North Carolina Office of Archives and History

By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife by John Michael Vlach;Lawrence W. LevineReview by: Douglas R. EgertonThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (OCTOBER 1992), pp. 459-460Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23521143 .

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Book Reviews 459

Appalachian Passage. By Helen B. Hiscoe. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Endpapers,

foreword, acknowledgments, author's note, illustrations. Pp. xix, 321. $29.95, cloth.)

In June, 1949, a young zoologist from New York, Helen Hiscoe, and her physician husband, Bonta Hiscoe, embarked on a journey to what to them was the unknown—the

coalfields of West Virginia. Bonta Hiscoe, a native of Massachusetts, had agreed to serve

as a coal company doctor in Coal Mountain. Appalachian Passage is Helen Hiscoe's

account of the twelve months they worked with and for a group of coal miners and their

families. The book provides interesting and significant details about life, the conditions

of medical practice, labor unrest, and the attitudes and behaviors of people in rural West

Virginia. However, perhaps the most important theme is the author's own growth. Helen Hiscoe's initial reaction to Appalachia verged on contempt, with just a tinge

of awe. She was appalled by the poverty, filth, and primitive medical conditions but

inspired by the natural beauty of the mountains. She quickly concluded that "Nature

seemed to be doing her best to compensate for some of the mess that people had made."

Hiscoe could not believe that her husband would have no telephone. "Who ever heard

of a doctor," she wrote, "being without a telephone." As the mother of an infant, she

was amazed and dismayed to observe her husband deliver babies while flies buzzed about

the room.

A year in Coal Mountain, however, changed the author. She witnessed and devel

oped an appreciation for the heroic efforts of the miners, for the close-knit family structure, for the lives and struggles of women who showed strength almost beyond belief in their everyday lives, and for the charm, warmth, and intrinsic value of rural

life. This woman who probably never intended to live in Appalachia concluded after

a year there, "Working in the office, I'd learned about human vulnerability and human

toughness. I'd developed a different set of priorities in a place where those in the

academic world I'd known counted for nothing. Coal Mountain had taught me the

meaning of small-town living, small-town gossip, small-town intimacy." This is an important book about an important slice of the American experience.

Hiscoe tells beautifully a compelling story of real life, struggle and achievement, and

personal growth.

Marshall University

Robert D. Sawrey

By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife. By John Michael Vlach. Foreword

by Lawrence W. Levine. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. First published

in 1991 by UMI Research Press. Foreword, preface, introduction, illustrations, select bibliog

raphy, index. Pp. xi, 240. $12.95, paper.)

"The Negro," Nathan Glazer insisted only thirty years ago, "is only an American and

nothing else. He has no culture and values to guard and protect." Fortunately, the

notion that African culture was somehow cast overboard during the middle passage is

now moribund; and few scholars have done as much to lay the old view to rest as John

Michael Vlach. In this collection of nine essays, seven of them previously published, Vlach demonstrates that black folklife culture is based as much in a distant African past as it is on Anglo traditions forced upon African Americans.

VOLUME LXIX • NUMBER 4 • OCTOBER 1992

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460 Book Reviews

Vlach suggests that many scholars argued until recently that African material culture

remained in Africa because most of the products produced by black labor resembled

European artifacts. But Vlach reminds readers that any object has three components:

form, construction, and use. Although the construction of a given item, a quilt, for

example, might be European, its form of asymmetrical patterns might be the result of

African emphasis on improvisation. Out of a unique New World combination—Anglo determination to control unfree laborers along with African determination to maintain

a cultural identity—emerged a new cultural reality, the black American. The speed with and extent to which that new reality was forged depended on a number of factors.

The demographic composition of the African-American community, the amount of

contact with the master class, and the length of separation from West Africa all played a role in the way old customs and attitudes gave way to a new matrix firmly grounded in the memory of a world lost to the enslaved people.

Although the author has grouped his articles into three larger topics (folk art, artisans' lives, and black buildings), the essays, which wander from the present to the

colonial period, do not always fit together well. Reprinted in their original form, the

articles are occasionally repetitive. Some, like the excellent description of material

aspects of the domestic routine of eighteenth-century Virginia slaves, are simply too

brief. The decision to place notes at the end of each chapter is questionable on aesthetic

grounds, and the press's refusal to permit historiographical material in the notes is

unfortunate. Those quibbles aside, the present volume is an impressive work that

carefully untangles the complex strands, both African and European, that produced the

cultural traditions of black America.

Le Moyne College

Douglas R. Egerton

Home Ground: Southern Autobiography. Edited by J. Bill Berry. (Columbia: University of Missouri

Press, 1991. Acknowledgments, introduction, notes on contributors. Pp. ix, 201. $29.95.)

Because southerners have been much engrossed with the concept of their identity, one might expect southern autobiography to be a useful tool for defining some

important aspects of that identity. But the silences are as telling as the autobiographical statements. The essays gathered in Home Ground explore several dimensions of south ern autobiography. They almost impel readers to expand the discussion in efforts to

explain the silences as well as the differences between southern and nonsouthern

autobiographies. The essays were written for a conference called "Home Ground: Parents and Children in Southern Autobiography," held in 1989 at Arkansas State

University. The participants came with impressive credentials as professional scholars of autobiography, or as scholars of the American South, or as creative artists from the South (or combinations thereof).

After editor J. Bill Berry invites a historical perspective on notions of southern

identity, three essays follow as "Autobiographical Criticism." James M. Cox bears out Lewis P. Simpson's claim that Cox, who has taught at Dartmouth for many years, is

"deeply Virginian." Because Cox looks back at his own long heritage, his essay forcefully opens up large vistas. The other two essays in part 1 deal less with the southern past.

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

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