Deluxe: When the Place You Come From Is Gone

Transcription:

CHUCK REECE 

Think about the place where you grew up. Imagine all the childhood memories attached to that place. The bedroom where you slept. The house that room was in. The trees out in the yard. Maybe there was a special oak you loved to climb. Maybe the animals — the pets or maybe farm animals.

Now imagine all of it … gone. 

No house. No trees. No remnants at all. 

Everything that might have reminded you of the place that raised you just … gone. Disappeared. Like it was never there at all.

That’s exactly what the writer Tracy Thompson experienced. 

I’ve known Tracy now for more than a decade. A few years ago, when she was on the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative reporting. And in 2013, she published a book called The New Mind of the South that detailed how this region was changing better than anything I’ve ever read. 

I’m a fan. 

But I knew nothing of how and where she grew up until she sent me an essay last year, hoping that Salvation South, the magazine I edit, would publish it. I was taken by its very first paragraph. Let me read it for you:

Even now, I can close my eyes and see the outline of those trees, as familiar as the veins on my wrist. Black lace in winter; brilliant red in fall; close and still on summer nights when heat lightning flickered on the horizon.

TRACY 

It was something I had tried to write off and on for, I don't know, 10 or 15 years.

It just, it finally jelled in my mind. It finally had, and it had a lot to do with those oak trees that I remember that were all over the lot where the place where my grandparents lived and where I lived. 

CHUCK 

Red oaks, beautiful trees, as you can tell from that description.

TRACY

We lived in a grove of oak trees, basically. And the only cleared spot was the cornfield. And my grandparents’ garden. And it had to do with grief for those trees.

CHUCK

For a long time, Tracy could never find the right word to express that grief. We have plenty of words for the grief we feel when we lose people — but not so much for when we lose trees.

TRACY

I decided the term that I was trying to define was something called eco-anxiety. 

CHUCK 

That's E C O hyphen anxiety. The term came into being a few years after global warming came into the public discussion. The word means “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”

When Tracy researched eco-anxiety, she discovered the word had been coined by an Australian environmental philosopher named Glenn Albrecht. 

TRACY

So I looked up eco-anxiety and that's when I found Glenn Albrecht's work and the word "solastalgia." I realized that what I was trying to name had already been named and written about. 

CHUCK

Albrecht had also coined that word: Solastalgia. He has written that it means, and I quote, “the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment.” Close quote.

Tracy thought the word perfectly described what she was feeling.

TRACY

This kind of permanent homesickness I felt.

CHUCK 

The Mississippi writer Eudora Welty argued that the most powerful distinguishing characteristic of Southerners is our sense of place. Our attachment to home. And to us, home is a complex idea. It’s a web of memory, kinship, landscape, and story that we carry in our bones. 

But when the giant broom of progress sweeps that web away, as if it were nothing more than something a spider spun on your back porch, where does that leave us?

Today we're going to hear about what it means when the place you come from is gone. 

I’m your host, Chuck Reece, and this is Salvation South Deluxe.

CHUCK

If the Southerner’s attachment to home is not just about a place — but really is a web of memory, kinship, landscape, and story — then Tracy Thompson’s story for us pulled all those things together beautifully. Particularly the memory of and kinship she felt with her grandfather, whose name was John Kleckley Derrick.

I’m going to take a moment to read Tracy’s description of him from her story, which she titled with that one word: “Solastalgia.”

The world Paw Paw showed me was the world of a yeoman farmer, and it differed very little from the ways people had farmed a century earlier. He owned about 40 acres, most of it in timber. On about 15 acres of cleared land, he raised corn, potatoes, green beans (planted between the corn so the vines could snake up the corn stalks), black-eyed peas, English peas, yellow and green squash, lima beans, cabbage, and tomatoes. There was also an orchard of crabapple and peach trees. Their fruit was small, misshapen, and tart, but for that reason it made outstanding jam, as did the muscadine vines he cultivated. He also kept a milk cow or two; a well on the property provided us with water. My grandmother’s chickens gave us eggs, and an occasional roasting hen; and then there were five or six pigs, one of which were slaughtered every year to provide us with ham and sausage. Then there was Becky, his mule, and one evil gander who hissed like a snake. My mother and grandmother spent every August canning and preserving everything that came in, working in steamy kitchens in the punishing August heat. But in winter, we had warm bowls of vegetable soup, and fried apples, jams made of plums and muscadines, and my mother’s fiery hot pear chowchow.

I followed Paw Paw, and watched what he did.

CHUCK 

How do you think watching someone live like that, how did that shape who you became?

TRACY

It gave me, well, I mean, I'm going to use a kind of a trite phrase, but it does have some meaning: It gave me a sense of place. Not everybody has that.

My husband, for instance, could live anywhere. He just really doesn't particularly care. On the other hand, I have a friend who grew up in Louisiana and she is Cajun to her bones and she goes back to Louisiana all the time.

I think that if you have that sense of place, and Alice Walker is somebody who's written really beautifully about this too. And you do get a sense of...where your food comes from and that meat just doesn't magically appear in plastic wrap on a shelf. And that there is a whole system to life that people in more urban settings lose touch with. 

CHUCK

That connection to a place, to a landscape and those who live on it, gets hardwired into our settings. Sense memories are created. We learn what that place tastes like, what it smells like, what it sounds like, the specific shades of black, brown, and red in the very dirt under your feet. 

TRACY

It used to be that I could, if I was locked up inside a building with no windows, I could still tell when it was about to rain. ’Cause there was some slight electrical charge in the air that I was sensitive to. I can't do that anymore, but I used to be able to.

And I think that if you have that sense, it never really leaves you.

CHUCK 

I understand what Tracy means. I grew up in the country. My father, who was the 11th of 12 siblings, worked in town, but he kept a garden, which he plowed just like Tracy’s grandfather did: With a mule. 

My oldest uncle, the first of those 12 children, was named Efford. He lived the closest house to ours. When I read Tracy’s description of J.K. Derrick, I instantly remembered my uncle Efford. He grew his own food. Raised hogs and chickens. Cured his own bacon and country hams.

And when I Tracy’s picture of J.K. Derrick, wearing overalls and holding his mule, Becky, with a tiny Tracy sitting on Becky’s back, I saw myself on the back of Uncle Efford’s plow horse.

But there is a huge difference between my situation and Tracy’s. I can drive 80 miles north from my home in Atlanta and I see the house I grew up in and my uncle’s house. Still standing. 

But on the 45 acres where J.K. Derrick lived, not a single trace of how he lived remains. Neither his house nor the one his granddaughter grew up in. No farmland. The red oak trees Tracy watched change as the seasons passed? Not one of them stands today. 

These two sentences from Tracy’s story explain why: 

We lived in a strange little rural bubble about one and a half miles southwest of what would become the main terminal of the world’s busiest airport; Paw Paw’s pasture sat athwart the route of what was about to become I-285, Atlanta’s Perimeter Highway.

TRACY

I would watch the bulldozers at night go back and forth across, behind the scrim of oak trees, and they had these orange lights at night, you know, to do construction. I don't know why they were in such a hurry, but they were in a terrible hurry. And those humongous earth-moving machines would just growl all night long on the other side of my grandparents' house, destroying everything.

It was like something out of Tolkien. It was like the orcs felling the trees, in The Lord of the Rings. It was destruction.

That kind of industrialization and what they call development, it's pretty horrifying when you see it up close.

CHUCK 

From South Atlanta to the mountains of Virginia, that same coal train of progress has been hauling away the landscapes that made us who we are. After this short break, we'll hear from poet Annie Woodford about what solastalgia looks like in Appalachia — and why her mother still believes no place on earth measures up to what's been lost.

 

ANNIE

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.

CHUCK 

The voice you hear is poet Annie Woodford reading a quote from Flannery O’Conner’s 1952 novel, Wise Blood. 

Where You Come From Is Gone is also the title of Woodford’s award-winning second collection of poetry, from 2022. Her poems describe the emotional pain of solastalgia felt by the people of the Appalachian Mountains that she calls home. The pain of losing old tree species to blight — or the taste of a particular honey disappearing because invasive species have overrun the place where the bees gathered pollen.

ANNIE

Goldenrod hides the small green jewel of a wasp,

a new species where once there were honeybees.

A last stand of hemlocks looks over

the cabins of rich Atlantans.

CHUCK 

Like Tracy Thompson, Annie Woodford frequently contributes her writing to Salvation South. Because I knew how deeply Annie understands the emotional pain that comes when the places we come from disappear, I asked her to read Tracy’s essay “Solastalgia.” I wanted to know how she reacted to it.

ANNIE

The way she evoked her grandfather's relationship to it and the way that you know people used to depend upon the land for sustenance and therefore that really changed the way they related to it I thought that was really profound in it. And she mentioned Wendell Berry in that essay.

CHUCK 

If you are a Southerner who wants to understand our people’s deep connections to the land, Wendell Berry is a name you need to know. Berry, now 90 years old, was born, raised, and still lives in Henry County, Ky. He's a farmer and a writer, and he has written more often and more eloquently than any other person about how people are rooted in the land just as deeply as trees and crops. 

His 1977 book, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, was a landmark critique of industrial agriculture and the breakup of rural communities. In her essay, Tracy explains how encountering Berry’s work brought back memories of her grandfather. She writes:

I did not know then that Paw Paw’s way was the same practice advocated by Wendell Berry as the ultimate in sustainable land use: plowing with a mule obviates the need to buy fuel for a tractor, and keeping livestock allows a farmer to use their manure for fertilizer, avoiding chemical fertilizers.

But Berry’s writing reaches far beyond the mechanics of sustainable farming. It also captures the grief rural people feel when that big broom of progress sweeps those practices away.

ANNIE

They did a documentary about Wendell Berry for PBS back like maybe 15 years ago. That's where I first encountered that idea …  you know, moving away from like subsistence farming toward like working in factories and industrialization, you know, not just was a form of grief for the people who moved, but it also, like, put things out of balance in terms of how we relate to the earth because we started to, you know, depend on industrial agriculture.

CHUCK 

Annie Woodford grew up in Bassett, Virginia, a small town on the Smith River in the southwestern corner of that state. And its story is similar to those of countless other Southern towns. In the 19th century, Bassett was a community of farms, timber tracts, and a few sawmills. And its name back then was Horsepasture. 

A man named John D. Bassett owned the general store there. John D. and some of his relatives built a furniture-making plant there at the dawn of the 20th century, and after that, people began calling the place Bassett. And Bassett Furniture became one of America’s biggest furniture companies. By the middle of the century, Bassett became a bustling town with movie theaters, department stores, drugstores, churches, and all kinds of shops serving the folks who worked in the furniture plant and their families.

You can still shop at Bassett Home Furnishings stores all over America. But their big complex of factories in the town that bears their name now stands empty, thanks to the globalization of trade. 

Annie’s maternal grandfather was one of the people who moved out of the mountains in neighboring Floyd County to work in the furniture mills of Bassett.

ANNIE

One of the narratives in my family is that my mother's father never wanted to move away from the mountains. You know, he did not like living in Bassett where the furniture factory was, but he felt economically compelled to do that.

All these people from Floyd County would have moved down to Bassett to work in those mills. So it was quite the like diaspora, I guess almost. And, you know, I don't know, it seems like progress. It seems like moving down for a better life, you know, and I think it was perceived that way. But like, I know that like my maternal grandmother liked, you know, the being closer to town.

CHUCK 

And the farmland higher up in the Virginia mountains was not exactly the easiest place to grow crops.

ANNIE

She said it was hard farming rocks.

CHUCK 

Living in Bassett when it was bustling gave her grandmother a different kind of pride. 

ANNIE

That was a counter-narrative to that.

CHUCK 

In her essay, Tracy contrasts what was lost with what was gained when her homeplace was sacrificed to progress. I’m going to read another passage from it. 

These days, when I get on Google Earth and enter my grandparents’ old address, all I see is asphalt and warehouses. Whole neighborhoods have been obliterated. Of the hundreds of red oaks that graced our property, not one remains. The perimeter highway that cut Paw Paw’s pasture in two has grown from four lanes to sixteen.

The landscape of my childhood was swapped for this dystopia. And what did we get in exchange? Some consequential things. A higher standard of living, for one: The house we moved into when I was 16 was a mansion compared to the house my parents built. The same air traffic that interrupted my algebra studies has taken me to places that broadened my horizons. The airline industry that employed my father paid for college educations for my sister and me. My hometown of Atlanta has grown into a thriving international city and a mecca for Black artists. All of these are good things, and maybe they were even worth the obliteration of every lovely thing I grew up with as a child, and the disappearance of the means by which a gentle man named J.K. Derrick could live lightly on the earth.

CHUCK 

Perhaps that’s what solastalgia is. It’s when we mourn not just the places and the people who raised us, but how those people were able to live when they were in those places. 

Here’s Annie Woodford again.

ANNIE

On some level there's a wound there, there's a displacement, there's a sadness there to having, like, become part of maybe this industrial system that was dehumanizing on some level.

CHUCK 

The personal pain of solastalgia merges with the story of much larger socioeconomic forces. Annie talks about this phenomenon in terms of her hometown. 

ANNIE

I was also thinking about the socioeconomics of, like, where I grew up and how, like you were pointing out that, you know, like the community in lot of ways has been devastated by the decline of industries. And that happened because of a very intentional economic policy called NAFTA, you know, and how that means then that, like, the community feels a sense of like, I feel like there's a lot of like shame or despair about what the community is and there's not a lot of pride in it.

CHUCK 

Annie now lives and teaches in western North Carolina. When her mother comes down to visit her from Bassett, they often visit Boone, N.C., which is the home of Appalachian State University. Boone is a little cultural mecca that is very attractive to tourists from Atlanta and other metropolitan areas around the Southeast. 

Annie’s mother finds it lovely, but somehow, to her, it never measures up to Henry County, Va. 

ANNIE

She comes to see me in Boone, you know, which is this very desirable tourist area. It's beautiful. And she's like, well, but it's not Henry County. She's like a, I call her a Henry County ideologue.  

CHUCK 

There is a poem in Annie Woodford’s book, Where You Come From Is Gone, that’s called “Those Factories Had Heart-Pine Floors.” 

Heart pine is the inner heartwood of slow-growing longleaf pine trees that were native to Southern forests. That wood was prized for its strength and durability. Not to mention its warm reddish-gold color. It was once so abundant it was used for flooring in factories, like the furniture plants in Bassett.

ANNIE

That term comes from something my mother would always say. As the factories were getting torn down or burned, she would talk about the wood that would be in them, y'know? Like, what a waste it was.

CHUCK (VO)

But now, heart pine is rare. If you wanted to floor your home with those wide, antique, heart-pine floorboards, reclaimed from an old factory, a thousand square feet of it installed, would cost you somewhere between $25,000 and $45,000. 

Most new houses these days are floored with LVP — luxury vinyl plank. That stuff isimported from China or Vietnam and made to look just like wood. You can get an LVP floor for about a tenth the cost of that heart pine, between $2,500 and $6,000.

That contrast makes Annie Woodford think about how her mother processes the loss she feels as she thinks about how her hometown of Bassett has changed, thanks to progress.

ANNIE

She loves her place so deeply and sees it as beautiful and retains that imaginative connection to the land and to the idea of it.

CHUCK 

Annie says her book Where You Come From Is Gone was written to use her art — writing poems — to process the loss that she feels, that her mother feels, that all the people of Appalachia feel, as they watch their ways of life change.

ANNIE

It was about loss and like kind of trying to preserve things that you love through imaginative acts.

CHUCK 

Like this one.

ANNIE 

“Those Factories Had Heart-Pine Floors”

When I think of all the wood and people we’ve wasted,

The piles of fire-bent metal stacked almost as high as the buildings that burned,

I want to make these words into a handmade knife,

Capped together in a backyard shed in Bassett or Fieldale.

Or a skirt sewn without a store-bought pattern,

Lined with a scrap of golden polyester my grandmother would have prized.

Or a bird dog with a mouth so soft no training quail ever died.

The loom and the finishing room held us in their spell.

The lathe turned and turned, but we didn’t listen.

We took all the overtime we could get.

CHUCK 

Wendell Berry wrote that "the soil is the great connector of lives." Tracy Thompson's grandfather understood that. So did Annie Woodford's people. They knew how to live in relationship with the land, not just on top of it.

We can't bring back those red oaks or those heart-pine factory floors. We can't undo the highways or tear down an airport. But we can do what Tracy and Annie have done: Bear witness. Tell the stories. Name the losses. And maybe, just maybe, think twice before we sacrifice the next 40 acres to someone else's idea of progress.

You can read Tracy Thompson's essay "Solastalgia" and find Annie Woodford's poetry at Salvation South.com.

I'm Chuck Reece, and this has been Salvation South Deluxe.

When it comes to giving credit to people who contributed to this episode, I should first say I am just in awe of how Tracy Thompson and Annie Woodford write about this region we call home. Every time we get the chance to publish their work, the Salvation South team is thrilled. The latest essay we’ve published from Tracy is called “Happy Families, My A-double-S.” It’s right humorous, and you can read it right now at Salvation South.com. I encourage all of you to buy Tracy’s brilliant book, The New Mind of the South, and any — or all — of Annie’s three collections of poetry. The most recent is titled Peasant. Her first, from 2019, is called Bootleg. Her second, from 2022, is the one we were pulling from today. It’s called Where You Come From Is Gone.

The producer of the Salvation South podcast is Miranda Hawkins. Georgia Public Broadcasting’s director of podcasts is Jeremy Powell. Both are essential to keeping our show on the road — or, I should say, in your ears. We owe a debt of thanks to Sandy Malcolm, who is GPB's vice president of content, and to Bert Wesley Huffman, the president and CEO, for their faith in and support of Salvation South.

We’ll be back next month with another full-length episode of Salvation South Deluxe.