Linda Scott DeRosier - Creeker: A Womans Journey

Women in Southern Culture

Margaret Ripley Wolfe, SERIES EDITOR

Publication of this volume was made possible in part by
a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright 1999 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky
663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008
www.kentuckypress.com

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Frontispiece: Linda Sue Preston, ca. 1946

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DeRosier, Linda Scott, 1941

Creeker : a womans journey / Linda Scott DeRosier.
p. cm.

ISBN 0-8131-2123-x (alk. paper)

ISBN 0-8131-9024-x (pbk; alk. paper)

1. DeRosier, Linda Scott, 1941- . 2. Mountain whites (Southern States)KentuckySocial life and customs. 3. KentuckyBiography. 4. Appalachian Region, SouthernBiography. 5. Appalachian Region, SouthernSocial life and customs. I. Title.

CT275.D3664A3 1999

976.914 98-32029

[B]DC2I

ISBN-13: 978-0-8131-9024-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper
meeting the requirements of the American National Standard
for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Member of the Association of American University Presses

For Momma and Daddy,
who filled my tousled head with a sense of
adventure and possibility and filled our homeplace
with tall tales and summer songs.
And
For Arthur,
best friend and lifes companion,
whose love and laughter help me live with the past
and whose generosity of spirit continues to brighten
every day of my life.

Two bits, four bits
Six bits, a dollar;
Send those creekers
Back up the holler!
Paintsville High cheer, 1950s

CONTENTS

EDITORS PREFACE

Women in Southern Culture is dedicated to the experiences of women across the vast range of southern history. The publication of Creeker: A Womans Journey marks the appearance of the inaugural volume of the series. It seems particularly fitting that the first book comes from the edges of the American South and the margins of southern womanhood. Creeker is a highly personal and refreshingly honest account of a human lifethat of a scrawny kid from Two-Mile Creek, Kentucky, who is now a middle-aged professor of psychology, a wife two times over, a mother, and a college presidents spouse. Linda Scott DeRosiers autobiography, both humorous and poignant, tells the story of an educated and cultured American woman who came of age in Appalachia; hers is a fresh new voice from the ranks of contemporary twentieth-century women.

Creeker resonates with the folkways of a rural South that is rapidly receding into the past. It is reminiscent of Anne Moodys Coming of Age in Mississippi and Shirley Abbotts Womenfolks: Growing up Down South. Linda Scott DeRosier is just as appealing in her metier as Sharyn McCrumb and Lee Smith are in theirs. All of them hail from the southern highlands, and McCrumb and Smith routinely draw on their Appalachian heritage for the characters and settings of their fiction.

The Southern Appalachians have changed dramatically during the course of the twentieth century, but remnants of the folk persist, vestiges of an American subculture that has moved into a high-tech society without completely divesting itself of the old ways and values. These beliefs survive in the shadows of interstate highway bridges and industrial smokestacks. One catches passing glimpsesthe fierce individualism and independence of someone boasting of paying cash and not owing a cent; the political aversion to experts and intellectuals, nowhere more apparent than in some school board races; the reluctance to make a will, an admission of human mortality in black and white; and the adherence to a prescribed and expected ritual of grief at funerals, a ritual often derided by the more sophisticated. The strength of the rural patriarchy persists at family gatherings where men eat first and women get the leftovers.

With a new century dawning, considerable confusion still surrounds Appalachian women. Homespun grannies, yarb doctors, fotched-on women, Dogpatch cuties, and coal-miners daughters capture the popular imagination. But Linda Scott DeRosier reveals the complexities of family life, femininity, and feminism in the mountains. Creeker is a remarkable alternative to much of what has been published about the Appalachian region and its women. DeRosier is an academic, but Creeker is not a conventional scholarly work; nor is it intended to be. Bereft of footnotes and bibliography, it provides a unique perspective filled with universal truths.

Margaret Ripley Wolfe

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This blend of remembrance and reality is a tale of a familymineand of a time and place that delineated it. I have long been fond of telling my students, You are the greatest authority on you. Until I began this effort, I honestly believed that. Without the bounty of other folks memories, however, this book would have been much less accurateand far less pleasurable to create. I have been fortunate in the excavation of this story to have had my own reminiscences restoredand on occasion remediedby Pat and Michael Greer, Brett Dorse Scott, and Gwen Holbrook. Indeed, I have drawn so heavily on the goodwill, professional skills, and memories of friends and family that I find myself beholden to a host of folks whose faith in me helped turn this effort into reality. A few of those whose support I appreciate are Heather Haas and Jeanette Morris, trusted associates who read every line time after time and whose thoughtful reviews significantly improved this work; Barbara Vail, friend and colleague for nearly twenty years, whose perpetual constancy, joyous friendship, and professional support I simply take for granted; Margaret Ripley Wolfe, series editor, who always cleared a place for my manuscript in her packed schedule and gave time, skill, and constant encouragement, however often it was needed; Thomas Appleton, uber-reader, whose kind attention to my every comma splice brought clarity to this effort; Gwen Holbrook, oldest friend and witness to the early years, whose voice over the long-distance lines always brings Two-Mile back to me, and me back to Two-Mile; the DeRosier girlsDeborah, Marsha, and Melissawho granted me the splendid opportunity of having daughters and whose presence has immeasurably enriched my life; Pat Greer, Baby Sister, whose support never wavered and whose recollections I counted upon to add her voice to mine in resurrecting memories of the parents and past we share; Brett Dorse Scott, who helped me reconstitute the essence and structure of a match that, while it may have been made in heaven, did not remain forever within those pearly gates; Brett Preston Scott, Sunner, whose entrance into this world created a place in my heart that didnt exist before him and whose idealism everlastingly restores my hope; and Casey Joans, she of the shining lantern, who has always stood ready to help a creeker learn to bake a new pie.