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Partial Transcript: I’m Jim Stokely. Wilma, and her husband, my dad, James R. Stokely Jr., had two sons. And I’m the younger son, James R. Stokely the III. And I grew up mainly in East Tennessee. Uh, and that was a function of Wilma marrying James R., who grew up in Newport, Tennessee, just across the state line from North Carolina. Uh, she married—they married in 1940, and that was a big deal; that was it changed Wilma’s life. And it was probably the best thing my dad ever did and gave him stability. And right after they were married, they—mother used to say they were the first hippies—they moved to a little isolated mountain range at Cocke County called the English Mountains. And they built a little stone cabin there or rather a stone cottage. And they didn’t have very many neighbors. But, they were actually raising apples. And they raised apples for a little over ten years throughout the ‘40s and early ‘50s. Uh, but that was—that was their early married life. Mother—we’re actually, uh, here in Buncombe County, at the head of Beaverdam Valley in Lynn Cove. I consider it one of the classy coves of the Southern Mountains, and it’s a perfect kind of little valley surrounded on three sides by mountains.
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Partial Transcript: Well, part of it is to run the Wilma Dykeman Legacy, which is a little non-profit that my wife and I started five years ago to carry on Wilma’s—not only her name, but her core values of environmental integrity, social justice, and the power of the written and spoken word. Uh, but I have other missions too. One is to—is to write good fiction. And I’ve tried to do that all my life—haven’t been able to. It’s tough. It’s difficult. And I found that poetry came a lot easier than fiction. Early on I published poetry, but I really wanted to write fiction, and particularly long fiction, novels. So I’m working on uh, kind of a short story cycle now, which is kind of the latest iteration. So that’s another mission.
0:03:38 And another mission as a parent is to—you know your children never, never outgrow you. So as a parent, you always have children no matter how old they are. So I want to make sure that they’re doing fine. We have a boy and a girl. And—or a man and a woman. And it’s just wonderful to have children that expand your universe and take you to new places. And so that’s another mission. And our son-in-law was speaking of new places—our daughter married a fellow who grew up in Argentina. Not of—not particularly prosperous means. So he has really expanded our life. He’s—he double majored in college in chemistry and art. And we have become interested in the sanctuary movement, and we’re taking Spanish. So that’s another whole world. So even though I’m retired from thirty years in human resource
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Partial Transcript: Wilma was born in 1920 uh, here, uh, one house down the creek at the head of Beaverdam Valley. And in the 1920s in Asheville and Buncombe County, that was a boom town. That was the good time for Asheville. Buildings were being built, people were making money. There was really a land boom. A lot of people were making money on real estate transactions. And in 1926, when she was six years old, they lived in a little cabin uh, uh, down the creek. Uh, a realtor just drove up, uh, to the house, and her father was sort of sitting on the porch—and the realtor said, “This is a nice place. What would you take for it?” And he couldn’t, number one, couldn’t believe the forwardness of that question and named some outlandish figure in his mind. And the realtor said, “Oh, okay.” He said, “I have some buyers who will probably take it.” So within a week, the place was sold. So he drew a line above that house, moved 100 yards up the creek and built this house.
0:06:19 And that’s where—this place is where Wilma came to environmental consciousness, I’d like to say. And she did that in two or three major ways. And she was an only child, so she spent a lot of time in the woods around here—it’s eleven acres—woods and in the creek and frog pond and uh, basically the plants and animals became her friend, uh, her friends. She did have other playmates when she began going to Grace Elementary School and Grace High School at the mouth of Beaverdam Valley. But uh—uh, she really had a personal connection to the woods and to the water. Her parents also introduced her to something called the water cycle. Nobody knew what it was then. But they would take her down to Beaverdam Creek and one parent would tell her all the ways that Beaverdam—where Beaverdam would—would—where the water there would run into Beaver Lake and the new sub-division of Beaver Lake and then on into the French Broad River. The French Broad will go into Tennessee and become the Tennessee River, which in turn will become the Mississippi River, and it would feed into the Gulf of Mexico.
0:07:35 And then the other parent would come in and say, “Yes, but Wilma it doesn’t end there because some of that water’s going to be evaporated and drift over and from clouds that come over the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Blue Ridge Mountains and Craven Gap up here. We need to come back here in two, three weeks, and we may see that same water that we’re looking at now come right back.” So through that kind of object lesson she uh, she sort of absorbed what would have been I think one of the main uh, teachings that she tried to carry throughout her life; which is that everything is connected. Everything is interconnected. Doesn’t really matter what it is. It’s all of a piece, and it’s up to the individual to discover those interconnections, and, in her case, pronounce them, and define them, and communicate them. She was all about communication; both spoken communication and written—the written word.
0:08:46 Uh, the other way that she came to environmental consciousness here was through walks in the woods with her dad. And her dad subscribed—he had come originally from a dairy farm in upstate New York. And he subscribed to a New York newspaper. And in that New York newspaper was a column where—where the fellow would personalize—he would have animals that personalize his column, including Peter Rabbit and a character called Reddy Fox. And Reddy Fox was always trying to catch Peter Rabbit. Always had some new, fangled contraption to catch Peter Rabbit, but just couldn’t quite do it. So you’d have to wait to the next column. Mother loved these things. So on their walls with her father, they would use these characters. Wonder what Reddy—wonder where Reddy Fox is. Wonder if Reddy Fox made these prints in the snow. Wonder where Peter Rabbit is. Now Peter Rabbit was not—was the concoction of Beatrix Potter, but as good writers do, they steal from each other. So, that was another way the woods came alive for her.
0:10:04 And then she also had a personal connection with the woods in a negative way. Uh, she—when she began to talk about the bad things that people can do to the environment she knew what she was talking about because her own grandfather, William Alfred Cole, was a timber-man. And he had timbered Big Ivy over at Madison County. His brother was the high sheriff of Madison County in the late 1800s. And after he had timbered some in Big Ivy he moved to Reems Creek and timbered Reems Creek. That’s where my grandmother grew up. And then around the turn of the century, around 1900 or thereabouts, he moved to Beaverdam. And just across the creek he built a wood frame house, probably with some of the timber he timbered himself. And that’s where my grandparents were married. And sort of in a traditional Appalachian way, he divided up his land among his children. That’s why Appalachia is kind of poor. We don’t operate on the Downton Abbey model. What one person is going to inherit the net of the estate, we divide up the estates, and then they become small and not sustainable. But that’s another matter.
0:11:30 But when my grandparents married, my great-grandfather, William Alfred Cole, the timber man, cut off a strip of land on the side of the creek for my grandparents. And he did the same for his other children. So this entire middle part of the Cove is a bunch of chasms. My second cousin lives up there, Carol Cole Carrier (??). My great uncle, who is my favorite relative, lived up the road, O.K. (??) Cole. He was a well-known stone mason in the area. And my great aunt,
Maude (??) lived 200 yards down the road, who shows up as an interesting character in Mother’s autobiography, The Family of Earth. So, sort of this is a kind of a classic Appalachian extended family cove, and uh, mother grew up in that atmosphere. And she talked and listened to stories that these folks carried with them and communicated within the family. And they showed up in some of her later fiction. So—
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Partial Transcript: Well, Wilma’s parents were two interesting people. Her father grew up in upstate New York. He was born before the Civil War. So think about that. Wilma’s father was born before the Civil War. So the stories that he could tell and the experience that he could bring took her back into the early part of the nineteenth century. So I really see her as—she had one foot in what I would call a old school—not just old school, but almost ancient school from an American standpoint before the Civil War. And at age seventeen—as a lot of teenagers will do—he wanted to travel. He read a book called The Great South by Edward King, and there were some engravings in there about, uh, of the French Broad Valley near Asheville. So that kind of piqued his interest and he came down to herd sheep on Elk Mountain over there and had a wonderful summer. And he always remembered that summer. He went back to New York and lived his life. He married. He had two children. But then later in life his uh, after his children were grown, his wife died of tuberculosis. So, I mean you can imagine what that did to him, what was going through his mind. And he said, “I just need a change.” He remembered what he had done at age seventeen. And he came back down here. And he met my grandmother at age twenty, Bonnie Cole, and they were married. And he was more than thirty years older than she was—more than a generation older.
0:16:13 So that was mother’s parents. An older fellow from upstate New York—what we would call today a transplant—coming into the Southern Mountains, and a younger woman who uh, was really the descendant of some of the original pioneers of the area. So she had in her parents literally married both the transplant experience and the sort of indigenous white experience. So that was interesting in and of itself. And then that gave her, just through osmosis, a sense of, uh—a sense of crossing barriers, that age doesn’t matter that much. You know, you can have a difference of thirty to thirty-five years in your marriage partner, but if they’re well suited to each other, you can transcend that. You can have a huge difference in geography and culture. But if the love is there, if the emotion is there, if the communication’s there, it doesn’t matter. So she—I think she absorbed the ability to transcend barriers. So that was one great influence. Another great influence, I think, was the mountains themselves. This cove, this Lynn Cove, it’s tremendously protective in one way. And you can get that sense of protection just by walking the cove. The sun doesn’t even come up until about mid-morning because you got Elk Mountain over here on the north, you got Iron Ore Ridge on the south, you’ve got Rice Knob, and the Blue Ridge on the East. And the only way in and out’s the west. And it can be seen as a protective set of mountains. And I think mother kind of felt that.
0:18:10 Now other people take a different view of the mountains and say, “I want to conquer the mountains. I want to live up on top of them. I want to live on the ridge. I want to have a view away from the mountains.” But mother was—mother was, I think, took more of the classic mountaineer approach, which was, “Hey. I’m part of these. I’m part of these mountains. There’s no antagonistic relationship. There’s a supportive relationship. And they protect me. And I’m willing to live within them and be a part of them.”
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Partial Transcript: Well, mother throughout the 1940s—as I mentioned earlier my parents were raising apples. Basically my dad was working himself to death raising maybe 10,000 bushels of apples a year but was having fun doing it. During that time, my mother, who had trained as an actress—but once she married my dad, she found herself 1,000 miles from Broadway. So what do I do? Well, she turned to what she could do, which was—was write. So, throughout the 1940s, she practiced. She wrote short stories, published a few. She wrote some poetry. She tried her hand at—at a novel—never published. She wrote a memoir of the first fourteen years of her life called Family of Earth. We found it in her papers after she died, and the University of North Carolina published it. And it’s a wonderful introduction to her work. But, uh, it was only published after she died. No one in New York would publish the memoir of a twenty-four year old from the Southern Mountains who had never published anything. So, the early 1950s rolled by, and she’s still not really—she’s not made the big time in any way. She just published a few short stories.
0:20:30 Well, uh, mother and daddy, as early as their honeymoon, in 1940, had taken books that were part of something called The Rivers of America Series. This was an immensely successful series of books published by Rinehart in New York on the history and culture of the river basins of America. Everything from the Columbia, to the Susquehanna, to the Hudson, to the Rio Grande. You name it. And it turned out to be a cash cow for them. I mean, it was just unbelievable. And as the series got going and kept going, you picked up people who were serious buyers. They wanted to buy the whole series and read the whole series. And they were really, really, some wonderful writers and made the history and culture of the rivers come alive. So, it was a very successful popular series of books in the 1950s—in 40s and 50s. And mother and daddy were well aware. And then one day my dad said, “You know, we ought—you ought to write a book about the French Broad Watershed. As you know, I grew up in the East Tennessee, in the lower part of the watershed, before the French Broad hooks with the Houston to become the Tennessee River. And you grew up in the North Carolina part, the upper French Broad Watershed. And we ought to pool our knowledge and do some more research and write this book.”
0:21:59 So off they went. They hopped into their car and drove up and down just about every dirt road in the watershed interviewing people. And the book kind of grew from there. So they started researching and writing—one of my dad’s distant cousins, a fellow named Edmund Cody Burnett, who turned out to be a great historian of the constitutional convention, he was also interested in the early hog drives of the area—the drives that went up the French Broad Gorge, cutting through the Appalachian Mountains. And mother talked to him and became interested as well in the hog droves and submitted a chapter on that early regional industry to Reinhart. And they were excited. And they said, “However, we don’t even know what the French Broad is. Is it a river? We think it’s a loose woman of foreign birth.” And it turned out that a woman—a secretary up there had visited Thomas Wolfe’s house in Asheville and knew of the French Broad River. So they wrote her back and said, “This looks interesting. If what you submit is as good, we will publish it even though about a river no bigger than a man’s hand.” And obviously the French Broad was bigger than that.
0:23:40 So it looked like something was going until she submitted for the first time in the forty-nine book series a chapter on population. If you can believe it, this unbelievable series of books about rivers, including let’s say the Hudson, really had not grappled in any significant way with pollution in this rivers—with unclean waters. Even the Hudson. You had GE, General Electric Dumping Docks, and for years, you know, into the Hudson River. You would have thought reading the book about the river, that the Dutch had just discovered it, you know, as well as the Native Americans. So they couldn’t believe that she had devoted this kind of time and energy to pollution of the river. And if you put yourself in the shoes of the editor, the editor’s got a cash cow here and the deal is you tweak these rivers, you romanticize these rivers. You know, “We have wonderful, clean water from coast to coast”, which was false. And mother knew it was false. And any good editor with his or her eye on the bottom line would say—would take a red line to that entire chapter. And that’s what they tried to do. They said, “We don’t want this chapter. In fact, if you make this chapter vanish, we will publish this book. You will become part of the big time.” So mother had a decision to make and her decision was, “No, I can wait. I can wait. I’ll become part of the big time some point. But I’m going to tell the truth.”
0:25:27 And one reason she felt that way even as a young—as a young aspiring writer was, she had interviewed, uh, Rueben Robertson, who was like Mr. Western North Carolina. He was the president of Champion Paper and Fibre. The biggest tributary of the French Broad, the Pigeon River, ran through his plant in Canton, North Carolina. So she went out—she was just a junior—like a cub freelance journalist—interviewing this powerful man, shown into his office, big desk, very intimidating situation, and she interviewed him. And he said two things that she would never forget. One thing he said was, “We will clean this river up when we have to.” And the other thing, which I didn’t know until very late in mother’s life—I was driving her around some old haunts. And just spontaneously she said, “You know, when I was interviewing Reuben Robertson, uh, we finished the interview and we were getting ready to go. And I was getting ready to leave. And he said, ’One more thing Ms. Dykeman. One more thing.’” And she said, “What’s that?” And he said, “When you write about us, be kind. Be kind.” And she said, “For some reason that flew all over me. This most powerful person in the region is asking me, this little reporter, to be kind. Now what’s the justice in that? When I know what he and his business are doing to the Pigeon River.” So that just made her more determined, and she then took this ultimatum from the big New York publisher as just a speed bump. So by that time she was—she was kind of unstoppable.
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Partial Transcript: The publisher ultimately gave in and published the book with the pollution chapter. Publisher said. “We don’t think anybody’s going to read this pollution chapter. It’s going to decrease readership. Well, in fact it increased readership. It elicited the most attention of any part of any Rivers of America book from coast to coast. And it really—it really kind of—it began to take uh, the thinking about clean water beyond the old Progressive Era. Now the old Progressive Era—people associate the Progressive Era with the first decade or two of the twentieth century with Teddy Roosevelt. Everybody remembers Teddy Roosevelt, John Murr on Yosemite Valley, and Roosevelt’s commitment to national parks. But there's a darker side to the Progressive Era. And that darker side is during that era the mining of the west opened up. There was a real dichotomy. On the one hand, yes, we want to save a few of these abnormalities of these kind of waterfalls and beautiful valleys. But really, what’s going on with the environment and what’s critical to progress is that we dam Hetch Hetchy; is that we take all the technology that humanity has invented and really bring it to bear and harness our natural resources and mine things and dam things. And on the one hand, yes, we do need to save some greenery. But really, what’s going to make America is this gray infrastructure that we’ve got. So there was a big dichotomy that on the one hand if you go too hot, too heavy on preservation you’re really going to damage the fundamental engine of America. So you can’t do that. 0:29:36 Well, Mother turned that on his head. She said, “That’s ridiculous. That’s just either or species.” What’s really happening is that if you have a culture, not just lip service, but a culture and a behavior of commitment to environmentalism and conservation and let’s take clean water as an example—if you have that culture and all the behaviors that go with that, you’re going to attract business. You’re going to attract the executives who are wondering where to put a manufacturing plant. And you’re going to attract the employees who work at that plant—who want to live and work in a clean setting. And the problem with—mother’s only problem was that her timing was a little bit off. She wasn’t a day early in that argument. She wasn’t a week early. She was about fifty years early. So fifty years later you get, for example, the brewing industry in Asheville, which is coming right to the base of the French Broad, for exactly that reason. But nobody knew it then. But she sensed that. Because she knew that everything is connected based on what she had felt and learned and osmosed growing up here I thought.
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Partial Transcript: Okay. So the French Broad is takes up the grand sweep of the history and culture of the French Broad watershed with emphasis on the Pigeon River, its main tributary, as well as the main river; Both West and North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee. So it starts with the Cherokee and their wonderful, holistic sense of the river: plants, animals, humanity, and moves on to the early Caucasian influx, the early mountaineers, pioneers, how they tried to basically settle areas so that they could live there, and then how that turned into more industrious enterprises for good and for bad; and then as well the pollution of the river. So mother did not want to neglect a truth that was going on, which was that the French Broad River, as many rivers around the country were being, were neglected and maligned and used as trash damp sand, I think, used as moveable trash dumps. So you take your trash down to the river and hopefully a big rain’s going to come and it’s not going to be there tomorrow. It’s going to be somebody else’s problem. So—
It was terrible. The French Broad at the time mother was writing the book was—was not only neglected. It was really maligned and used as a dumping ground. Champion Paper and Fibre was on its biggest tributary, the Pigeon River, and dumping docks and other chemicals into the river. On the upper end of the plant in Canton, North Carolina, when it came in, it was virtually pristine water. When it came out of the plant—I can remember—it looked like it was black. It was smelly. And it had lemon meringue topping. And I grew up in Newport, Tennessee, across the state line further down the Pigeon. And I had to cross that river twice a day going to elementary school and from elementary school. And you could hardly cross the river. You’d have to hold your nose crossing the river. So you can imagine what that would do to the economic and recreational potential of a town like Newport, Tennessee. I mean we’d just kill it. So what was good at the time and economically for Western Carolina was disaster for East Tennessee. And—
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Partial Transcript: Asheville was using the river as a city dump, literally. Beaverdam Valley—Mother grew up at the head of Beaverdam Valley—the bottom of Beaverdam Valley was a landfill. And that was—she put in the book—she referred to the book—to the pollution from that landfill driving one of the great track farmers—one of the great vegetable—I’m not saying it correctly. Beaverdam Creek was special to Wilma. She grew up at the head of Beaverdam Creek. So if you follow Beaverdam Creek down to its mouth where it flows into the French Broad, you’re following it down to the current metropolitan sewage district plant. Around that lower part of Beaverdam Creek was a county land fill. So basically, they had written off Wilma’s native creek. And she didn’t like that. And in the book—in the French Broad—she referred to, for example, the biggest farmer along the lower end of the creek who really pioneered and used the greenhouses and year-round farming and organic farming being run out. He had to close down his operation because of the pollution from that land fill. And that was taking place throughout the watershed. On the Tennessee side, you would have communities—you’d have open sewers draining into the river. It was a terrible and non-sustainable situation. So she felt that she had to, number one, make people aware of what was going on. But beyond that, she had to call for something. And what she called for was the law. Uh, and the law became the Clean Water Act in 1974—1972—early 1970s.
0:37:04 But in “Who Killed the French Broad,” she—it would have been easy for her to take the easy way out and to say, “Folks, we’re okay. But there’re some bad actors around. And the worst actor of all was Champion Fibre and Paper. And if we can just make them do right, and become like us, we’ll be fine.” But she knew that was not true because none of us was doing right. And so she called us all out because of our apathy and our ignorance. So she felt that her first job was to educate people—to make people aware of what was going on. And then secondly, to put people on notice that you cannot continue to ignore and be apathetic about this situation. And you got to call for legislation because that’s what it’s going to take here to get us off a dime and to move us forward.
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Partial Transcript: “There is only one respectable course for a free citizen. And that is to shoulder his share of the responsibility for the killing and the pollution. Because just as just as the river belongs to no one, it belongs to everyone. Everyone is held accountable for its health and condition.”
So again, she could have called out what we call single-point polluters. But she did not. She told us that all of us should be held accountable for our portion of the pollution. And she did call for a law saying that this killing of the French Broad River must cease. And she called that chapter, “Who Killed the French Broad”. She probably called it for a humorous reason, again, to try to allay the concern to the publisher and she said I’m going to make a murder mystery out of this. “Who Killed the French Broad.” Kind of the double entendre and sort of when at least when people approach this chapter they won’t have their hair standing on edge saying, “This is going to be a terrible chapter on pollution. It’s going to be—maybe she’ll treat it kind of in a humorous vein.” She did not. There were two pioneering aspects in my mind of that book. And the main one was on the pollution side. She turned the old progressive thinking of environment either the environment or industry on its head and said, “These two should go together into a virtuous circle. It’s not either or; it’s both and.” So that was the first great—the first great pioneering efforts she made. And I think it really was a watermark in intellectual progress of the nation on environmental thinking.
0:40:34 The second pioneering thing she did was to privilege oral history. She was becoming a historian to talk about the history of the French Broad River. But in those days to be a historian, you had to handle documents that were, you know, parchment and were in danger of breaking apart in your hand. That’s what historian did. If it wasn’t written down, it wasn’t history. Well, what my parents did in researching the French Broad was talk with the old-timers. Get this connection to the old school, to the descendants of the—actually the very first folks to move into the area in the early 1800s. And they had a chapter called “The Chattering Children”—the old Cherokee term for the tributaries of the French Broad—“The Chattering Children”. And that was entire oral history. And throughout the book oral history would pop up with quotes that they would take from sometimes illiterate folks, farmers, others. So these were not all scholars contributing to knowledge within the French Broad. It was all the people of the watershed. So I think that was a pioneering aspect.
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Partial Transcript: Well, the, uh, again you have this recurring argument—speeches argument—from quote “pro business factions” saying, “Look, if we have to pay too much—“ (clears throat)—so you had the speeches argument from pro business factions. If we have to pay too much attention to the environment, we’re going to lose our bottom line. We’re going to go out of business. Or we’re going to have to cut back tremendously. Well, that was a real pioneering argument that Wilma made in “Who Killed the French Broad,” the chapter on pollution in her book. Because I think she was the first writer to get a full-fledged cost benefit analysis of environment versus profit, let’s say, and to come out on the side of clean water. So she took into account some jobs that might be lost by conservation efforts, by anti-pollution technology. But she also took into account the development opportunities that would be gained through a culture of clean water and conservation. Again, she felt—she was coming from a place that everything is connected. So you can’t just isolate clean water itself and a paper plant, let’s say, on the other hand. You have to take into account the community and what the community’s like. What the community’s values are. And if the community can attain a level of conservation mindedness at the same time that it retains a needed level of economic mindedness, then people are going to sense that genuine balance. And that’s going to be attractive to executives who are sighting, uh, manufacturing facilities, business facilities—and it’s also going to be attractive to their families. So she used that as one of her arguments.
0:45:25 Another argument was, you’ve got a tremendous number of users of the water and the recreation in and of themselves: tourists, hunters, fishermen. And then her last argument was—and this is something that we’re just coming to as a nation—drinking water. There were some—in 1955—there were some municipalities that were drawing their water from the French Broad, even though they were having to clean it up before people could drink it. But now, it’s becoming evident that rivers like the French Broad are going to become primary drinking sources of many more municipalities. So as a direct resource for the sustenance of people living along the river, the benefits of a clean river are going to vastly outweigh having to put another piece of technology on another filter or, from an air standpoint, a smoke stack. So she used those three arguments: tourism, hunting, fishing, recreators, number one. Number two, business executives who’ll be attracted to an area of conservation mindedness and free drinking water itself for people, and all we have to do is look at what’s happened in the far west, and now the Midwest with the depletion of the Midwest aquifers. It’s coming our way folks, and with global warming, climate change it just ends with the depletion of Eastern aquifers this situation of drinking water is going to do nothing but intensify. And mother called it—she called it out in 1955.
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Partial Transcript: So the book came out in 1955. It was a tremendous success, [clears throat] particularly regionally as well as nationally. It became one of the best sellers of Rinehart’s Rivers of America series. It was honored decades later as one of the best of the series. I think they were over fifty books in that series. It won the first Thomas Wolfe book award given by the Western North Carolina Historical Association that inaugurated that award. It’s been—it’s sort of been used as a great introduction to the area from people moving in. I know Dam Pierce, the former chair of the history department the University of North Carolina, at Asheville, said that if you live in west of North Carolina and you have not read the French Broad, they should take your driver’s license away. So I think it has already stood the test of time as a timeless piece of history in application of [clears throat] application of a river and a place.
I will say that. Uh, I was leading up to something that kind of—oh yeah. It’s already—The French Broad has already I think stood the test of time as a timeless evocation of a place and a culture and a region. And I think that book, as much as any, has established mother’s place in environmental thinking as well as regional respect. So what that did for her career was to shoot it up. I mean she came into the big time. Problem was two years later they took up the race issue—race relations and came out with a book in 1957 called Neither Black Nor White where they—in a sense they did the same thing for the South that they did for the French Broad watershed. They got in their car and they interviewed people high and low in all walks of life, black and white from Charlestown to Houston about the race situation. So as high as Mother’s reputation was in 1955 and 1956, it plummeted in 1957 and 1958 when Neither Black Nor White came out because if you were living in the south at that time integration wasn’t cool. Barbara Mandrell, the great country singer, came out with a song back in the ‘70s called, “I was country when country wasn’t cool”. Well, mother was for integration when integration wasn’t cool. And the reaction of the folks in Chapel Hill and, you know, across most of the state of North Carolina was pretty negative. So that hurt their career. But, I think my favorite quote of all her writings appears in Neither Black Nor White at the beginning of the book, when she’s trying to explain why are we writing this book. And you talked about pioneering. I think it’s probably the first quote that anyone can find linking the environment to marginalized people. Now it’s all the rage. Now people have seen the connection of environmental degradation and discrimination—human discrimination.
0:52:15 But that—the quote goes something like this. “As we have misused our richest lands, we have misused ourselves. As we have wasted our bountiful water, we have wasted ourselves. As we have diminished one whole segment of our people, we have diminished ourselves.” So obviously she’s talking about African Americans and also she’s talking about water—the treatment of water and the treatment of land. I can’t think of a closer connection to marginalized humans and marginalized environment. So, again, everything is interconnected. And I think that was mother’s great, great message.
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Partial Transcript: So we talked about, uh, Wilma’s great learning from her parents, that everything is connected—everything is interconnected. So my favorite quote in all of Wilma’s writing comes from her book, Neither Black Nor White—came out in 1957 and was about how the South felt about race relations. And we talk about Wilma’s pioneering in this and that. And I think my favorite quote from her writings has to do with probably her greatest pioneering effort. The thing she was most advanced about. And that had to do with this intersection between environmental degradation and discrimination against people.
Nowadays it’s all the rage. People love to talk about that. The pope’s great encyclical that came out a couple of years ago talked about the intersection of bad things in the environment bringing bad things to poor people. Well, this quote from Neither Black Nor White published in 1957 goes like this. “As we have misused our richest lands we have misused ourselves. As we have wasted our bountiful water, we have wasted ourselves. As we have diminished one whole segment of our people, we have diminished ourselves—” And of course, the one whole segment of our people she is referring to are African Americans at the time the beginning of the great civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties. But that was, again, that was sixty years ago. So Wilma continued her problems with timing. She wasn’t a day early. She wasn’t a week early. She was a generation or more early. And I believe she should be internationally known, uh, but that’s the way it goes.
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Partial Transcript: So a fellow named Thompson came into the area during the great logging boom of the Southern Mountains in the early—the very end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century. So Champion Paper was already a large company, but it was expanding to the Southern Mountains. A fellow named Thompson came in. His son-in-law, Reuben Robertson, picked up the mantle and Champion turned out to be one of the great loggers of the area, most of the Great Smoky Mountains, many, many timber stands in the outline counties. But they ran the entire tributary of the French Broad River, the Pigeon River, through their plant, and turned it from a pristine river to a black, chemical-ridden, smelly, river, with lemon marine topping. The problem was that Canton, North Carolina and Haywood County, the economy was basically based upon Champion Paper. So when Mother wrote “Who Killed the French Broad”, Champion was one of the assassins, as well as the rest of us. But it took from 1955 to 1990 and beyond—so thirty-five years, a full generation—for people of East Tennessee, who had to deal with this pollution that Champion caused to bring a class action suit against the company.
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Partial Transcript: So in "The Tall Woman" mother, for example, the environment is incredibly important in that book. Lydia McQueen, the heroine, gets her family through one year—while her husband is away—through woodcraft, through Ginseng, and the other medicinal plants of the woods. She actually dies by drinking polluted water from timbered fields that the sort of the villain of the novel, has contributed to the community. She gets typhoid from this diluted water—infected water. So the environment is important there from a fictional standpoint. Then later in her later history—history of Tennessee—she was the state historian of Tennessee. She wrote the bicentennial history, the environment as figures large in that book. And she wrote a couple of coffee table books. I think Wilma’s great legacy is multifold. I think it has to do, on the one hand, with interconnectedness; with the fact that we need each other. She was all about communication. She was all the time trying to connect with people both in written form and in conversation and in lecture and in talks. Uh, and through that she was saying, we are not going to prevail unless we do it together. Her other legacy was an environmental legacy. And I really do think she progressed the way we think about humans and the environment by saying, “Look, let’s get away from this false dichotomy between business and conservation and let’s get on board with the fact that we can form a virtuous circle.” That if we have a community or a region or a nation that is committed to conservation and sustainability. For example, a community with a culture of clean water; we’re going to be able to attract business and the right kind of business and create the right kind of values to give us both money and trees.
01:08:42 Uh, so I think the instant that I knew that mother was more than a tree hugger, was committed in her bones to the environment came in the early 1970s with the first era oil embargo. Now what happened was that economically our family was dependent both on Wilma’s writings and on the sale of land from time to time. My father deviled in real estate and developed land. Well, with the oil embargo, land sales dropped. No demand for second home lot. At that time, the writing was in a bit of a low as well. So we were hurting economically. We needed some money. We happened to own 200 acres of forest with some mature trees on them in the East Tennessee. So one day we decided to walk that land with an eye to possibly selling the timber—possibly timbering it. So we walked the land, took about an hour, we came back to our car with long faces, and in my own mind I was saying, “Yeah, I guess we’re going to have to do it.” And my mother said, “Listen. I have a chance to write a contract book, a biography, for $20,000. Now, I don’t want to do it. It’s going to take two years. I really want to write a novel. But we are not cutting these trees. And I’m going to write that book.” So, yeah.
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Partial Transcript: Yeah. Canton itself was not immune to the stench, but the great phrase was, “smells like money to me.” And it was money. It was part of the economy. And local politicians could not disregard that. One of my parents’ great friends was Jamie Clerk, who became congressman from Western North Carolina, but even he was supportive of the plant. So the plant was making all the usual arguments about how much it was going to cost to do this, the risk that it would put them at. The problem was that they were dumping dioxins into—as well as other chemicals—into the Pigeon River. And that was not just killing the fish. It was killing people. So this class action suit brought by a family named Schultz as one of a class of Cocke County citizens relied greatly on the statistics of more deaths, more illness in the Pigeon River watershed across the state line into Tennessee.
01:00:12 So in 1992, the suit went to trial in Greenville, Tennessee, and the first witness for the prosecution was Wilma Dykeman. And Wilma ran through the history of the French Broad, its degradation. She recalled her interview with Reuben Robertson, at the time the president of Champion, who said, “We will clean it up when we have to.” The implication being somebody’s going to have to Champion clean up this river after thirty five years or more. The lead defense lawyer, a fellow named Wolfe, who was a lawyer for—actually the defending team of lawyers were from Howard Baker’s Law Firm in East Tennessee—held up a glass of water in the court room to mother. And the water was somewhat murky, but, sort of on the whole, clean. He said, “We’ve taken this glass of water from the Pigeon River. Look at this water. This is good water.” And Wilma said, “Would you drink it?” And he said, “Sure.” So the next day a group of eighth graders from Cocke County confronted him outside the courtroom with the same glass and said, “Please drink it.” And he sort of made a natural defensive reaction and a newspaperman caught that shot, and it made the papers and was sort of the dramatic moment of the trial.
01:02:01 Well, before the trial was concluded, Champion settled. They did admit that they had dumped the dioxins. Of course a lot of their argument was to try to discount the relationship between dioxin and cancer and deaths. But they ended up settling multimillion dollars with the people who were land owners on either side of the river. It was a long struggle. That was not complete victory. It just requires eternal vigilance from environmental monitors as well as champions of the watershed. The natural human tendency toward destructiveness is not going to go away anytime soon and new people have to take up the banner and take up the charge. But I always thought that was kind of a nice bookend to what Mother started in 1955, you know, thirty-seven years later at the trial in East Tennessee. Sort of bringing it home and causing Champion to do some things that they didn’t want to do. Yeah. Oh yes.
01:03:23 Starting in the early sixties, Mother, just like anybody else, had the capability of just getting mad—getting angry over something. And the continuing Appalachian stereotypes angered her. [clears throat] The continuing Appalachian stereotypes angered her because she was one of them and she knew that this region had all sorts of people, just like every other region, and that it was representative of America as any other place. So she decided to write a novel that would be a positive novel about mountaineers—and would have a main character who was very positive. And the more she thought about it, she thought, “Well, that main character should be a woman.” So she wrote a book called The Tall Woman, set in the Civil War times. And that became a best seller. I can remember seeing her on the “Today” show in 1962. And then she wrote a sequel called The Far Family. It came out in 1965. And the main characters there were really modeled upon her and aunts and uncles. So the oral history that she had known up with the stories all found their way into that book. So those two books, The Tall Woman and The Far Family, she really tried to counter the Appalachian stereotypes. And The Far Family is one of Robert Morgan’s favorite books, for example. And one of the reasons is that—the idea—is that the family has wandered far. They’ve wandered away from Appalachia. One is a senator, another in various walks of life from New Jersey to the West. So in that book, she was trying to say that Appalachia is not just this isolated, lost America. It’s as interdependent as any other region with the rest of the country.
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Partial Transcript: I think the river heroes—and there are river heroes. Thank goodness. We will need them forever—the river heroes of today can take from Wilma her great skills and talents and innate abilities and competencies and attitudes and orientations of tolerance—you’ve got to be tolerant with people—diligence, hard work—if you had Wilma here and the Eveready bunny here, the Eveready Bunny would fall over—so energy, optimism—we can do this. And you always take what can be done, not what can’t be done. So tolerance, optimism, diligence, and yes, you do have to know some things, but the mental peace is not as important as the commitment in your bones to what you know is right. So I think that—those kind of foundational values are Wilma’s real legacy.
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Partial Transcript: That’s right. Wilma was a consummate teacher. And the way you become a consummate teacher is not to come across as a teacher. You’re not going to change anybody by lecturing at them. So Wilma had a way of just immediately knowing where people were coming from and trying to understand that; giving that some respect. Where are they coming from? They’re not coming from the place you’re coming from. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. That means something has taken place in their past life and you need to understand that so that you can work with that and you can get to a better place.