The Happy Poppies Of Handshoe Holler

Majestically arrayed in an ancient blue suit, frayed white shirt and new brown boots, Floyd Handshoe, 51, la bored at a seignorial pace last week, hoeing rocks into potholes in the road. So did half a dozen other unemployed fathers of Handshoe Hollow who have enrolled in a federal make-work project known in the mountains of eastern Kentucky as the Happy Pappies. As they demonstrated the blessings of the poverty program, other local residents--mostly the pappies' wives and small children--harvested potatoes behind a mule-drawn plow on Will Handshoe's land beside Upper Quicksand Creek. Will, 72, who is distant kin to Floyd and unchallenged patriarch of the valley, had foresightedly taken the day off to go squirrel hunting.

Handshoe, like all the other "hollers" of Appalachia, is a narrow, creek-carved slash between rugged hills. Measuring six miles from head to foot, it accommodates some 200 mountain folk, a tiny grocery store that also serves as a post office, and a one-room school.

The people of Handshoe Hollow are in no sense comic-strip characters --though to bemused social workers their ways often seem as anticly unreal as those of Snuffy Smith or Moonbeam McSwine. While they have few worldly goods and little interest in acquiring more, most mountain folk of Southern Appalachia cling stubbornly to an ar cane way of life and the bucolic virtues--hardihood, close-knit family ties, fierce independence of outside authority--that were the models of an earlier America. With federal funds coming in, no one in Handshoe Hollow goes hun gry any more. Nor are the pappies very happy.

Writing Good. To help such people, who do not feel poor and who resist change in any form, the anti-poverty warriors face obstacles as impervious as the Cumberland's timber-topped mountains. To date, Washington has poured $1.2 billion into its Appalachia program, mostly for 3,350 miles of new roads; the aim is to lure new industries to Appalachian cities and give mountaineers ready access to the jobs thus created. But, as evidenced by the few person-to-person anti-poverty projects that have been launched thus far under the program, the challenges of transforming the mountaineer into a middle-class American have become even more evident.

Along with most other holler folk, Floyd Handshoe is virtually illiterate. To keep his job, according to federal regulations, Floyd--the father of 14 children--must struggle ignobly off to school two nights a week, when most menfolk thereabouts have other things on their minds. His wan, dark-haired wife says hopefully: "Floyd never could read. I notice now he can write his name real good. They act like it hurts them to go to school, but it don't." Nonetheless, the Handshoes' main aim in life is not to qualify for factory jobs but simply to go on living as they and their ancestors have for centuries.

Like most mountaineers, Floyd has tried his luck up North; he worked in an Indiana foundry, tenant-farmed in Ohio. Each time, he came back as soon as he could save a few dollars. "You're all the time homesick when you ain't in this hollow," says Handshoe. "It bothered me fierce. In a city you got a certain job, and you go to the store and buy from one mess to the next. You can't get credit in a place like Ohio. Just about any store around here will give you credit."

One of the first things Floyd Handshoe did after joining the Happy Pappies was to buy a $300 freezer--on credit. It contains no meat as yet. He was "aiming to kill that bull calf and a hog" in October, he explains, "but I got to looking at the moon. You can't kill no meat on the new of the moon. It will be tough. I studied the calendar and the almanac, and the soonest I can do it is around the ninth or tenth of next month." Then there is the hillbilly's fundamentalist religion, ever inveighing against sins of the city. Two years ago, at a revival meeting in Handshoe Hollow's Holiness Church, snake handling was part of the ritual --until one of the faithful grabbed a purely satanic copperhead, got bitten and nearly died.

Room to Prank. By comparison with a city slum, an Appalachian holler offers an infinitely rich, exciting life, which mountain folk extol in a courtly tongue directly descended from their Scots-English ancestors, who first penetrated the region two centuries ago. Children have creeks to fish in, plenty of room to "prank," as their parents say. Last hog-killing time, several of the Handshoe boys dried a hog's bladder, filled it with peas to make a giant-size rattle. Then, relates Floyd's wife Dollie, still shaking with laughter at the memory, they "took and tied it to a cat's tail. That old cat took off like it was spooked." So, as soon as they reach their mid-teens, do most of the children themselves. The three oldest Handshoe sons have all had to leave the mountains for city jobs up North. "None of those boys want to live up there," rues Floyd. "That's what ruins us, the young ones having to leave."

Most important to the mountaineer is his own and his neighbor's instinctive respect for individual dignity. Approached by a newspaper photographer in Handshoe Hollow last week, a woman warned: "I don't want my likeness struck." A mountaineer's likeness is as private as his still, and the photographer who strikes it without asking is likely to get struck back. That very independence is one of the major obstacles blocking the mountaineer's assimilation into the 20th century. In the world's most mobile, adaptable society, he does not want to move or adapt.

Without Envy. In a perceptive new book about Appalachia, appropriately entitled Yesterday's People, Jack E. Weller, a Presbyterian minister who has spent 13 years in the region, writes of a church-backed attempt to organize garbage collection in a typical holler where the families had traditionally tossed their refuse into stinking heaps near their houses. The people were so incensed at this intrusion that some of them took to dumping their refuse on the garbage collector's lawn. In Appalachia few community-wide campaigns go much further.

"Throughout their existence," Weller points out, "the people of Appalachia have been faced with unique hostilities of environment, heritage, economics and circumstances--all of them combining to lead the mountaineer into a way of life all his own." The New York-born minister contends that the mountain man "has found his way of life satisfying enough, and he looks on persons of other classes without a trace of envy." The best hope for change lies probably in the very young; in contrast to their parents, Appalachia's children thrive on the attention of anti-poverty workers, flock to games, community projects and preschool lessons. In any case, concludes Author Weller, "It's going to take at least another generation" to bring yesterday's people into today's world--if Washington can be patient that long.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.