Professor West Virginia you say tis called “Appalachian Fatalism.”   I prefer shared genetic script.  Outsiders’ words assault our ears, “Stoic.  Strange.  Fierce.  Here piggy, piggy.”   I curse, I will not be beholding to them.  They.  Revenue man.  Qualities or traits that make us who we are because of where we are.   More potent like moonshine, where our ancestors baptized.  Germany.  Ireland.  My own kin, that honor Scotland.

Fatalistic realism of who you think I am, sinks deep inside.  I can’t tell where it begins because it is misery of years, time not fully formed.  Your pain moves through me transparent.   It caresses.  It coaxes, calls out seductively like sweet wine to ardent hillbilly lips.  You stranger, curse, and spit us from your worldly maw.

“Come out, come out, let us dance to the beat of yesterday’s New Deal, Long A-Appalachia,” speaks your forked, foreign tongue.

Oh, but know this.  Yes, know well holler dweller.  Once set loose, their finery rages unmercifully until it exhausts the clan’s bright-eyed child within.  The babe who sings songs of misty, hollow nights and untarnished coon-skin cap ultimately withers to gray-haired rogue.   Naive one is vaguely certain this lullaby turned siren song pierces tender soul, leaving it tattered, derelict.  Mountain top tongue removal.  Our indigenous dialect lashed from our bosom.

Shrill cries violate, pulsate through shared roots, relics, heritage.  Them.  They.  Me.  I.  All bound tightly and woven through brittle, yellow eons of Fathers and Mothers, poverty of property and flesh.  Backcountry dwellers.

Our shared bones.  Our bones borne of misery.  Bones carry us forth and begat anew.

Heritage.  Poverty.  Fatalism.

Speak it, curse it.  Claim it I will, as our own.  For it is our distant, inherent forbearer that walks you, our “me” skeleton below Mason Dixon line.  Virginia.  West Virginia.  Eastern Tennessee.  Eastern Kentucky. Western North Carolina.  Northern South Carolina.  Georgia.  Alabama.

These mountains of earth we shall surname Short –A, Appalachia our abode.