TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN

...Some county officials, who didn't like the center's tampering with the status quo, tried to compel Jean to change the focus of her work...

...Tell It on the Mountain Marie Cirillo helps people in Appalachia take charge of their lives BY ANNE WITTE GARLAND Marie Cirillo lives alone in a little house up in a hollow in northeastern Tennessee...

...He asserted his authority...

...One thing I've learned is that every mountain hollow in Appalachia has people capable of doing what people here have done...

...for the local people, it was just a first taste of what they could accomplish together...

...In 1970, the Economic Development Council obtained a Federal Small Business Administration loan to start its own company, a factory for assembling wooden loading pallets...

...Then coal collapsed and people moved to cities in large numbers...

...The choice of business made sense: The area had abundant timber that was underutilized...

...Marie was harassed because of her support for SOCM (she was one of the founding members) and her stand on the strip-mining restrictions...

...As with other projects, the process of getting the land trust firmly established has been painstakingly slow...

...It began to come down to a question of who we'd be loyal to, our Sisters or the men," she says, "and it didn't seem to make sense to hold on to loyalties to the men when we were part of a women's community...

...Tilda, a schoolteacher, had been one of the first local people to attend the early meetings at the Clairfield community center...

...With Marie it's the other way around...

...Marie saw her own first task as simply listening to the needs of the people...

...The mountain communities have faced cycles of major outside forces coming in and robbing them," she adds...

...The target area encompassed the several small, unincorporated towns in the valley around Clairfield, bordered on either side by Pine and Cumberland mountains...

...But there's a certain basic strength in the culture of the people and the land that has really survived all those changes, that hasn't been penetrated...

...The nuns' experiences in the missions fueled their discontent...

...The same officials probably assumed— and hoped—that Marie would leave as well, but she had something different in mind...

...The first year, Tilda got children together for activities outside under trees...

...Jean Luce, a friend who had also left the Glenmary order, joined her, taking a job with the county-administered Federal poverty program, funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity...

...The year before Marie and Jean arrived in Clairfield, a Quaker volunteer had lived there, and with his help the people in the community had chosen an old school house to turn into a community center...

...But to Marie, the transition was completely natural...

...Marie helped to track down medical volunteers and encouraged the clinic's board to incorporate as a nonprofit organization, which would make it easier to get funding and—importantly—to survive independently of the government...

...The population in the town where my grandparents lived was 200 or 300 people," she recalls...

...All it takes for change to happen is for someone to pull people together.' ganization Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM), which later worked to pass legislation regulating strip mining...

...The diocese has continued to pay her a small salary and to provide modest funds as seed money for community projects...

...Renovations were begun on the building, and Jean, whose job involved directing the center, called meetings to start discussing projects to undertake...

...So even if she had to leave tomorrow for some reason, the groups would still be able to function...

...So they made me teach...

...We piled into my station wagon and went around to different offices with our problems—with no results," she recalls...

...by 1967, it had dwindled to 1,200...

...One local man who has worked with Marie for years has an explanation for the trouble she has sometimes faced...

...The bishop of Cincinnati at the time, under whose jurisdiction the Glenmary order fell, felt responsible for seeing that the nuns conformed with church law...

...She wanted to be a missionary...

...Land and the coal that lies under it are the only wealth in this area of the mountains, with all but the smallest portion of the land owned and controlled by a few corporations...

...Her house was shot at, and there were threats that she would be "burned out...

...I said neither, but if I had to choose, it would be nursing...

...The first thing to go up was a new building for the health clinic...

...Marie has moved on to a different way of dealing with the land issue: through a community trust...

...Then she obtained a trailer, a neighbor gave her a place to put it, and she started her day-care center...

...After working in those conditions, the nuns began to develop their own ideas about how they could work more effectively...

...job training would be relatively easy, and an out-of-state company had promised an ample market for the product...

...Copyright © 1988 by The Center for the Study of Responsive Law...

...As early as grade school, Marie had made up her mind to be a nun...

...within ten years, the Community Land Association in Clairfield has acquired sixty-six acres, mostly in small parcels from family owners...

...It's a comfortable, inviting place with a porch, a wood-burning stove, and a tiny kitchen where she often bakes bread or cooks meals for gatherings...

...Marie has been that guiding hand...

...The project became known as the Model Valley Economic Development Council...

...She didn't just come in one year, get a big salary, and go back to write a book about it or something, meanwhile leaving people the same as before or even worse off...

...But when they started looking for land so that they could build a new place, they were stymied...

...The community's first success was setting up a health clinic, sorely needed because of inadequate or nonexistent health care in an area where many of the men were suffering from black lung and other miners' diseases...

...For several weeks each summer, youth from Knox-ville and other cities live together with mountain youth and work on such projects as learning how to produce video documentaries on the local development activities, clearing land for pasture or garden sites, or stripping logs for cabins...

...But what attracted me here in the first place were the problems, and what's kept me going is the drive to understand what people can do about their problems...

...Other projects were under way, including the Model Valley Craft Group, and Tilda Kemplen's day-care center...

...The heart of Appalachia, where Marie settled and has worked for twenty years as a "community developer," as she calls it, is far from Brooklyn, New York, where she was born in 1929...

...Early on she developed an appreciation of the differences between urban and rural life...

...She loved the mountains, had gained the trust of many of the local people, and was as determined as ever to help them identify and start grappling with the fundamental problems plaguing their area...

...When the health clinics were being formed, the students from Vander-bilt University who helped coordinate them started bringing in law students as well to address other problems...

...didn't see back home in Brooklyn—and I knew even then that I liked it—was the close interaction of people, not just with the land but with one another...

...She then got her first taste of mission work, with stints in several Appalachian communities, and loved it...

...But even the simplest things were difficult without a place for them...

...A cross in Marie's living room is from her days in the convent novitiate...

...She's shown people ways to do what they want...

...Someone tampered with the steering wheel of her station wagon...

...She applied for and received some Federal educational funding, and after several moves was able to buy a small piece of land with a building which contains a greenhouse, a used-clothing store, and a library...

...That led Marie and others to consider wearing lay clothes, well before most nuns in other orders were toying with the idea...

...But then they'd leave, and everything would be gone— they'd even tear down the building...

...What I saw there that I Anne Witte Garland is the author of "Women Activists: Challenging the Abuse of Power, "from which this article is adapted by permission of The Feminist Press at the City University of New York...

...First there was the timber industry that helped to build up the East, then the coal industry...

...She reasoned that if she stayed in one community long enough, she would be able to identify the causes of the migration and help people to start tackling them...

...Clinics were started in nearby towns as well, many with funding from the Federal Appalachian Regional Commission and with the help of energetic volunteers from Vanderbilt University...

...Growing up in Brooklyn, the daughter of music teachers, Marie spent summers with her grandparents in rural Kentucky...

...But there was another strong influence at work on Marie as well—the Catholic Church...

...A poster in her study reads Pray for the dead—fight like hell for the living, a quote from an early organizer of coal miners, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones...

...For one thing, they saw that rural communities desperately needed medical 'Marie has helped groups to become aware of their own talents and all the things they can do for themselves.' care, and that some of them could serve a useful function by practicing as nurses...

...She was attracted at first to the Maryknoll order, which did foreign mission work, but when she was in high school she heard about a new order, formed to do home mission work chiefly in the rural South...

...All it takes for community change to happen is for someone to pull people together to do things for themselves...

...I know it's going to take a good while more...

...When Marie Cirillo left the convent, she set out to find an Appalachian community that suffered from outmigration, for she was haunted by the question of why so many Appalachian people were forced to leave their home and move to the cities...

...The Model Valley Economic Development Council achieved an important breakthrough when it was able to buy thirty acres of land in Clairfield from a local family...

...There were issues of when you had to be in at night, whom you could go around with, even the areas of the house that were supposed to be cloistered...

...There are other pockets of poverty in the country, but there probably isn't a larger chunk of land where there's been as much colonialism and exploitation of resources as here...

...I've seen the way some churches have operated here," Tilda continues, "starting up settlements with schools and things, and then falling by the wayside because the community people had no input into it...

...Early on I had heard the local people saying that the reason nothing could happen around here was that the companies owned all the land...

...Marie approached the Catholic bishop in Nashville for support...

...A small, trim woman, dressed typically in slacks and a turtleneck or a delicately flowered shirt, with short brown hair that she cuts herself, Marie looks perfectly comfortable with the rural life she has chosen...

...It all seemed so worthwhile—even romantic," she says...

...Marie was already being drawn to the vision of community that has inspired her entire career...

...the volunteer who was driving it had an accident, but wasn't hurt...

...Well, if you lived in a house and local people came in and weren't able to see your dining room, they'd wonder what was going on...

...There used to be a lot of people under other people's thumbs here," he says, "and they're getting out...

...But in those days, most public-health agencies wouldn't hire a woman who wore a habit and veil and looked, as Marie puts it, like a Catholic preacher...

...When coal companies left the area, they left only the environmental damage behind, often burning the company housing that they had put up for workers and their families...

...To Marie, control of the land is at the crux of the problem for the people of Appalachia who are trying to gain control over their own lives...

...Out of that grew the or'There used to be a lot of people under other people's thumbs, and they're getting out...

...The population of the community had once been 12,000...

...As the community center lost its vitality and effectiveness, the board of the health clinic decided to dissociate from the center...

...She's also brought stability, by staying here so long...

...Being a nun meant obeying superiors' orders...

...A year out of high school, in 1949, she became the twelfth woman to join the Glenmary Home Mission Sisters...

...The clinic was opened in 1968...

...So I'm going to start up a daycare center...

...She quickly learned what wouldn't work...

...The root of the trouble was tension over what Marie calls "an emerging new spirituality...

...Several families live in their own homes with long-term leases on land-trust property in Clairfield—families that probably wouldn't have their own homes if the land trust didn't exist...

...When that happens, there's bound to be a reaction...

...at one point, after hearing people's complaints about the food-stamp program and inadequate health care, she suggested that several local people go with her to Nashville and visit government agencies...

...We've come up against the problems of the 'system' more with the land trust than with any of the other groups," Marie says...

...When I went around saying, 'Well, what should we work on next?' of course no one said, 'Let's take over the land.' Instead, they mentioned things they thought they could achieve, like the health clinics, or even something as simple as getting together a little music group...

...They asked me which I preferred, nursing or teaching...

...When I first moved here," Marie says, "it was before any of the educators and organizers in Appalachia were focusing on land problems...

...The land has been used for community and family gardens, for firewood and timber, and for housing...

...A "summer camp" has been built on one site, with a lodge and four cabins...

...Lay people weren't allowed to see Sisters' dining rooms...

...She has helped groups to become aware of their own talents, their rights, and all the things they can do for themselves...

...With those cycles, people's community life changed...

...We just couldn't conform to conditions that most nuns could conform to, and were supposed to conform to, according to the laws of the church back then," Marie recalls...

...Marie and the area residents were striving to form local organizations that could serve as realistic models for other communities...

...Marie's role here, the way I see it," says Tilda, "has been to help that to happen—to help people to help themselves, help them get together groups and to take control of their own lives and community...

...But it wasn't all romance...

...to his credit, he recognized the value of what she was proposing, and the diocese hired her to work as a community organizer...

...It folded in three years, in part because the landowning corporations wouldn't give the new company access to timber land...

...Some of the students did a multicounty survey of land control in Appalachia and, since the findings showed that the interests controlling the land paid very little in taxes, an effort was organized to enforce state laws on land taxation...

...Public services were virtually nonexistent, and most people who remained in the area lived below the poverty level...

...She was raised Catholic, attended Catholic elementary and high schools, and had relatives in Kentucky who were nuns and priests...

...By this time, there was a growing split within the Glenmary order...

...After several meetings, she told Marie, "I've been watching you and listening to what you're saying about starting organizations, and the one thing I really want to work on is day care...

...The health clinic had resources, it had volunteers, it had everything but a building to function in," says Marie...

...The following year, a group of forty-four more women, including Marie, left the order—but not before restating their commitment to continuing rural community work...

...The factory began operation the following year, but never reached more than 60 per cent of capacity, with fifteen employees...

...I've been here a long time now...

...The church might be the Good Samaritan, bringing in people, building a place, giving the local people handouts...

...The community was to experience the inevitable false starts and obstacles, though...

...While the groups struggled to find small pieces of land to build on, events in the region made it necessary to focus on the land problem...

...She was out of town at the time of some of the worst threats, but a couple of organizers were staying at her house...

...In 1966, forty women left the order individually...

...it would be a better place because she'd been here...

...Women were studying and teaching theology for the first time, and women theologians were challenging the bastion of male theologians...

...About a year and a half after Marie and Jean arrived in Clairfield, key changes were made in the government's poverty program to reduce local control by poor people themselves of the Federally funded projects...

...Marie was sent to take education courses, and then to rural Kentucky to teach for a year in a two-room school, which she says was "probably the most unhappy year of my life...

...She decided to settle in Clairfield, Tennessee, a coal-mining community...

...But I didn't know what to do with that information...

...In the 1940s, underground coal mining had largely given way to strip mining, which was less labor intensive and cost most of the men their jobs—and even their homes...

...And when you're trying to organize adults and have to be home at nightfall, you're obviously not going to get very far...

...The basic concept of a land trust is to accumulate property, not for individual ownership but to be owned and managed democratically by a board, which determines how to put it to best use for the community...

...Marie moved into an apartment attached to the post office, in a building that had once been a coal-company commissary...

...neither did they...

...Even those first groups we set up were confronted with problems of getting hold of land: it's taken us this long, and we still haven't succeeded...

...instead, she opted to quit her job and leave the area...

...Marie has helped start both a regional and local land trust...