We have now been living in Floyd, Virginia,
for six months. We are waiting for our log house to be completed, but luckily
have found a small place near our land to rent. Just the other day, my
wife and I went to Floyd to circumambulate, to look around, to get better
acquainted with places and people, especially places and people that make
Floyd the special artistic mecca or haven that it is. I suspected it when
we bought land but now I know categorically that I love this place. As
with all people, there have been places I have been in love with and other
places that have been important, though love had little to do with them.
Because my father served in the Navy, I started out my life in interesting
places. My mother once showed me an article that dubbed me randomly the
first post-WW II child to travel to the finally pacific Pacific, at least
in war terms. I was nine months old and on my way with my mother to join
my father at the military base on Guam. We were pictured together, I looking
at a globe and my mother pointing to Guam and looking girlish (she was
only eighteen when I was born) and sporting the typical clothes and hairstyle
of the forties. My mother always dreamed she would grow up to be Rita Hayworth.
She could have been, she said, except opportunity never knocked. In this
picture, she is beautifully and wondrously young and innocent.
Other pictures of Guam showed me with sand at my feet and palms shading
in the background rocking on a horse my father made-he was always good
with his hands, except when he misused them. Other pictures showed we lived
in a Quonset hut. He said he put a concrete base around his. When the typhoon
came, his was the only one that didn't sustain major damage. I was apparently
thrown bundled up into a closet. Then there are memories of France and
Italy and then home to Louisville after the divorce, when my mother was
left on her own and we bought a house, a place that introduced me and my
refined sensibilities to an outhouse, which I have since come to appreciate,
private places connected to the earth from which one can watch the sun
emerge from mists along a mountain range or delineate the constellations
and wonder at the number of stars in a country sky as I was able to do
when visiting our son when he lived on Craig's Mountain or when we were
coming on weekends to a rented cabin in Ellett Valley. Our gravitation
to our destined future home began years ago, even as early as Dylan's matriculation
at Virginia Tech.
After Louisville, I went with my brother and sister to live with
my grandmother who owned a capacious old farmhouse in corn-country Indiana
until the size of the house suggested to her, it would seem, the invitation
of a number of female residents to do more than keep her company, and she
was arrested for managing a place whose reputation the local authorities
found objectionable. How many Uncle Johnnies should one set of children
have? What did we know? We loved the place because we were free to play
house in the various nooks and crannies, and only when the other set of
grandparents visited bringing needed coats and boxes of food with cereal
brands other than oatmeal or mush, which we would eat bowl after bowl in
sheer, gut-bulging abandon, did we ever question where we lived. What did
we know of want and the glimpse of something mysterious beneath a suddenly
and accidentally opened robe?
Generally, home was never a place I wanted to be. So after graduation,
I ran off to live with my grandparents whose country life appealed to me.
My first real job was bailing hay, and I spent the entire summer helping
to work the farm. I was a hired hand, which made the details in Frost's
poem about the young college kid that thought knowledge could only be found
in books and the hired hand's ability to find water with a hazel branch
more meaningful.
When in college I earned a scholarship to go for a summer to the
English university of my choice-I was able to achieve what every anglophile,
like me, dreams of: to study at Oxford University-I went early so I could
travel to the Riviera, to Ville Franche-the place where my father was stationed
and where we lived for a year when I was five. But such smiling memories
of lowering a basket from a sixth-floor balcony to the vegetable vendor
below and hauling up the goodies or drinking sweet liqueur that the local
barman treated me and my siblings to in little shot glasses or gazing from
the window to the harbor to which the streets wound descendingly and ended
in stairs that led directly and naturally into the Mediterranean waters
at the ships anchored there blur into darker ones. It was a place of domestic
discord, which I could not escape. Children are the victims of place because
they do not have the means to change theirs.
I planned to go to Ville Franche to confront the past, but I never
made it beyond Paris whose Old World charm and monuments and art seduced
me completely. I had spent one night outside with little sleep on my hitchhiking
way to the famed metropolis, so I literally passed out in the car helping
me and awoke suddenly to the full panoply of this mistress's beauty and
bounty. I thought Heaven had fallen on the earth in the form of classical
architecture and statuary. I fell in love with Europe and knew I would
have to go back, maybe forever. Once back across the Channel sick to the
gills and in the town of Oxford, I lived in a bed and breakfast for a week
before school started. The family made me one of them: we ate meals together,
not just breakfast, and the son and I listened to the Beatles and played
cricket in the backyard.
Once in Oxford, Paradise seemed possible in my room in medieval-looking
Exeter College, one of the colleges within Oxford University, where I spent
the summer studying Dylan Thomas and T.S.Eliot and doing Oxford things
such as visiting storybook places like the Ashmolean Museum and the Bodleian
Library and the very field where Alice supposedly fell down the rabbit's
hole, eating tongue and trifle and kippers, punting on the Cherwell, reading
and writing poetry in the many college gardens, and after a visit to Brighton
with an English girl (a Cambridge student who served as guide for the foreign
students) racing with her down the streets of Oxford along the Thames laughing
and breathless arriving in just the nick of time for evening tea.
A professor, whose name was ironically Christopher Wordsworth had
said if I wanted to come to study at Oxford that he would admit me. Three
years later after having completed a master's degree at Florida State University,
I decided to take him up on his offer. He remembered, but as I was in the
midst of filling out an application for a Marshall Scholarship to afford
the trip, my wife announced she was pregnant with our second child, and
then my nerve failed because I was not sure we could manage abroad with
two children in tow. I abandoned the project.
I should mention that Hampden-Sydney College (while touring the Parliament
building in London, I saw statues of the two English freedom-fighters who
lent their names to this college), the place where I went to undergraduate
school and the place from whence I came to go to Europe, was important
too because I learned new things, and not just from the books. There was
Latin and English history and Chaucer. But there was also drinking and
smoking and sex and failure. But more, the college was located seven miles
from the town of Farmville in infamous Prince Edward County where segregation
forced the closing of the schools in the mid-sixties and where black students
were deprived of education for years. It was here also that a friend and
I crawled through the woods one night to witness a KKK rally, something
like the scene in O Brother, Where Art Thou.
So it became the place where I was able to act out my desire to be
involved in the civil rights movement. During the summer after my junior
year when I received a scholarship to study the European novel and stayed
at the college while almost everyone else was at home working or playing,
I became involved in a local program supported by the federal government
known as Catch Up, whose purpose was to help black students deprived of
their education for so long to catch up, a somewhat hopeless effort in
the face of the length of their deprivation. But for me, it was also an
opportunity to be involved in civil disobedience and to become privy to
local black politics, the politics of the underground, and to know the
children of the defiant black leaders in the town and those castigated
freedom-fighters who had traveled from northern colleges to help liberate
America's still enslaved citizens. One day, a reporter for the New York
Times came with a photographer to my class where I was teaching the fundamentals
of reading. The next week, I was sent a copy of the front-page article
with my picture and a description of what we were trying to do down there
in the South. From Farmville to New York was a significant leap in place
without actually moving. But back in the real world of Farmville, I was
falling in love with a local resident who was willing to forswear with
me the racism of her parents.
So my wife and I and the then two children stayed in Tallahassee
at Florida State another two years while I worked on my doctorate before
returning to Virginia and to Lynchburg. Tallahassee with its live oaks
and Spanish moss and sinkholes and hippie communes was a hard place to
leave. Communes, though, as my wife and I discovered, are not always as
good as they ought to be because as Camus put it: Hell is other people;
well, that is a little extreme unless the other people are spoiled and
selfish. But it was a place that brought me once again in touch with the
love of the earth.
A good house is a place that can make a bad town tolerable. Lynchburg
has many attractive houses, old Georgian and Victorian houses. I liked
Lynchburg primarily for the old house we bought where we reared our four
children: ours was in a quiet, friendly neighborhood; there were at least
five teachers on the same street. The house was designed and built in 1911
by a well-known architect Stanhope Johnson who because of his time and
place lavished all his talents and all nature's plentiful and affordable
resources on the design of this fifteen room (not counting four porches),
essentially four-story home that originally was a country place, located
just beyond the last trolley stop that is now the local tavern in our neighborhood,
The Cavalier, where our sons learned to play pool. Evalina O'Wiggens who
built the house was, like me, an English teacher.
Lynchburg was a place I loved also for the clever students I had
the privilege to teach over a period of thirty years who always to the
end believed in my vision of the world. I would like to think it was a
vision of satiric good sense, moral responsibility, and aesthetic appreciation,
but I think finally what I did more than any of these in that place was
to introduce them to the majesty of language. It is amazing to me now that
so many were moved by that majesty: one does not think of adolescents as
people for whom words in and of themselves make a difference. I say this
about my place there because of an epiphany at the recent Dr. John concert
at the Jefferson Center in Roanoke, when a former student, a recent graduate
of Yale, said when I asked what he was going to do that he didn't know
because I had screwed up his mind with a passion for language. Not all
places are as rich in interested, sensitive, intelligent, and ambitious
students as Lynchburg is.
But Lynchburg was not a difficult place to leave because it suffers
from the usual problems of the urban scene: gangs, drugs, violence, social
disparity, overcrowding, racism, hypocrisy, and the modern ills of general
disarray and disharmony. There is art there and a sort of community of
artists but it lacks the vibrancy and the energy and the numbers that I
have found here in Floyd, Virginia. Plato rightly concluded that the ideal
polis must be small so that the citizen feels palpably he is one of the
threads in the fabric of the state; he senses his contributions and that
of others, and he is able to grasp the boundaries. It is like the old theatrical
requirement that the setting of the play should not extend beyond the distance
a man could travel in a day-on his old donkey.
Our journey to Floyd really began with our journey to Blacksburg,
Virginia, specifically to Ellett Valley, just outside the town, literally
just outside: within ten minutes or less of leaving it, one comes upon
farm after farm, nestled in valleys and spreading right up to the tops
of the likes of Paris Mountain and Catawba Mountain and so on down the
range. Our son had been renting for a couple of years a house on 280 acres
on High Knob which offers a view of the valley that extends for miles and
a panoramic sight of the Blue Ridge encircling it. Across from that spot
but miles down into the valley lies 300 acres owned by the same man whose
father bought the land when it was dirt cheap, but cost wouldn't have mattered
much to this fellow who was apparently the main man at Union Carbide, whose
corporate environmental practices, by the way, make his desire for a conservancy
on his land a joke.
In any case, my wife and I discovered that there was a cabin for
rent on this property for a reasonable price. So we rented it and began
coming every weekend to get away. The log cabin, it turns out-my wife went
to the Tech Library to do the research-is one of the oldest standing structures
in Montgomery County, having been built in 1776 by one Thomas Rutledge
who came down from Pennsylvania Dutch country to settle. The cabin has
two distinct sections because apparently when such structures were built
the family had to build as quickly as possible before winter set in, so
they built the smaller part until they had time to add on the next season.
This cabin faces the North Fork of the Roanoke River (now and again residents
like ourselves are forced out by flooding) and broad fields and woods and
mountains. These sites provided ample nourishment for the soul.
Eventually, the owner decided to sell the whole 300 acres to someone
who wanted to divide the property into smaller plots-we feared the inevitable,
and our fears were realized. We had mentioned wanting to buy the five acres
with the cabin up to the creek, but finally we had to abandon that dream,
which then led us to Floyd and to the walk down the street that my wife
and I took the other day around downtown Floyd and which is the subject
of this essay: the place called Floyd, the place I love, and the place
where art really matters. Despite my recent struggle with that old love
of Europe-having revisited Paris and in the springtime-I know that I have
finally found my true home.
To be continued....
James Locke
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James Locke
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