Our Heritage

Walking the Trails—Telling the Tales

by Amy Ammons Garza




Over the years as I prepared to write my books, I visited my aunts and uncles, taking a tape recorder with me.  Explaining that I was writing a book to save our family stories and heritage, I'd get permission from all those in the room and turn the recorder on.   All my uncles and aunts were happy that I was doing this, for they knew the time would come when they would be gone and the stories would be lost.  In fact, many times they would tell me on tape to pause the recorder while we had some tea or a bite to eat.  They wanted me to save the tape for recording stories, not the clank of spoons. I have over twenty cassettes of these conversations...a treasure.  They are all gone now (except my aunt Lillie on my daddy’s side), but I have saved their beautiful voices.    
    I sat here just awhile ago and listened to the stories Uncle Bryson told me back in the ‘80’s.  On the tape, he told me of the tussle he had as youngster with his cousin Homer over a shotgun. “The gun went off and just about blew Homer’s finger off,” said Bryson. “When Old Doc Wilkes showed up...he was an Army doctor in the first war, you know...he took one look, cut the rest of Homer’s finger off and throwed it into the fire.  They stood there, starring into the fire...watching as Homer’s finger burnt up.  Homer had quairest look on his face!”
    Bryson talked about how he was out hunting one night, and come face to face with something big, black and scary.  ”I swallered hard, then I hauled off ‘n shot that booger’s head off!” he said.  Then he laughed and told of the dead coon he found at his feet.
    My mother’s sisters Lillie and Irene spent time with me one morning in November of 1982.  I have more than three completed cassettes of their stories.  One of the tales they told had to do with their mother, Ellie, and their brother, Teddy, a newborn baby.  
    “Neither one was faring well at all,” said Lillie. “Poppy prayed over and over again for the two of them. Then, one night when Poppy was going up across the field behind the house, he heard a lamb ball.  He followed the sound and found a lost lamb caught down on a ledge below the trail.  The lamb couldn’t get up, so Poppy took off his belt and climbed down, latched his belt around the lamb, climbed back up and hauled the lamb to safety.  Then suddenly, a bright light hit him, and he heard a voice telling him to ‘preach the word!’  The voice said,  ‘I’m going to take little Teddy, but I’ll spare Ellie.’“
    “After that,” said Irene, “Poppy poured over the Bible, night and day.”  
    When she paused, Lillie said,  “Poppy was ordained to preach in 1925.”
    Listening to the tapes this morning took me back to that time, sitting in the households of these precious people.  I can see their faces wreathed in smiles and hear the laughter as we were all transported back to another time and place when they were young, strong and making a life for themselves in the mountains.  Some times were good, some times were bad, but love, fellowship and family held everything together.
    The years of writing my stories now spans twenty-five years...twenty-five years of research, time spent visiting with my people on a one-on-one basis, caring about them, not wanting them to ever be forgotten...buried forever underneath the soil. When I’ve written the stories, I’ve tried to use the very words as I heard them on the tapes--listening to them over and over as I wrote--writing them with the Old English dialect that still is preserved in some households here in the mountains.  I was fascinated with the use of the words and their sound, so I tried to honor them by preserving the way they spoke.
    After Daddy took us out of the mountains when I was a teenager, I never quit dreaming of coming home.  When I began writing twenty-five years ago, I’d come down from the Chicago area where I lived numerous times a year, even just over weekends, driving close to 800 miles round trip just so I could “get filled up with North Carolina,” and to visit my people.
    Sixteen years ago, my dream of coming home came true, and I gave my life over to a nonprofit organization my sister and I founded, Catch the Spirit of Appalachia.  Without any funding, we’ve “poured our hearts” into working with children to encourage them to realize their wonderful mountain heritage, to realize their strength has come from their roots, those who have lived before them...all to raise their self-esteem in realizing who they are—the living descendent of a direct line of eight or nine generations of pioneers who did what they had to do to survive and provide a “home” for those who are here today.  Children should know this, they should hear it often and be proud of it.  I know, for as a child growing up in the mountains I experienced prejudice toward "children from off the mountain"  and it lowered my own self-esteem.  
    When I began to write down the stories told to me by my family, I suddenly realized what it took to live in those days, and how they rose to meet the challenges.  It changed my life!  I will always be grateful to my storytelling grandpa, to my dear uncles and aunts, and to my parents—all who gave me strength to know I could survive over obstacles, while encouraging me to retell their stories.
  
Since I intended "Sterlen," the third book in my historical fiction trilogy, to be my last and final book about our family heritage, I had been encouraged to record the lineage of our family. When my cousin Michael Owen sent me the background work he’d done on our family’s lineage, I asked his permission to add it to the end of my book.  Then, I called a member of each family represented in my extended family—the Owens, the Ammons, the Galloways, the Brysons, the Coggins. Each of them, after gathering current information from their brothers, sisters, and/or children, either told me over the phone, mailed or emailed to me what they wanted published in this lineage section of "Sterlen."  What I have listed in this lineage represents information for the reference of our family's future generations.

The book "Sterlen" represents to me the gentle-heart of the mountain man musician—the man who visits his neighbors, his kin, or complete strangers and sits on the porch to pick a few tunes, tell a story or two, and promise to help bring in the crop—providing a little happiness in a difficult world of "making do."