Appalachia's people have always been working people more than they are "unemployed" 26 or "impoverished" people, and as often as not they have defined themselves and shaped their stories through the nature their labor: on small diversified farms, in coalmines, in lumber camps, in paper and textile mills, in country stores and beauty shops. Both before and after specific industries—mining, logging, milling—came to the mountains, Appalachians were employed, as well, in work that grew out ofnecessity, makingthe items for "everydayuse" thattheir isolation made it hard to get any other way. With unintentional and stereotypical humor, a website titled "Appalachian Traveller," which sells the "Folk Art & Crafts of Appalachia," stretches this point. Visitors to the site are told, "In the hills, you were on your own. No all night convenience stores. No remodeling companies. No butchers. If you ever wondered what it'd be like to 'do-it-yourself all of the time, here's a start." What follows are instructions on how to "Build A Log Cabin. Dress Meats. Make Moonshine.Make Soap. Plant by the Signs." The marketing of the Appalachian "craft ethic," as the Appalachian Traveller sales pitch indicates, has often turned the hard labor of Appalachians into patronizing romance. James Still's work offers a much more realistic presentation of the region's laborers that merges necessity and calling. In his haunting novel, River ofEarth, for instance, wemeetBrackBaldridge, who moveshis familyfrom a dirty, depressing coalmining town to an idyllic mountain farm. After a thriving time there, however, he takes them back to the Blackjack coal fields. His only explanation? "I'm longing to get me a pick and stick it in a coal vein," he says (175). Fred Chappell has commented in his article, "The Seemless Vision of James Still" published in the Spring 1981 issue of Appalaachian Journal, on this strange decision: Brack, quite simply, is "a coal miner by calling as well as by profession. He gives hay fever as an excuse, but the truth is that he is called to mining the way another man might be called to baseball...