Hello, Joe,
It's me, Gene, the fellow who was born in Charleston, West Virginia, but now living up north in a place called Sweden. Remember me? I had hoped you would someday turn up in Stockholm to cool off a bit after you wrote your book, which I have on order as soon as it hits the press. Feels good to read your musings about the lower classes in the old Appalachians and its environs. The place needs a Mark Twain to write about it -- but you will do. You and I feel the same way about Virginia, West and East.
Though I always loved those mountains in Kanawha County and Nicholas County where I used to swim in New River near Beckley, I felt sad that so much was gone that was the best, the native Americans who had lived there and had never even been left with a reservation to console themselves with. When I read American history as a teenager my reading was of my own choice, outside of school. My heroes were Tecumseh and Chief Cornstalk and the savages, the invaders, were Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton, the bounty hunter and George Washington as the invaders priest, father confessor, and king.
I have always felt there was a kind of a curse put on the whites who took the land from the natives. I could never get rid of the feeling that the poverty and ignorance that plague West Virginia are to some extent self-incurred in perpetuation. And that they are now beginning to feel what the native Americans felt when the coal companies are loping off the top of the mountains in southern West Virginia: like the natives, they are losing the very ground they stand on. Something of a paradox in a hen pecking order.
Good to know you are still in there punching, Joe. I enjoy very much what you write. It reminds me a bit of the nightly discussions I had near Elkview with my friends in Bat Holler back in the 50s. In those discussions we found out who were to be the future liberals, defenders of the system, radicals and anarchists. But my "goin' up Cripple Crick to have a little fun" landed me in Sweden. There are certain problems here in Sweden that resemble those in America.
By the way, do you have Skype? We could gab a bit with the use of that. Been a while since I have heard the Virginia dialect.
Gene -- a mestizo, as they say much further south.
Sweden
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Gene,
I don't know how long it has been since you've been back to the New River country down there, but what the coal companies have done to our beloved mountains is an abomination against this very earth.
Please don't hesitate to call. That invitation is extended to all my readers. If I am working I won't answer. But if I am fucking off and pretending to be working so my wife won't make me do my chores, I'll pick up immediately.
My Skype name is: joseph.l.bageant
In art and labor,
Joe
