I’ve been accused of being pessimistic before.
I reckon that’s probably fair.
Mamaw used to say our family was cursed. She didn’t say it jokingly, either. It wasn’t the kind of thing you toss out after getting a flat tire or having a picnic rained out. She said it the way you’d talk about tomorrow’s weather, like it was something already decided before any of us ever got here.
My Aunt Sandy still believes it.
And if I’m being honest, so do I.
For a long time, I figured it was just one of those family quirks, some little strain of doom that had been handed down right alongside Mamaw’s biscuit recipe. Then I learned there was actually a word for it.
Fatalism.
Folks who study Appalachia have used that word to describe the belief that hardship, poverty, sickness and bad luck aren’t necessarily things that happen to you so much as things that were always going to happen. What will be, will be. It’s God’s will. We take what the Lord sends us and keep moving.
I didn’t need a scholar to teach me that.
I grew up hearing it.
My family’s version of it starts in the Great Smoky Mountains, back when those mountains were simply home and not a national park. When the government came through to create the park, my people were pushed off the only land they had ever known. They were told, among other things, that the park would always be free to enter.
Today, you pay to park your car.
That may sound like a small thing to somebody who doesn’t have any connection to those mountains.
It isn’t a small thing to us.
Then came Fontana.
When the dam went in and the valley flooded, my ancestors didn’t even get to stay put in death. Their graves were dug up and the remains were moved to Lauada Cemetery. My Mamaw Cochran received an actual letter telling her how much of her oldest child’s body they had managed to recover from Woody Cemetery over on the North Shore.
Some of our relatives were left behind altogether.
The family was told not to worry too much about that, though. The government was going to build a road that would take us back home, a road that would let people reach the graves that had been left on the wrong side of the water.
That road is called the Road to Nowhere.
It was never finished.
It never will be.
So some of my people are still up there, buried in a cemetery you can only reach by boat, with wild hogs rooting around in the ground because you aren’t allowed to fence off a burial site inside a national park.
Tell me how a family is supposed to walk away from generations of that without developing a little fatalism.
Now, I’ll give the scholars their due. They don’t all agree on what Appalachian fatalism actually means.
Thomas Ford wrote about Appalachian values in the middle of the twentieth century and identified fatalism as one of the region’s defining threads, alongside self-reliance and traditional religion. Jack Weller later wrote about a mountain culture that seemed more concerned with enduring than with getting ahead.
Both men were criticized, and rightly so in some respects, for painting an entire region with too broad a brush. Appalachians are people, not a sociological specimen, and you can’t reduce millions of lives to a handful of characteristics.
But there was another argument that has always made more sense to me.
John Gaventa argued that what looks like quiet acceptance from the outside isn’t necessarily acceptance at all.
Sometimes it’s what powerlessness looks like.
When the logging company owns the mountain, the company store and half the county government besides, saying “we’ll take what the Lord sends us” may be less about surrender than it is about preserving whatever dignity you can. You know exactly what you’re up against. You know you probably aren’t going to win. So you name the thing for what it is, you endure it, and you refuse to let it take everything from you.
I think about that a lot when I look at my own family.
Dutch Cove has its own chapter in this story, and it isn’t finished being written.
By the time last week’s hearing rolled around, I had already been forced to sell my heritage land — the ground my family had held for generations, gone because the law doesn’t much care what a piece of dirt means to the people whose blood is buried in it.
I went into that courtroom with low expectations.
By then, I had learned better than to hope for much.
Apparently, even that was too much to ask.
I was ordered to pay, too.
Less than fifteen percent of cases involving attorney’s fees in special proceedings like partition cases actually see those fees awarded.
I wasn’t part of the other eighty-five percent.
I cried the tears I needed to cry.
Then I got up.
Because when you come from people like mine, you learn something about grief pretty early: eventually, you have to wipe your face and get back to work.
That’s the part of fatalism people sometimes misunderstand.
It isn’t necessarily that we believe nothing can change.
It’s that we have seen enough to know that it usually doesn’t.
It isn’t only the land and the graves and the courtroom.
It’s the grisly accidents.
The rare illnesses.
The deaths that came too early and too often.
The poverty.
The feuds that outlived the people who started them.
The betrayals that became family stories because nobody could quite figure out how to let them die.
And the trauma that gets passed down the same way everything else does, from one generation to the next, until somebody finally stops long enough to realize they’re carrying something that never belonged to them in the first place.
You stack all of that behind a family and then wonder why somebody becomes a little fatalistic.
Maybe it’s a curse.
Maybe it’s fate.
Maybe it’s simply what happens when generations of people learn that the world is not fair, that powerful people rarely do the right thing, and that sometimes all you can do is stand there, take the hit and keep your name.
I don’t know.
I’ve made my peace with it.
Because my inner hillbilly has always understood something I’m not sure the rest of the world ever will:
Peace was never really promised to us in this life.
We were promised something else.
We were promised that this life wasn’t the end of the story.
And for people who have spent generations losing pieces of home, family, land and one another, maybe that’s why we’ve always been able to endure a little more than we should have had to.
We’ve always known where the real peace is.
It’s in the hereafter.
