georgetowncollege.eduhttp://spider.georgetowncollege.edu/htallant/border/bs10/fr-metz.htmhttp://spider.georgetowncollege.edu/htallant/border/bs10/fr-metz.htmBorder States: Journal of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association, No. 10 (1995)PINEY RIDGE TRILOGY: JANICE HOLT GILES'S ESSAY OF PLACE Clara L. Metzmeier Campbellsville College A sense of place results gradually and unconsciously from inhabiting a landscape over time, becoming familiar with its physical properties, accruing a history within its confines. Kent C. Ryden The social history of rural Adair County, Kentucky in the 1930s and 1940s unfolds as one reads Janice Holt Giles's The Enduring Hills (1950), Miss Willie (1951), and Tara's Healing (1951), the novels that comprise the Piney Ridge Trilogy. Giles brings the reader to Piney Ridge by using detailed descriptions of the landscapes and by accurate reporting of the traditions and life styles of the people. Giles provides continuity of plot and setting by developing some of the same characters throughout the three novels and by constructing a literary map of Piney Ridge that includes roads, houses, woods, and hills. She adds reality and history to this map by labeling each place with the name of the owner or the purpose of the building. Because her map includes such intimate details, it is different from a highway map or a map in a geography book. When the reader studies Giles's map, memories of Piney Ridge people recur, and a sense of place "gradually and unconsciously" forms. The little square marked "Hod Pierce" on the Piney Ridge Map, for example, calls up more than just a house located on Whispering Creek. The reader remembers that in The Enduring Hills, Hod and Mary Pierce decide after the close of World War II and after a few years of working in Louisville, Kentucky, that they would live on Piney Ridge, the home of Hod's family for seven generations. The reason Hod and Mary believe it is necessary for Hod to return to his childhood home after many years' absence is that both seek a balance between their place of residence and their spiritual needs. The reader recalls that The Enduring Hills ends when Hod takes Mary to see Grandpa Dow's house and states that this old log building will be their home. The reader further recalls that Hod often visited Grandpa Dow, who had talked a lot about life on the Ridge, about the Pierce clan, and about reasons why the Ridge folks lived the way they did. The reader remembers that it is in the Hod Pierce house that many people begin their lives on the Ridge. Miss Willie and Tara Cochrane first live in Hod's and Mary's home when they come to the Ridge; Jeems Pierce, the first child of Hod and Mary, is born in the old log home. Thus the house, becomes a focal point for a multi-generational and multi-cultural family. The old log home helps to establish the thread that weaves through the three books: the influence of geographical location on cultural heritage and of heritage on an individual or a group of individuals. Giles helps readers to focus upon the landscape, the people, and the relationships formed between place of residence and people. As Giles conducts a tour up and down Gaptown Pike, she stops at the mill and the school and in many houses and fields so that the reader can listen to the people's conversations and come to know them. The reader learns that these are farm families who depend upon tobacco as the main money crop, that the people are poor and uneducated, and that medical treatment is minimal. Electricity and indoor plumbing do not exist in rural Adair County in the 1930s and early 1940s. Most of the people travel around the Ridge on foot or in horse or mule drawn http://spider.georgetowncollege.edu/htallant/border/bs10/fr-metz.htm (1 of 9)4/7/2008 2:14:11 PMhttp://spider.georgetowncollege.edu/htallant/border/bs10/fr-metz.htmwagons, and they seldom travel further than The Gap. Isolated by geography, ignorance, and poverty, the people form a close-knit community. Their love of place and the security it gives them keeps them on the Ridge. There they stoically and fatalistically accept their hardships. The Piney Ridge folks of the 1930s and 1940s accept their hardships with the "Hits allus been" attitude, often expressed in Miss Willie, but they are not a dismal people. They make their fun much as America's pioneer families did. They have house- and barn-raisings, church dinners and singings, and pie suppers at the beginning of the school term. These functions give the people a chance to see each other and escape from drudgery into fun; they give young couples a chance to hug waists and to steal kisses. Food, the traditional sign of hospitality, is always served at these functions. The Ridge folks usually bring beans of different varieties, fried chicken, potatoes, homemade bread, and pies. The women sometimes make a social event of their sewing and mending jobs, visiting on the porch in the summer or by the fire in the winter, while they mend clothes or make quilts. The men often gather at the mill to swap news and to tell stories while the grain is being ground into flour. Such was the case when the men at the mill pay tribute to Grandpa Dow in The Enduring Hills. In Tara's Healing the men tell stories at the house raising. Gault's story of Grandpa's throwing a corn cob at an old Tom turkey tricks Tara into asking what happened to the turkey. Tara's question is the point of the story. Thus the men guffaw and slap each other on the back and tease Tara for "biting hook, line, and sinker." This episode is typical of Ridge humor. Folks have their special ways to escape the never-ending farm labor. Janice Holt Giles did not grow up in rural Adair County, but Henry, her husband, did. He told her many of the stories about Knifley, Giles Ridge, and Caldwell Ridge that enter into her Piney Ridge Trilogy. In fact, the story of Hod and Mary Pierce as it is written in The Enduring Hills parallels Henry's and then Janice's and Henry's lives. Janice, like Mary Pierce, visited the Ridge many times before she moved there. She slowly learned the established customs, the sayings, and the habits of the people. Eudora Welty, in her well-known essay "Place in Fiction," says that place is like a brimming frame. Point of view, according to Welty, is "a product of personal experience and time . . . and the imagination," causing the writer to see his or her picture and the world's picture superimposed in the frame of place.