In folk music a “floating” verse is one that floats around and appears in lots of songs. When you’re singing a tune and you’ve sung all the verses you know but you don’t want to quit yet, you might throw in a floating verse—like this one:

Oh, the winds they do whistle,
And the waters do moan.
I’m a poor boy in trouble.
I’m a long way from home.

I’m quoting folk tunes from memory here, so I may be adding my own variations, but that’s just as it should be. It’s the same with stories—like the one I’m about to tell you. I’d already heard it, so I wasn’t surprised to hear it again. I was about five, no older than six, and I’d just stepped outside of our apartment door and found our neighbour from the end of the hall laid out flat on the floor. I went back inside, said to my grandmother, “Ray’s just laying there right outside our door, should we call a doctor?”

She comes to look, shakes her head. “Don’t worry about him, honey. He’s all right. He’s just on a bender. You step over him.”

I step over him. In West Virginia, you don’t tell a story just once, so I’ve heard the story many times—how once Ray got so drunk that he had to crawl home on all fours. “He doesn’t drink all that much,” my grandmother says, “but when he does, oh boy!”

“When he’s sober,” my mother says, “you couldn’t ask for a nicer guy.”

“That’s right,” my grandmother says. “They don’t come any nicer.”

They go on with the story. Yeah, Ray got so drunk once that he had to crawl on his hands and knees all the way across Front Street, and the neighbors were worried about him, so somebody went out to stop cars from running over him, and eventually someone—maybe it was Mr. Noyes, they can’t say—anyhow, someone helped him, took two men to get him up and into his apartment, so it was no wonder that he was laying outside our apartment in the hallway that morning. The point of the story is not merely to convey information or even to recycle good old neighborhood gossip—although it does both. The point of the story is to tell the story.

Here comes another one. When my grandmother was a young girl, she was cleaning up the kitchen and found my uncle Shelby’s sheet in the cupboard. Again, I was just a little kid when I first hear this story, so I didn’t know what it meant. His sheet? What sheet? “His Ku Klux Klan sheet. Scared me half to death,” my grandmother says.

“It wasn’t really the Klan,” my mother says. “It operated like a union. You didn’t have unions back in those days, and if anybody came around trying to organize the union, they’d be pulling their body out of the river. So the guys who worked on the railroad, or on the river, or in the mines, got together in the Klan. Sometimes there were even colored guys in the Klan.”

Stories. I grew up hearing stories. “I seen it rolling right along the riverbank there, a hoop snake,” my uncle Addison told me. “They grab their tails and hold them in their mouths, and they roll just like a hoop. The other thing they do is if they feel any danger, they swallow all their little baby snakes until the danger goes away, and then they spit them out again. Yep, they live in the woods around here, hoop snakes. And you heard about fireballs? Nobody knows what they are. Science hasn’t figured them out yet. They’re about as big around as basketballs, and they’re made out of fire, and they just roll right on down the road burning up everything in front of them.”

I was a few years older when I first met my cousin, John—old enough to know that his stories were not literally true, but they were darn fine stories anyway. “Yeah, we get tomato pickers in for the harvest, and we don’t have to give them any place to sleep. We just string out clothes lines and hang them over them ‘cause they’re all so bent over from picking tomatoes all day they can’t straighten up. Oh, and the other thing is, we don’t use ordinary window screens. Our mosquitoes are so big we use chicken wire. One time I saw a mosquito suck all the blood right out of a cat.”

My cousin John’s the one who painted his bedroom black and wouldn’t come out of it for months, maybe even a year. They had to leave his dinners outside his door. John’s father was my uncle Harley. He had a stack of business cards that said YCSISOYA. When anyone asked him what they meant, he told them gleefully: “YOU CAN’T SELL INSURANCE SITTING ON YOUR ASS!”

The first time I tasted beer I was settin’ with Uncle Harley on the steps of his place overlooking those fields of tomatoes. I was nine or ten. Some of his boys came by with a crock of draft beer—a good cold crock against that hot steamy day. In memory I can still feel the pourous texture of the crock and the droplets on it. Harley took a big drink, and then held it for me to have a go. Wow!

Harley’s wife, Aunt Martha, visited us every summer. I thoroughly enjoyed her company. On one of those visits she said about Wheeling, “This place is depressing even when the sun’s out.”
She always drank beer for lunch—a few saltine crackers and a couple wedges of Swiss cheese and a beer—or two—or some days who’s counting? After she and Harley were both long dead, my mother told me that Harley frequently got plastered and sexually assaulted her. Eventually she got the locksmith to put a big monster lock on her bedroom door, “Told him, you touch me one more time, I’m headed straight for the divorce court.”

In her old age, Martha stopped talking. She wouldn’t talk to my mother, her very own sister, on the phone. She wouldn’t talk to her children or her grandchildren. She wouldn’t talk to any of the staff in the old folk’s home. She wouldn’t talk to her doctors. They were considering giving her electroshock, but if they did, it didn’t work. She died in silence.

I’m sixteen and I’ve hitchhiked down the river to visit my buddy in Moundsville. His parents are out of town for the weekend so he and I and the boys drive out to the farm where his grandfather stashes all the booze that people give him. He’s a well-respected man, Grandpa, and people give him cases of stuff all the time, but he’s not a drinker. We find it in the barn, and we’re passing the bottles around, trying out the different flavors—gin, vodka, Scotch, bourbon, rye. Eventually we can’t stand up anymore, but my buddy can still get himself behind a driver’s wheel and we can still manage to cram ourselves into the car. Back at his house, my buddy has not reckoned on his older sister. “You’re drunk!”

“No shit!”

The boys and I just sit there pissed and stupefied as our buddy and his sister get into the world’s most operatic yelling match, airing every resentment either one of them has ever had about the other, and it finally drifts into my consciousness that I was supposed to be home hours ago. I haven’t got the faintest idea how I’m going to get back up the river. Sometime after 2:00 AM, the front doorbell rings. My buddy and his sister shut the fuck up instantly. The sister tiptoes over and opens the door, and there’s a man. He looks just like anybody. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he says, “can I borrow five bucks off you?”

Late last night when Willie come home,
knock knock knocking on the door,
slipping and sliding with his new shoes on,
Willie, don’t you slip no more.

Oh me, oh lordy my,
what’s gonna become of me?
Way downtown just a foolin’ around,
nobody to stand by me.

My mother told me that the Noyes house had secret tunnels in the basement, and those tunnels went all the way under the Ohio River. Now wait a minute. Are you out of your mind? There are no tunnels under the Ohio River at Wheeling.

Okay, now let me interrogate my own memory. Maybe she didn’t say under the river; maybe she said to the river. But anyhow, she said tunnels. She did not say vaults or storage lockers or cellar complexes or any other damn thing. She said tunnels. And yes, they were secret. What were they for?

They were part of the underground railroad, she told me, so slaves could get north to freedom, and they were also for Confederate soldiers who got separated from their units so they could get back down south to their own lines.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I was old enough by then to have some sense of how the world worked—or at least I thought I did. “Runaway slaves going north and lost Confederate soldiers going south? Both? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“We’ve always been for the underdog.”

Every few days my grandmother got on the phone to talk to other old ladies about the olden days; those old ladies were the only ones who could remember who was related to whom. As my grandmother kept getting older, the old ladies gradually died off until she was the only one left. Then she died too, leaving me with old letters, old photographs, incomprehensible pages of genealogical charts, and a business card that read:

Dogs that bite but never bark
Are sure surprises in the dark.

I also found the phone number of the old guy who used to organize the Thomas reunions back in the day. “You’ve got to see the cemetery in Clarington,” he told me. “We own that cemetery.” When I finally got there, I could see that he was right—every other gravestone had the name of someone related to me, and that was only the main cemetery. There was also the pioneer cemetery. It was slowly washing down the hill because nobody gave a shit. The carvings on the stones were so weathered they were hard to read, but I could make out most of them. I was related to almost everyone there.

On top of Wheeling Hill there’s a statue of an Indian. We did not say “Indigenous” in those days, and people in West Virginia still don’t. The Indian was welcoming people to the Ohio Valley—that’s what everyone said about him. “It’s terrible what we did to the Indians,” my mother told me. “We broke every treaty we ever made with them.” She was right.

George Washington was a rich man. He started out as a land surveyor, and he was always a land speculator. The first congress was a whole bunch of land speculators, couldn’t wait to get out into Ohio Country, make a few bucks. The Indians were warlike folks, you sure didn’t want to get yourself captured, but the settlers were worse. All the Indians wanted was to be left alone, but the settlers? Nobody ever had any intention of honoring any of those treaties. The Treaty of Paris? 1783? Nobody invited the Indians to that one. Washington wanted them gone. He had a plan for getting rid of them and it worked. The Battle of Fallen Timbers. The Treaty of Greenville. “My heart is a stone,” Tecumseh said, “heavy with sadness.”

If the Indians hadn’t been cleared out, there wouldn’t have been any dot of a town called Clarington at the end of a trail called Reuben’s Trace blazed by my grandmother’s grandfather, Reuben Thomas. He floated down on the inland waterways from what he always referred to as Old York State, and he claimed his land by tomahawk rights.

I was invited to give a talk at my old high school. When I was a student there, it was a boys’ military school, but it’s co-ed now, and I felt no connection to it. What severed the connection for me wasn’t that it had girls in it—I always thought it should have girls in it—no, what severed the connection for me was that it was no longer military.

Eeenie meenie miney mo
Let’s go back and count some more
Sound off! ONE, TWO.
Sound off! THREE FOUR.
Cadence count! One, two,
three, four,
one, two
THREE FOUR.

The students in what used to be my old high school seemed excessively polite, and they didn’t have much to say. I thought that the girls wore their skirts too short. I read from something of my writing set in West Virginia and said I would answer questions. One of the students told me he was from out of town. “I’m wondering if there’s a special culture in the Ohio Valley.” I said yes absolutely there was, but I’d be damned if I could define it. Afterward I asked my buddy Willie, the owner of Wheeling’s motorcycle shop. “We’re all family,” he said. “You’re in your cabin and somebody comes up on horseback and says the Indians are attacking down at Tom’s cabin, where do you want to be? You’re going straight to Tom’s cabin.”

Let’s see if I’ve got this right. We’re defining ourselves by killing Indians?

For a couple hundred years now scholars have been arguing about what exactly constitutes Appalachia—or if it even exists—but everyone who has ever drawn a map of that mythic region has included the entire state of West Virginia in it. Where’s that?

I could tell you about Hank Williams dying of a combination of drugs in the great sovereign state of West Virginia. I could tell you about Aaron Burr on Blennerhassett Island in the Ohio River in West Virginia and what he did there. I could tell you about Sara Jane Moore, born in Charleston, West Virginia, and how she tried to assassinate President Ford and came damn close to doing it. I could tell you about what a miserable childhood Charlie Manson had, growing up in McMechan, West Virginia. Then, moving on to the pathetic, I could tell you about William C. Marland, former governor of West Virginia, who vanished from public life and then was later found driving a taxicab in Pittsburgh. But I’m not going to tell you about any of that stuff.

At a book festival in Charleston, West Virginia, the novelist Lee Maynard was interrogated on the issue of hillbilly stereotypes. His books are crammed full of them. He looked straight out into the audience, engaging with it, looking people in the eye. “When you stop acting like that,” he said, “I’ll stop writing about it.”

One of my thesis students grew up in northern Florida, and that’s where she set her stories. I told her that I found something really familiar about them.

“Well,” she said, “a cracker’s a cracker.”

While writing this, I decided to look up Appalachia in Wiki. Under the heading Appalachian Literature, I found, by god, myself!

Many of the original settlers of West Virginia are what are called Borderers—they came from the border between England and Scotland. Quakers in Pennsylvania watched them walking by, headed for the hills of western Virginia, and didn’t care for them much. “The men all carry guns,” they said, “and the women wear their skirts too short.”

The last time I visited him, Willie showed me his guns. He’s got a couple of shotguns, quite a few rifles in various calibers, and several handguns. He made sure to show me the pink rifle he bought for his wife. “Hey,” I say, picking up a monster, “this looks like an assault rifle!” Yep, that’s exactly what it is, semi-automatic. He hands me a Glock. It fits into my hand perfectly. If you were ever a little kid playing bang-bang-you’re-dead, this is the gun that you imagined. The only possible use for a Glock would be to kill somebody with it. “Did you buy all these things?” I asked him.

“Naw, mostly people give them to me. This is a crazy state, Keith. I can walk around downtown with a bazooka in my hand, but I can’t carry an open glass of beer.” He also told me that he’d hardly ever fired any of those guns.

Okay, I’ve been trying my best to avoid it, but it looks like I’ve got to say a word or two about the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. It reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” For years now folks have been arguing about what exactly that means, and they’ve split into two main camps: the “individual rights” folks and the “collective rights” folks; I’m in the latter group and would ask, “Just what is it you don’t understand about ‘well regulated Militia’?” You will note that the Constitution does not say, “Armed individual citizens, being necessary so that they can express their dissatisfaction with life by shooting up the local grade school, the right of the people to keep and openly bear any weapon whatsoever, shall not be infringed.”

An eminent West Virginia historian has hazarded the opinion that it would have been better for the state if they had never found coal in it. Then it would have been a rural mountainous state of small farms that eventually turned into a tourist destination. But with coal, West Virginia became an internal colony of the United States. It made tons of money for a very few people, and much of that money left the state.

Come all you young fellows so young and so fine,
spend not your fortune in the dark dreary mine.

A union organizer in downstate West Virginia told me that what my mother had told me was true. “Back in those days if the word went around that you were organizing for the union, you were a dead man. They pulled lots of bodies out of the river. And that story about Black people being in the Klan? You know, I’ve heard that before, but I don’t know if it’s true or it’s just white people trying to make themselves feel better. But what is true is that the Klan functioned as a union down on the coalfields. Soon as they got a new mine operator in, the boys would burn the fiery cross on his lawn just so he knew what was what.”

The anthropologist Kathleen Stewart wrote a book about West Virginia—A Space on the Side of the Road. When she was getting her PhD, they soaked her in theory, and she absorbed it, but if you can manage to float through the theory parts, you’ll find some of the best writing anyone’s ever done about the state. She writes about how Appalachia “came to encode the ‘lowliness’ of an intractable Otherness itself; under the signs of ‘rednecks’ or ‘white trash’ it became the site of a culture that was irredeemably white, poor, rural, male, racist, illiterate, fundamentalist, inbred, alcoholic, violent…” Wow, how would you like to have that string of adjectives hanging around your neck? We could poke at any number of them, but let’s just start with “male.” You should remind yourself that the last time you seen little Maggie, she was settin’ on the banks of the sea, two pistols wrapped around her shoulders, and a banjo on her knee.

The big city historians used to claim that us poor ignorant hillbillies learned to play the banjo from the guys in the touring minstrel shows, but small-town Appalachian historians lately have been saying, wait a minute, that’s ridiculous. The banjo is an African instrument. I’m gonna repeat that. The banjo is an African instrument. Us poor ignorant hillbillies learned to play the banjo from the black folks who accompanied us as we walked away from the assholes in East Virginia and crossed the mountains. Those black folks started out as slaves but didn’t end up that way. Of course we learned to play the banjo. We’ve been playing it since long before the Civil War.

In Appalachia lots of motion runs sideways, and that’s where I’m headed now. The minstrel style of playing the banjo is called “stroke,” and it’s a downstroke style—you hit the strings with the back of the nail on your index finger—but it’s very different from the downstroke styles in Appalachia where it’s “clawhammer” and your thumb keeps bouncing off that pesky short string. The other interesting thing going on in the mountains was that the Spanish guitar had snuck in there, and some folks started up-picking the banjo, guitar style. Some folks used a three-finger up-picking approach and got very good at it.

Why did Bill Monroe choose “Molly and Tenbrooks” to record in 1947? We don’t know who wrote the song, but probably a Black man, and it recounts a horse race between the Kentucky horse, Ten Broeck, and California one, Mollie McCarty, in 1878. Here’s the singer addressing Kyper, the jockey:

Kyper, Kyper, Kyper my son
Give ol’ Tenbrooks the bridle an’ let ol’ Tenbrooks run
Let ol’ Tenbrooks run, oh Lord, let ol’ Tenbrooks run

Holy sweet suffering Jesus! What happens next is purely wonderful. It’s not just ol’ Tenbrooks we’re letting run here! Cut right through your brain. Nothing in the entire history of the world has ever sounded as good as this because what happens next is Earl Scruggs.

Okay, back to the point. Somewhere downstate I learned that when the POlice come around, there’s only one thing you should ever say to them: “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know NOTHING about it.”

My mother calls me up to tell me that a fireball blew up her TV. We’re not back in the olden days now. I’m a grown man; she’s in her eighties. “What do you mean, a fireball?”

“You know, Keith, a FIREBALL. We were having a terrible storm, and it rolled right down the chimney and across the carpet and blew the TV completely apart. It was sparking everywhere. I had to pull the plug. Lord, it scared the living daylights out of me!”

“A fireball? Was it round?”

“Oh, yes. It was perfectly round.”

“As big as a basketball?”

“Oh, no, not as big as that. But bigger than a baseball.”

“What did it do?”

“I told you, Keith. It rolled right down the chimney and across the rug. It left a scorch mark on the rug. It headed straight for the TV and blew it right up!”

I’m way down in the coalfields, way up on a mountain top where we can see the hills rolling away forever. It’s one of the most beautiful vistas I’ve ever seen in my life. We’re standing in the cemetery where my informant is pointing out all the stones with KKK cut into them. “When I was a little girl, I came to a funeral up here,” she tells me. “All the cars came up that road,” pointing, “and everybody was wearing their full Klan regalia. It was a sight to see.”

Last Wednesday night was stormy,
all filled with rain and sleet,
My dad had joined the Ku Klux
but Mom had lost his sheet.

There ain’t no flies on me.
There ain’t no flies on me.
There may be flies on the rest of you guys,
but there ain’t no flies on me.

I’m still way down in the coalfields but in another part of the state. My informant is a retired Black miner. When Mother Jones came to West Virginia to organize the miners, the Black miners told her that living in a company town and working in the mines was worse than slavery.

Me: “Was there racism in the union?” That is, the UMW of A, the United Mine Workers of America.

Retired Black Miner: “No, there wasn’t. We were all equal in the union.” Pause. “But I noticed that none of the white guys ever invited me to dinner.”

“Was there much Klan activity around here?”

“Hundreds of Black miners living here? Every one of them owning a gun? Are you kidding me?”

Dear Professor Maillard,

I’m writing to ask you to send me an autographed picture of yourself. That might seem like a strange request. I teach in the high school here in ____. We used to be a prosperous little town, but the mine closed down. Then, just a few years back, the lumber mill shut down too. There’s no work anywhere. My students are depressed and hopeless. I’ve taken a whole wall, and I put up pictures of people from West Virginia who have made good. I tell my students, see, it’s possible. I want to give them hope. So if you could send me an autographed picture of yourself, I would kindly appreciate it.

I’m a man of constant sorrow.
I’ve known trouble all my days.
I’m going back to West Virginia,
the place where I was born and raised.

My pal Willie lost his business in the great meltdown of 2008, but he’s still got his Civil War era farmhouse near Wheeling Crick. He and I are settin’ out by the barn, taking in the night, while his dog runs free. It’s a beautiful night.

The dog has treed a coon. “That’s the little bastard that’s been eating my apples,” Willie says. “I should get one of my guns and shoot him.” Pause. “But hell, that’s too much trouble.”

A number of things are on my mind, bothering me. “Keith,” Willie says, “just let the peace of West Virginia sink into your soul.” I do that. I didn’t know that was the last time I’d be in West Virginia.

©Keith Maillard, 2024