“Why don't cha come with us?” and “Why don't yuns jus’ stay?”---What "simple" conversation can mean

I have been thinking lately about how family members and their friends carried on conversations when I was a child. This was a time when there was much outward migration from the coalfields to the cities underway, and out-migration from Appalachia and the rural south to cities had been going on for more then 30 years. People left their homes for many reasons. For whites and Blacks there were hopes for better paying jobs, security, and better living conditions for themselves and for their children. Black people had additional reasons to leave their homes; discrimination, racist violence, the reality that conditions were not going to change for the better in the south soon.

Don’t confuse people leaving with wanting to leave. Many, maybe most, of the people who left were adventurous, but I think that most of them missed home and were occasionally nostalgic or sentimental. I knew many Black people who returned to their old homes when there were layoffs in the factories or when they got fired or had earned a certain sum of money and then went back to the city after a little while. And I knew many more white people who made the drive home on weekends, kids in the backseat with bread and a loaf of baloney. You can hear these stories in Dwight Yoakam’s late 1980s song “Readin' Rightin' Route 23” and Albert King’s mid-‘70s “Cadillac Assembly Line.” You can also read Isabel Wilkerson’s great book “The Warmth of Other Suns.” In fact, that's a nearly-essential book.

Sometime after I read Wilkerson’s book, I read a biography of the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. I had wondered to that time how it was that the Nation of Islam had worked out its theology, which did not then fully accord with traditional Muslim theology and sounded to most whites and quite a few African Americans like something from science fiction. But Wilkerson’s book helped to give me an understanding of the disorientation that people experienced in moving from the south to Chicago and how strong their desire for community was. An African American friend whose father had been a Pentecostal preacher in Chicago had no love for Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, but he recognized the key role that they had in building community and explaining the new reality to migrants, who he said were ready for nearly any explanation of how they got where they were. We agreed that nothing that Elijah Muhammad preached was any more far out than what the Pentecostals were preaching on the face of things. Taking matters a step further, I came into a different understanding of those majority-white storefront churches and transplanted preachers that I was so familiar with.

It was exactly 99 miles from the house I lived in to my grandparent's house when we all lived in Pennsylvania. That was a long trip at the time, especially during the winter. It was an even longer trip--about four hours--when my parents and I lived in New York. 

I think that there were some important aspects to those visits that showed the best and most interesting sides to people. The old people would stay up late, way past their bedtimes, to welcome everyone when they arrived. Their attentions focused on the children, who they practically smothered with love. There was usually something to eat waiting. They had worried for hours, and if anyone ran late, they got questioned nearly to death.

The next day was for visiting and catching up and shopping. With my father's family word spread pretty quickly that we were coming. The old people went into the kitchen to talk and I fell asleep on a cot in the front room. Saturday, the next day, was for distant relatives dropping by my grandparent’s house and trips from house to house, with meals and gossip at every stop, and going to a local department store or the Kresge store for needed things. We would drive out to a coal patch and see a great aunt, and her sons would stop by. If there was time, my father and my grandfather would drive out to a mountain spring for water or to a place where a relative had died in a mine cave-in or to a grove of fruit trees. My father and grandfather might argue along the way or step around arguing with one another while I sat in the backseat and tried to take it all in. At night we went to a local diner, something beyond my grandparent’s comfort zone. There were Pokeno games and more visiting, and there was Lawrence Welk on the UHF. If it was Christmas, we went from house to house and envied one another’s presents, and quite a bit got broken as we played.

My grandparents went to church on Sunday mornings and my parents and I slept in. Breakfasts were either mush and cheap coffee ground in a very old coffee grinder or diner food. Milk was delivered on a horse-drawn wagon. The other meals were greasy and starchy dishes with their origins in northern Italy but modified for the coalfields.

My father was regarded as kind of a family success story, which meant that he was expected to put up relatives who were looking for work when they showed up and that he was expected to not show off his relative advantages but be gently generous to others on the side. It was a no-win situation for him; someone was going to hold what he was earning against him, or my grandfather was going to complain that he wasn’t really working or was wasting his money on extravagances like an electric stove or a car that was less than ten years old.

Conversations were usually loud and non-stop. People interrupted one another and ate while they talked. This one or that one would go to the cellar and work on something to show displeasure. But when there was a moment of silence someone would ask “So, did you make good time?” and the story of the trip would be told again, with emphasis on another detail of the trip—the traffic, how the car handled, where we stopped, where the cops were hiding to catch speeders. And at that point it was if the visit was starting over, with more food and more listening and more amazement over the cost of this or that or the time the trip took. How “So, did you make good time?” got asked sent signals about money and poverty, how someone had dealt with the police, and how good a car we had (or didn’t have), how patient my father was (or wasn’t). The way that the question was asked also invited memories and discussions about memories, because people remembered past events differently and were still carrying hurt from arguments that were 30 or 40 years old. Telling the old stories created new stories and gossip about what happened when the old stories were rehashed.

Goodbyes were long and seemed to take forever. Last week I was reading on the Appalachian Americans Facebook page what some people from central Appalachia had to say about their goodbyes on Sundays. What they recalled is a little different than what I recall, but it comes down to this for most of us:

Saying goodbye and leaving could take an hour. Food had to be offered and refused and offered again and then wrapped up and given to my parents. The car had to be loaded just-so. In central Appalachia people would say, “No, it’s fixin’ to leave. We gotta get to the house.” There would be hugs and sauntering to the driveway and “more conversatin’, more hugs. Still conversatin’.” Someone there or on my family’s visits would say, “I was gonna ask ya something” or “I was gonna tell ya something” and there would be more conversation at the car. Someone would say “Oh, did you get everything?” and someone would realize that they forgot something and go back in the house and the conversation and the goodbyes would keep going. In central Appalachia it was often a woman forgetting her purse. “Oh my, I left my purse in the house.”

There were a few common things said as my father started the car. “Don't forget, call me when you get home and let me know you made it!” was one. Another was “Watch out for deer!” Sometimes this was “Watch out for the speed traps!” and in central Appalachia it was “Don’t hit a polecat!” There was also the warning to “Watch out fer that other feller!”

Three endearing things then happened in central Appalachia that did not happen on my family visits. One was someone saying “Y’all come back now, ya hear?!” or the driver saying “Why don't cha come with us?” and someone answering “Why don't yuns jus’ stay?” and someone walking beside the car and everyone saying their goodbyes as the car drove slowly away. But in both cases, in central Appalachia and on my family visits, there was always the goodbye honking.

When I tried to make sense of this as a teenager I was fortunate to find the Young Patriots and Rising Up Angry. You will not learn this history from anyone except those who lived it. There is much in their history to criticize, but there is much more there that should make the people who migrated out and their children and grandchildren proud.   

What is all of this besides just getting along with one another and conversation? Well, it’s history---its people developing in the space that they had. It’s about other times, meaning that it is about ways of getting along with one another and giving one another space and support and working out how to live in a world that gave a few people reason to hope and other people reason enough for despair. It’s also a story about family and solidarity. And it’s a story of lost opportunities. We all would have been better off if the people who did out-migration had stuck together in their new environments and helped one another across racial and occupational lines. We would have all been better off if we had supported people at home with more than a little cash given away behind closed doors.

The beauty here is in the near-miracle that people kept up ties under difficult conditions, liked one another enough to avoid stepping on toes most of the time during visits, loved one another enough to manage being family, and kept talking to one another and telling their stories. Photography---"taking pictures"---became very important under these conditions. There is an art and a science to memory and to telling stories, and I think that we're in danger of losing that. I don't know if folks can be folks without our stories, so please get busy passing on what you remember and remembering what is being passed on to you.