Voices from a Troubled Community
WARNER, ROGER
Voices from a Troubled Community Everything in Its Path By Kai T. Erikson Simon and Schuster. 284 pp. $8.95. Our Appalachia Edited by Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg Hill and Wang. 397 pp....
...In fact, the residents of Buffalo Creek—all earning approximately the same income, owning the same goods, sharing the same outlook-were so much a "community" as to define the term...
...Oral history requires no more of its contributors than that and authenticity...
...He could take full advantage of his innate sense of form and extremely sensitive ear in fashioning his remarkable book...
...Their commentary does not give the interviews a sufficient framework—one never understands the role of each piece in the overall scheme...
...Still, perhaps it is unfair to compare Our Appalachia to Path...
...Speech changes as it is transcribed from tape recorder onto paper...
...In a mass it usually smolders, and occasionally it explodes...
...Behind it was water, also black, that had been used for washing coal...
...When "some words have been deleted and some sentences rearranged," and words not spoken have been inserted in brackets to help the grammar-all of which happens in Our Appalachia—even more of the wonder is gone...
...From his observations, and from thousands of pages of depositions given to the law firm for the court action, Erikson has fashioned Everything in Its Path...
...He could take full advantage of his innate sense of form and extremely sensitive ear in fashioning his remarkable book...
...too often the author comes hoping to fit his findings into the framework of a preconceived theory...
...The human beings who figure in such studies are allowed little life, so tightly are their actions imprisoned by the thesis...
...It teaohes about all tragedies, yet mentions few...
...The book provides a point of reference for "independence" and "community," overblown words that are much misused these days...
...Erikson, in contrast, declares early on that "the event must tell its own story...
...I suppose the responsibility for Our Appalachian inadequacy lies with the editors, Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg...
...It is an unusual book, and a great one...
...These last, in particular, are a marvel...
...The better works of the genre-such as Studs Terkel's Working and the Foxfire books, edited by Eliot Wigginton—have demonstrated that oral history can survive the shock of transcription...
...You can't get out...
...But Everything in Its Path is primarily literature, a special kind of literature consisting of history, sociology and statements from the Buffalo Creek survivors...
...The slag heap was soon 200 feet high by 600 feet wide at the face, and extended back more than a quarter of a mile...
...Most families found themselves living among strangers, selfconsciously aware that ordinary sounds—of conversations, flushing toilets, creaking bedsprings—could be heard several trailers away...
...The students who recorded and transcribed the interviews are blameless, and no doubt learned a great deal about their regional heritage...
...Some of the Our Appalachia interviews are successful, but the others should have been consigned to the archives, for preservation and research...
...In the third section Erikson comes to his real theme—the flood's aftermath...
...The volume is the product of an oral history project conducted by four Appalachia colleges, so it is difficult to know whom to criticize for the unfortunate results...
...Erikson explains that the forebears of the Buffalo Creek residents, the original Appalachian settlers, were totally "independent" of one another...
...Still, perhaps it is unfair to compare Our Appalachia to Path...
...Second, Erikson's work would make a good textbook for bureaucrats in relief agencies...
...As the valley widened the wave caromed from one hillside to another, seeming to take aim at buildings, changing course as if at will, slowing momentarily before obstacles and then smashing through...
...He has by training a lens-sociology—through which to examine the surroundings, but possesses as well as wider vision that enables him to see beyond the blinders of his specialty...
...Some of the Our Appalachia interviews are successful, but the others should have been consigned to the archives, for preservation and research...
...It was restrained by a series of dams that were made of more slag...
...I just don't like them...
...Their commentary does not give the interviews a sufficient framework—one never understands the role of each piece in the overall scheme...
...he did not have to rely on someone else's rambling speech...
...That Erikson should have come to Buffalo Creek was a stroke of luck...
...By the time industrialization had thinned the population and unionization had brought decent wages, the coal-mining families were cozily settled into neighborhoods as alike and dependent upon each other as "cells" in a "tissue...
...I wouldn't give a dime for every one of them...
...Early on the morning of February 26, 1972, the highest dam became saturated with water, turned into mush and slumped over...
...Indeed, it is in presenting bits of uttered speech like the following that the author comes closest to "letting the event tell its own story": "Buddy, you don't want my opinion about those hud trailers, or nr> other trailers...
...It is the kind of book that sticks in your mind...
...Where Everything in Its Path outs through layers of human experience by focusing on Buffalo Creek, Our Ap-palachia brings us a variety of people spread over a wide geographical range...
...Kai Erikson could carry the narrative with his own writing and select his quotes from the very best of the material at hand...
...When the wave shot out of the gap it carried along a million tons of solids...
...Kai Erikson could carry the narrative with his own writing and select his quotes from the very best of the material at hand...
...he did not have to rely on someone else's rambling speech...
...Speech changes as it is transcribed from tape recorder onto paper...
...The natives who offered their voices certainly cannot be faulted...
...It lets us see them more clearly for what they are: polarities along an axis of social living...
...Nobody wants it but there it is, a sum of impurities...
...That goal is as difficult to live up to as a campaign promise, but his account of the flood in the first part of the book is a masterpiece of narration...
...While the survivors stood numb amid the unimaginable black wreckage, snow began to fall...
...As a concession to environmentalists, the mining company was impounding the water until the solids could settle, rather than releasing it directly into the stream...
...Coming from very different backgrounds, the interviewees do not really cohere as a group—the possessive in the title seems undeserved...
...wet, it turns into slush...
...The problem with many books by sociologists is precisely that they do have a something to prove...
...Sometimes do-gooders do the worst things...
...Over a year later, the law firm representing them in a suit against the mining company sent Erikson, a sociologist, into the area...
...Where Everything in Its Path outs through layers of human experience by focusing on Buffalo Creek, Our Ap-palachia brings us a variety of people spread over a wide geographical range...
...In the second part he reneges somewhat, offering a background history of Appalachia that might have been delivered from behind a lectern...
...The writing is excellent, the thought clear, and the implicit subject larger than the matter at hand...
...Coming from very different backgrounds, the interviewees do not really cohere as a group—the possessive in the title seems undeserved...
...Then and only then, though, should it be published...
...Subsequent generations, moving down from the mountain into the coal camp, became more social...
...It is combustible...
...It was, in Kai T. Erikson's words, "not really a flood, not a straight thrust of water, but a churning maelstrom of liquid and mud and debris, curling around its center and grinding its way relentlessly into Buffalo Creek...
...Another new book, employing the voices of the entire Appalachian region, is far less effective...
...is far less effective...
...A short distance below the gap lay Buffalo Creek, a valley of mining communities...
...12.50...
...Hence the unusual pain they suffered on relocation: Their complete identification with their place in the "tissue" severely disoriented them when they found themselves alone...
...The volume is the product of an oral history project conducted by four Appalachia colleges, so it is difficult to know whom to criticize for the unfortunate results...
...The students who recorded and transcribed the interviews are blameless, and no doubt learned a great deal about their regional heritage...
...Hitting a lower dam and then the slag heap, the water force set off explosions that spattered muck hundreds of feet in the air...
...Erikson, an exquisitely sensitive editor, uses them throughout the text as anonymous "solo voices . . . drawn from a chorus of similar voices," and they are more powerful than anything of their kind since Spoon River Anthology (and are true to boot...
...The death toll that morning was 125...
...They're hotter than a firecracker and you can't do nothing...
...As Erikson puts it, "there was virtually no privacy inside to guard and virtually no community outside to make contact with...
...It filled the narrow valley and swept away the first settlement-road, topsoil, railroad spur line, trailers, cars, the houses of coal miners, the church...
...The better works of the genre-such as Studs Terkel's Working and the Foxfire books, edited by Eliot Wigginton—have demonstrated that oral history can survive the shock of transcription...
...Oral history requires no more of its contributors than that and authenticity...
...The disruption of social patterns, he notes, has prolonged the period of recovery: "The fear and apathy and demoralization one encounters along the entire length of the hollow are derived from the shock of being ripped out of a meaningful community setting as well as the shock of meeting that cruel black water...
...The Department of Housing and Urban Development (hud) made trailers available to Buffalo Creek's homeless survivors rent-free, for instance, yet there was no effort to reassemble the old neighborhoods in the new camps...
...The natives who offered their voices certainly cannot be faulted...
...You can't get out the front door without you're looking at another man's door and he's the same way to you...
...Then and only then, though, should it be published...
...if some of the tales are uninteresting, they were nevertheless given in good faith...
...He thought he would merely be writing a quick report on the effects of the disaster before returning to his teaching position at Yale, but what he found moved him to take a leave of absence and go back to Buffalo Creek: The inhabitants of the ruined landscape were still dazed, still "wounded" by a second, lingering catastrophe—the destruction of their web of community relationships...
...His digressions always have a purpose, however, and when his academic spectacles are adjusted correctly the subject is inevitably in sharp focus...
...At least two of Everything in Its Path's several values were probably not intended by the author...
...And the children had no common space to play in...
...When "some words have been deleted and some sentences rearranged," and words not spoken have been inserted in brackets to help the grammar-all of which happens in Our Appalachia—even more of the wonder is gone...
...4,000 were left homeless...
...Reviewed by Roger Warner Contributor, "Smithsonian," "Rolling Stone," Washington "Post' Slag, the leavings from coal mining, is a substance of low integrity...
...Dry, it can be kicked away like cinders...
...The black lake, 132 million gallons strong, broke free...
...Moreover, the editing is indifferent, and skillful editing is a must in undertakings of this kind...
...Moreover, the editing is indifferent, and skillful editing is a must in undertakings of this kind...
...I suppose the responsibility for Our Appalachian inadequacy lies with the editors, Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg...
...if some of the tales are uninteresting, they were nevertheless given in good faith...
...At the beginning of 1972, the Buffalo Mining Company was dumping a thousand tons of slag a day into a gap between two West Virginia mountains, because that was the cheapest way to get rid of it...
...Perhaps most important, though, he barely knew anything about the area, is not a specialist in disasters, and therefore had nothing to prove...
Vol. 60 • March 1977 • No. 7
