King Coal, King Jesus, and Moonshine: Faith and life in Appalachian fiction

Theology Today, Jul 1999 by Smylie, James

Eggleston tells us many things about the Appalachian frontier religion, and especially how the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians lost out to Methodists and similar denominations in the religious marketplace. Eggleston's picture of the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians, who brought order, education, and medicine, is not always complimentary. He describes Methodists as enthusiastic, dedicated, and ready to sacrifice all, even life itself, as in the case of Kike, to meet the spiritual needs of the community and to organize religious societies that apparently met those needs. To be sure, over the years Methodism lost out to a bewildering variety of Baptists and a number of other communions. But Eggleston celebrates the religious pioneers, memorialized in a more vivid way in this novel than they were remembered in the minutes of the Methodist Conferences. He concludes that these pioneers are named in God's book of remembrance.

THE PROPHET OF THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS

Eggleston writes about early Appalachia and the triumph of Methodism. Charles Egbert Craddock, the pen name for Mary Murfree (1850-1922), tells us of the development of another side of Appalachian religious life in her powerful novel, The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885). Murfree's family moved from North Carolina, where she was born, to Nashville, Tennessee, where her father became a well-to-do planter and lawyer. The family vacationed in the Cumberland Mountains where Murfree gathered the insights for her numerous writings. She gives us an authentic picture of faith and life in Appalachia. She describes a somber life in the mountains, isolated, primitive, austere, more so than in southern Ohio.

Murfree does not give us the exact time of her gothic story. People still hang images of George Washington in their shacks, and remember Andrew Jackson, for whom one person continued to vote years after the legendary general's death. The author measures mountain time by the moods of the seasons. The setting is in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, which she describes with great skill and with a sense of beauty and foreboding. She pictures "illusory mists" and isolated human beings who have no business living in such a place. And she portrays mountain folk who do live there, speaking their own dialect, with their own customs, in what seems to be a self-contained existence. The story opens as young Rick Tyler comes out of his mountain hideout to see Dorinda Cayse. He is in hiding from the law because of a crime he did not commit. He confronts the lovely Dorinda while she is plowing in the rocky fields. They are obviously drawn to one another, and Rick would like to marry Dorinda. She is the daughter of Cayse, a leading community figure and moonshiner. Hiram Kelsey is the parson and the prophet of the mountains, an intelligent but uneducated person who has been led into the ministry because of his remorse. He has accidentally poisoned his wife and baby. Hiram is not a systematic theologian. He does know that the "paramount emotion" of his life is Christ, the One who stilled the storm, healed the sick, wept for his friends, raised the dead, and did not kill anybody. Hiram speaks with the authority of a prophet when he comes out of the mists of the mountains into the community. Like Rick, Hiram is drawn to Dorinda romantically. She is drawn to him as a spiritual leader.