ABNER, THE WILD MONKEY OF THE SMOKIES

Abner, the Wild Monkey of the Smokies

    I don’t really remember the origin of this story. I have told it several times over the years, but it always changes when I start writing it.....takes an abrupt turn into a side-road and suddenly, I am lost in Little Canada or maybe Cades Cove and I am almost out of gas. Scary, but then up ahead, there are bright lights and it looks like another country...My God, it is the Cherokee Indian Fair.........

I vaguely remember a German story some fifty years about a monkey that unintentionally killed himself with his owner’s straight razor and then he is resurrected, wrapped in a burlap sack and it is a cold October night full of bells, whistles and laughter, strange smells: cotton candy and charred meat. The monkey has diarrhea and shivers in his foul sack in a dark cage and an old man named Carl is prodding him with a stick.
“Still alive,” says the old man.
“Yeah, well, so?” says the man with a bowler hat.
“Give you $10.” The bowler hat snorts, then says, “Okay. But to be honest, I don’t think he is going to live another day. I’m just sayin’.”

The old man lifts the monkey from the sack and stares at the little wizened face. “I am goin’ to call him Abner.”
“You want a clean sack?”
“No, I’ll just drop him in here.” The monkey settles inside the old man’s bib overalls that smell of tobacco and beef jerky. “Suit yourself,” says the bowler hat and snatches the bill from the old man’s fingers with practiced ease.

So Abner came to live with the old man in an old farmhouse in Big Cove on the Cherokee Reservation. Carl fed him cornbread and buttermilk and souse meat and the monkey thrived. Before long, he was swinging in the rafters and peering through the windows at a strange world. chickens and hounds. A cow and a mule.

Although Abner came when he was called, he was “a free agent.” That meant that he did what he wanted. When he ventured outside and explored the barn, he frightened the chickens. Abner got a perverse pleasure out of reducing the chicken house to pandemonium when he swung through the rafters, leaving a storm of feathers and dust. In time, he learned to ride the hound and spent exciting nights riding the poor creature through the moonlit forest. He left in his wake a kind of tidal wave of cackles, screams, hoots, trills, as the creatures of the woods took note of his passage.

Abner still came when he was called. But his absence from Carl’s kitchen became longer. A few days and then an entire week. Carl’s neighbors kept him informed about the disturbances....tales of Abner pursuing foxes on the backs of blue tick hounds. They said he made the dogs run faster by biting their ears, his legs wrapped around them like a Saturday cowboy. People complained when Abner took to plucking chickens, leaving great clouds of feathers wafting through the woods. Dogs owners threatened to shoot him.

A kind of legend developed about Abner, the Mad Monkey of the Smokies. Carl was a popular storyteller and on winter nights, he would entertain the neighbors with stories of Abner’s adventures. On one of his treks into town, Abner had raided a craft shop and come away with a rebel cap that became a permanent item and many tourists came out of the Smokies telling incoherent stories about a monkey with a rebel cap who attacked campgrounds at night, vanishing into the darkness with gaudy clothes, candy and food.

Ah, but when the heavy snows came and the campgrounds closed, Abner came home. Carl said that it was a kind of hibernation, he guessed. Deprived of excitement, Abner became morose and depressed, spending hours staring out of the window at the snow. Then, there came a year when he did not return. For several years, there were still stories of a monkey, riding the wind-buffeted hemlocks, staring down at a startled traveler.

Now, lets change gears and let me say that I have always identified with Abner, the Wild Monkey of the Smokies. Hell, I am Abner. From the time he was plucked from that dark cage until he vanished “into the dark wood,” I felt an empathy with that solitary creature. He lived in a world without companionship (There weren’t any other monkeys out there!) and although he made efforts to befriend and live with other creatures (dogs, humans and chickens), he was (I am) a solitary being. Yeah, I have tried too, but I have so little in common with others, it is a hopeless pursuit. I guess it is the brooding and melancholy that puts them off. The few “friends” that I had have vanished....gone off to pursue more pleasant relationships. I mean, what can you expect if you have nothing to offer them but brooding. Yes, I’m only fit company for Abner and I think I would enjoy that: Abner and I high in a hemlock, both of us with rebel caps riding the wind.
Some have abandoned me so they could devote more time to acquiring fame of some sort; a few have gone in search of God..a search that takes all of their time and energy. Adieu, travelers and pilgrims. Abner and I bid you farewell. You all go on ahead, now. We will catch up.

I have been thinking that I could perhaps teach Abner to read. It would be quite a challenge .... but then, we have nothing but time. Certainly, there are wonderful possibilities. What would Abner think of Cormac McCarthy? I think he would love A. E. Housman. How about the Rubiayat? Hey, then there is Yeats, a poet after a wild monkey’s heart.! For like Abner, I was born into a world where both reading and friendship are becoming a kind of lost art. Perhaps Abner and I could start a secret sect that.....READ stuff. Rediscover poetry.....Write a play. I heard once that Abner loved Elvis. Okay, maybe I can lure him out. Maybe if I go to Deep Creek tonight and sing “Fools Rush In,” I might tease him out. I do a pretty good Elvis when there is no one around to judge.....maybe, if I sing long enough, he will hear. “Lonely rivers flow, to the sea, to the sea, to the open arms of the sea.......” Come out, Abner! Comes to Rhodes Cove and sit with me in the fog and listen to the rain crows on Painter Knob. I think their sad coo will sooth your mad heart! We still got a little while before the street lights and the pavement run us off to some dark holler..... to Black Rock or Linville Gorge. “I’ll be coming home, wait for me.”

A HARD JOURNEY by James J. Lorence

A Hard Journey by James J. Lorence
Chicago: University of Illinois Press
$39.95 – 344 pages

West felt that Appalachia had been”missionarized, researched, studied, surveyed, romanticized, dramatized, hillbillyized, Dogpatched and povertyized again .… and [he] offered a spirited challenge to outsiders who had come to exploit, instruct and denigrate mountain people.
- A Hard Journey, p. 204

Once on a warm, summer afternoon (circa 1957), I met Don West in the Townhouse Restaurant in Cullowhee. He was visiting his daughter, Hedy (a student at WCC) and talked easily about provocative topics: McCarthyism, HUAC, Eugene Debbs and union violence in Georgia. At one point, he indicated a well-dressed coffee-drinker at the counter and said, “See that guy? He is an FBI agent that follows me everywhere I go.” The coffee-drinker nodded and smiled. I was skeptical. Besides, I was eighteen, and most of my attention was focused on his daughter, Hedy.

When he got up to leave, he gave me a battered copy of Clods of Southern Earth and suggested that I read it; we could talk about it the next time we met, he said. I had no way of knowing that just a few months before our conversation, he had narrowly escaped lynching near Blairsville, Georgia. Shortly after visiting Hedy, he would return to his farm in Douglasville to find his livestock poisoned, a KKK cross burning on his property and a government agent on his porch with another HUAC subpoena. I had just met what may well be the most controversial and significant poet,minister,activist and teachers in the last century of Appalachian history.

I found James J. Lorence’s biography to be a dense, difficult but rewarding book. Certainly, it presents a comprehensive portrait of a charismatic, flawed and driven man whose confrontational manner caused him (and his family) considerable hardship. Like an old storytelling friend of mine once observed about her own difficult life: “I have dug my grave with my tongue.” In a pulpit, a classroom or in crafting the lines of a “working man’s poem,” West possessed an astonishing gift: the power to persuade and inspire others. Yet, that same gift provoked his enemies to bring him down.

Born Donald Lee West on June 6, 1906 in Gilmer County, Cartecay, Georgia, West’s early beliefs were shaped by his grandfather, Asberry Kimsey Mulkey. From an early age, Don was taught to believe in the inherent wisdom of common people, the equality of all men (anti-slavery) and the concept of Jesus Christ as a revolutionary. Raised in a family with a reverence for the power of words, music and oral tradition, Don learned to use them to promote his grandfather’s principles. These basic precepts remained with West throughout his life.

When West’s family moved to Cobb County and became share-croppers, Don and his sister were ridiculed for their clothes at school. This experience in conjunction with an encounter with educational “paternalism” convinced Don that schools were attempting to eradicate his culture and replace it with middle-class values. Although he received a work scholarship to Berry College, Don quickly found himself expelled when he led a protest against the blatant racism in the film, “Birth of a Nation.”

Gaining admission to Lincoln Memorial University in east Tennessee, West becomes friends with Jesse Stuart and James Still marries Connie Adams, decides to become a minister and moves to Vanderbilt where he soon becomes involved in radicalism, strikes, unions and educational reform. A trip to Denmark convinced him that the Danish school system offered the solution to retaining traditional values in education.

At this point, West’s life becomes a striving for ideals that invariably brings him into conflicts with authority. His attempts to launch the Highlander Center (1933) in Monteagle, Tennessee with Miles Horton is successful, but leads to irreconcilable conflicts with Horton. Amid accusations that the Highlander was a “communist training center,” Don leaves and begins a series of erratic journeys (on his beloved Indian motorcycle). West’s nebulous involvement with the Communist Party causes many of his friends (including Jesse Stuart) to distance themselves from him. Eventually, West’s publicized ties with the Communist and Leftist politics forces him to seek work under an assumed name.

For much of West’s life, his mainstay is his wife Connie. A gifted teacher, she readily finds employment. Even when Don’s notoriety brings her dismissal as well (guilt by association), she frequently travels to Florida and other states to teach. She sends the money home to Don and her family. In time, she also becomes a talented artist.

Time and time again, West succeeds in an astonishing variety of ventures: a beloved superintendent in Hall County, Georgia; three years of teaching at Oglethorpe; a successful newspaper editor in Dalton, Georgia; the creation of the Appalachian Center at Pipestem (modeled after his beloved Danish school system); a series of awards, including Appalachian Writers Association, Berea College and the Lincoln Memorial Hall of Fame – all remarkable achievements. Yet the majority of his successes turned to dust in his hands. His notoriety and his past involvement in radical activities results in his dismissal from Oglethorpe; the KKK and groups of anti-red organizations (including the American Legion)drove him from Dalton, and his major nemesis, Ralph McGill, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution is credited with driving West from Georgia. For a time he lived and taught in New York. Then came a realized dream at Pipestem.

Lorence’s biography gives a detailed account of how a battered and demoralized West retreated, again and again, to his farm in Georgia to seek renewal from the land. Even this final refuge is denied him when his farm is torched and his collection of 10,000 books destroyed – a tragedy that Don later claimed was provoked by Ralph McGill. However, the last decade of Don's life was relatively peaceful, and was spent fundraising, teaching and promoting the Appalachian South Folklife Center at Pipestem. West died at the Charleston Area Medical Center in 1992.

This is what remains: His awards, his poetry and essays and the Appalachian South Folklife Center at Pipestem, West Virginia; the multitudes of students who still speak of him with respect, the lifetime friendship of people like Langston Hughes, Paul Green, Byron Herbert Reece and Arthur Miller; and the music of his daughter, Hedy an art that owes its authentic beauty to the same forces that shaped her unrepentant father.

It may be that the final judgment of Donald Lee West’s significance is yet to be made. If Communism is finally a harmless scarecrow and if McCarthyism has been defanged, perhaps it is possible that we can finally give this angry, impatient and gifted man a fair hearing. He loved mountain people and honored them in every act that he performed. Let us finally acknowledge that.

Note: After completing this review, I had the good fortune of contacting George Brosi, the editor of Appalachian Heritage magazine. Brosi sent me the Fall, 2008 issue which is largely devoted to Don West. Included with Don's poetry, Connie's paintings and a host of essays, the magazine includes a marvelous article by Jeff Biggers, "The Pride and Prejudice of Don West." Much of this issue is available at the Appalachian Heritage website. I urge you to go and read it.

MEDIA HYPE AND POPCORN SUTTON

Don Dudenbostel/Special to the News Sentinel

Moonshiner Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton talks to Knoxville photographer Don Dudenbostel in March 2007 at his still in Parrottsville. The photograph was made only hours before the still exploded, bring agents of the ATF who found 850 gallons of Popcorn's best.

Photo Gallery

Don Dudenbostel's images of Popcorn Sutton

I've always been fascinated by the process by which history becomes legend. In essence, I think that the majority of American history is "mythical." Very gradually over time, all events and personages (the Civil War, Martin Luther King, JFK) are molded into something that we want them to be. It looks like Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton is on his way.

According to a recent article in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, a photographer named Don Dudenbostel spent the two years prior to Popcorn's suicide, photographing the moonshiner's daily life: making whiskey, telling ribald stories and driving his vintage cars. According to the photographer, Popcorn gave him access to the "inner sanctums" where the brewing and selling occurred. In addition, Don was accompanied by Tom Jester (I love that name), a writer-producer who recorded Popcorn's salty stories and followed him as he performed his daily chores. Dubenbostel feels that he "has caught the essence of the man."

In addition to some 70 black-and-white photographs of Sutton,Dudenbostel's exhibit will include the works of other photographers, including photographs of "snake-handling preachers" ... and an east Tennessee mule-skinner. The exhibit will open at the East Tennessee Historical Society in 2010. After that, the photographs will "go on a road tour to national museums."

I'm hoping that this event provokes some discussion from folks who read this blog regularly.