The Lark: Vol 4, Issue 9, November 2024

Almost Heaven or Hell Depends on Who You Ask?

 by Lorraine Kaul

My school assignment in ninth grade was to create a tourist brochure highlighting the beautiful state of West Virginia, whose motto later became "Almost Heaven."

It was a stupid assignment, but many of my teachers were stupid. I was, after all, an immature ninth-grader. Mom taught me tolerance for people and things I didn’t understand. She believed that teacher tolerance was “a good beginning.”

“Someday,” she said, “you’ll find that teachers could be the best friends you ever had.” She also mentioned that ignorance would be my lifelong friend if I didn’t “pay attention” to my teachers. As I now understand, her philosophy was to begin with tolerance, then embrace and learn from differences. Initially, I endured this belief to escape her boring but well-intentioned lectures. I never dreamed that I’d later discover she was right.

I thought hard. I wanted to begin and end my assignment so I could be with my friends, but nothing positive about my state came to mind. I decided to interview Uncle Jim for his perspective. Being old, he had more time in West Virginia and could probably tell me about things and places I hadn’t considered. I thought whatever he said would be better than my hollow log of a head. This assignment was hell-heated and hard. Uncle Jim was sitting on the porch, eating his daily sugar sandwich and occasionally picking tunes on his banjo when I interrupted with my queries. I knew he’d take time with me for a school project; he valued school even though he signed his name with an X. Uncle Jim couldn’t read or write.

With Mom working and Grandma out planting bulbs, Uncle Jim was my most convenient resource. I asked for his help. I said, “Uncle Jim, you were born and raised in West Virginia. Can you tell me some good things I can write in my brochure? It's for homework.” He seemed taken aback by my asking him for help with homework. He thought for a moment and replied, “Well, youngin’, I ain’t sure why you're askin’ me since you know I never got no schoolin’, and I don't know what a “brosier is; wha’d you call it?” He chuckled. “I always thought that was a woman’s mamma harness holdin’ them in place til’ it’s baby’s feedin’ time.”

I explained it’s not a brassiere! It’s a paper written to tell people from other states good things about West Virginia. He began, “Well, I can tell ya this: they ain’t no-one outside o’ West Virginia that would ever understand us, no matter what you write on that paper.” I probed: “Why?”  He said, “They all think we are stupid Hillbilly’s, that’s why. They think all we do is eat opossums and shoot people. Nothin’ you write on a piece of paper is gonna change their minds.”

Frustrated, I replied, “I have to write something, it’s for school! Can you think of something GOOD that I can write?” He moved his banjo to the side, motioned for me to sit down, then took a deep breath and raised his head, looking toward the sky as if searching for some profound nugget of wisdom that I believed might eventually flow from his toothless tobacco-stained lips. He had helped me in the past. He showed me how to gut a fish and tan a hide, make an acorn-top whistle and a high-powered slingshot, and lots of other things that I never thought I could do.

Well… he uttered, “We are some good people; we will take in a starvin’ stranger and feed em’ the last scrap of biscuit on the table. We’d even take in a neighbor’s kids if they can’t afford to raise 'em’; we’d shoot a stray dog with scratches to get it out of misery, but we can also fill a back-side full o’ buckshot from a sawed-off barrel ifn’ somebody crossed us bad.”  He asked, “Did you know that some of them people,” referring to my potential brochure readers or his imagined northerners, “never had corn pone or poor man’s gravy and biscuits? Well, maybe some of them had some biscuits, but they never had a West Virginia biscuit.” He added, “Heck, they don’t even know what an opossum looks like, never mind have it stewed.” He paused and added, “I guess you can say we are good people that don’t take no scat.”

I didn’t find Uncle Jim helpful, but he was the only one at home, and I wanted to finish my homework. I let him go on about how to catch and smoke crawdads, bait fish with a safety pin, and salt-dry a hide. None of this seemed to be what the teacher wanted to see in a brochure. Uncle Jim noticed my fidgeting and obvious annoyance and pointed it out. “Youngin’ it looks like you’re done with me,” then added, “You sitten’ here with me, thinkin’ I’ll help ya write that paper, all knowin’ you’ve just been beaten the devil around the stump. You might as well get your butt, suckin’ wind, and head up in them mountains, and sit a spell, open your eyes and ears. It’ll come to ya. If it don’t, you better start back scratchin’ with the chickens.”

I jumped up; that was my cue. I thanked him. Although I didn’t think it would help, I did what he said. I took my homework to the mountain, sat by my favorite stream, and wrote about the good things “I liked.”  I no longer cared about what others, including my teacher, would think. This was a stupid assignment, but it was “my” paper.

I wrote about the majestic mountains' size, meandering paths, and the coolness of the rippling stream as it covered my warm bare feet. I wrote about the shining diamonds in the morning dew-covered grass.  I included instructions on how to catch crawdads and copperheads. I described the red-tailed hawks as they soared the mountains with their wide-winged, gauged glides and deep dives when spotting prey.

I included Grandma’s recipe for West Virginia Biscuits but did not reveal the recipe for Poor Man’s Gravy. Some things needed to be with the mountain people of West Virginia.

Uncle Jim’s wisdom had made its way through my hollow -logged head, despite my analysis that he wasn’t of any help and my urgency to leave his presence. I truly felt my hillbilly uncle was wasting my time. I was wrong.

Besides getting an A+ on my “brochure,” my teary-eyed teacher read it to the class and published it in the school newspaper and another local publication. I was proud, Mom was proud, and I read it to Uncle Jim. His toothless face and fringing grin unfurled, declaring, “Well, don’t that just knock your hat in the creek? I always knew you could use your head for somethin’ other than a hat rack.”  I think that meant Uncle Jim was proud. I learned early the vast difference between wisdom and education.