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No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems
Don West, edited by Jeff Biggers and George Brosi
University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago. 2004
227 pages. $25.00 Paper
ISBN: 0-252-07157-3
No Lonesome Road is a collection of some wonderful poems and prose pieces by Don West, social and political activist of the 1930's and after. Born in the red clay mountains of Georgia, he connected the Christian gospel to the political and economic struggles of poor people. West was a proud Southerner, and thus took as one large part of his life’s work insisting on an alternative narrative to the conventional story of Southern aristocracy and oppressed slaves. He wrote and spoke about a tradition of poor white anti-slavery attitudes in the South. His writings are given an excellent context in this book with a biographical introduction by Jeff Biggers and an appreciation by George Brosi.
Perhaps the most immediately familiar of West’s accomplishments to an audience today would be that he was co-founder of the Highlander Folk School, the inter-racial institution in Monteagle, Tennesse that originally focused on justice for workers in the South and gave training to many leaders of the civil rights era including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Carmichael. West founded other institutions as well, including a folk life center in West Virginia late in his life. He was also at various times a lineman for a telephone company, a farmer, a textile worker organizer, and an ordained minister. He called himself a poet, and he lived his whole life steadfastly by his beliefs–in spite of being beaten, jailed and even burnt-out by the Ku Klux Klan.
Another of West’s lifelong characteristics was that he was a determined coalition builder with more interest in justice than in a correct party line. George Brosi writes that West “refused to disassociate himself from any individual or group working on an issue he cared about.” (p. 197). He worked with Communists and with fundamentalist Christians, and he had many friends and associates, ranging from sharecroppers of his early days to Appalachian literary figures like James Still and Jesse Stuart, and in his later life, student activists and mountain musicians and crafts people. His daughter, Hedy West, became a folk singer and muscian who put some of his verses to music.
The editors have done a brilliant job in portraying the dedication of this man’s life through the scope of his work. No single poem or essay (and in some cases, the prose works are just paragraphs from longer pieces) would have the impact standing alone that it does in this book. Without the scholarly apparatus and stories of West’s life from Biggers and Brosi, West’s work could have seemed limited to its historical interest. West’s poor Southern Appalachians, for example, have pinched cheeks and empty bellies, whereas the poor people in the South today tend to have the obesity of poverty rather than skinniness. A reader of only one poem or essay might say, Oh, that’s interesting–there used to be Southern mountaineers who supported labor unions and civil rights. But knowing that West himself was a worker as well as an organizer, and a man whose own relatives lost their health in the fields and mills makes a poem like “The Song of the Saw” especially meaningful and moving.
In this narrative poem, John McCarty, a pine board sawyer, asks his boss to have the big saw’s belt fixed, and the boss puts off the repair till Monday, not wanting to waste time and money, and, predictably, a life is wasted instead:
Saturday the belt slipped.
John’s belly struck the saw.
Ripped him open
Like a yellow pine log... (p. 125)
The workers are angry, but tend to the human requirements of the situation: the narrator pulls the short straw and has to go tell McCarty’s wife:
Nancy didn’t cry
Or scream.
Just hung her head
Down low
And stroked the hair
Of John’s baby.
She looked out through the trees
And it didn’t seem like
She looked at anything... (p. 127)
Poems like this are so stark and uncompromising that we almost turn from them, as if simplicity somehow had to be less true than ambiguity. West, of course, knew better. Much of his poetry was performed aloud in public readings, and he thought of himself as speaking to and for people who don’t regularly buy books, let alone books of poetry. His 1946 collection, Clods of Southern Earth, published just before the red-baiting anti-communist McCarthy era, sold well over 100,000 copies. The direct engagement with working lives gave it a popularity that surprised the book sellers and publishers.
West’s poems call for civil rights and integration as well as for recognition of the lives, accomplishments, and sufferings of poor mountain people of all colors. Unfortunately, his popular book came at the end of a time of some general support for union organizing and social justice, often spearheaded by the Communist Party. Unlike many of the liberal fellow travelers, however, Don West never moved away from a life lived to right social wrongs. He continued for another forty years to make common cause with the oppressed, to celebrate mountain culture, and to live by his principles regardless of whether they were popular in the mass culture.
Nor did he hesitate to attack what he saw as elitist theories of literature, especially if he perceived them as having a bad social effect. In one of his poems, he takes on the Agrarian movement of academic poets who came out of Vanderbilt University and included John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davison.
In Dixie Land they stake their stand,
Turning the wheels of history back
For murder, lynch and iron hand
To drive the Negro from his shack (130)
This was not an attack on literature or even on high culture. Rather, it was an attack on what he saw as a retrograde ruling class who glorified the days of planters and slaves. West himself had done graduate study at Vanderbilt University, and it was his choice to use his learning in service of his principles and of justice, to see himself as a teacher and sometimes even a prophet.
He also wrote some beautiful lyric poems like “Hungry Old River” in which a community is sitting on the banks of a river in the night waiting for a drowned man to be discovered:
The little ripples of the River
Purred gentle and smooth,
Like a house cat,
Or the soft feet of a jungle beast
Stalking the forest edge.
Summer’s moon glittered
From the waters
Like little diamonds
Speckled out
Across a velvet bosom.... (124)
Most of his writing was published in relatively ephemeral media like chapbooks, pamphlets, and periodicals that ranged from New Masses and the Daily Worker to Christian Century and Mountain Life and Work. The beauty of this book is that it does not attempt to make the case that West was something simpler than his entirety–a man who was at once an artist and an activist, a teacher and a preacher and an organizer. The book demonstrates the breadth and quality of his writing and thinking.
The essays and scraps of essays cover the whole span of his career and have titles like “Thoughts of a Kentucky Miner” and “Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls.” Perhaps my favorite prose piece is “Robert Tharin: Biography of a Mountain Abolitionist,” which is part of an academic treatment of the antislavery traditions in the mountain south that he never finished. The title of this book, too, comes from another work, also, sadly, unfinished.
In the Afterword, George Brosi describes West as “a symbol of the power of a purposeful life”(195). I think that is an instructive way to approach this book and the work it chronicles: not as an exhibit of an interesting extinct species of proletarian activist, but rather as an introduction to a man we wish we could have known, who inspires us to see our own lives whole and as part of a continuum of change-makers. Don West’s “purposeful life” makes me proud to be a member of the human race–not a small thing these days.
Meredith Sue Willis has two new books, a book of short stories called Dwight’s House and Other Stories and a science fiction novel called The City Built of Starships.
No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems
Don West, edited by Jeff Biggers and George Brosi
University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago. 2004
227 pages. $25.00 Paper
ISBN: 0-252-07157-3
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