This book does not rival Fair and Tender Ladies, but it comes close. Some days I swear I can’t tell no difference between them, and I tell you, I don’t give a damn. Some days I’ll set by my fire all day, and think back on things that was, and them things is ever as clear to me as the here and now. Three years of summers coming and going, and snow on the ground in the cold, and I’m still traveling my mountains but I know it in my heart I’m slowing down. Who doesn’t like a little mystery and some backwoods superstitions? She speaks of people who believe in witches and curses and makes you wonder if they are crazy or just more sensitive to another dimension than we are. She knows the music and the old-time remedies, and she uses the expressions that peppered a Southern childhood and have now almost passed out of existence. Smith has a rare command of the language of the mountains, and she presents her characters without condescending to them, another rarity. The very handsome Almarine Cantrell begins this story and three generations of Cantrells then weave a tale of fate and adversity that makes the legend of a curse seem more possible than not.
It is nestled between three mountains, and it influences events by walling people in or setting them free. The mountain setting of Hoot Owl Holler is as much a character as the people. In Oral History, a young college student goes to the mountains of Virginia to research her family ancestry, and we are treated to their real stories, seen through the eyes of others who witnessed their lives unfold.
This is what Lee Smith does so perfectly in her novels-she reaches into the past, plucks out fascinating characters, and brings them completely to life. My Daddy would tell tales of his Uncle Bunny, a man who had been dead twenty years before I was born, and bring him to life, so that he felt like a presence still there. When I was growing up, all family history was oral.
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