Mountain People

RIVER OF EARTH--James Still--Vikinq ($2.50).

A sense of what is fitting, in the best meaning of the word, is an invaluable attribute of a writer. Among other good qualities, it is one that James Still seems to have achieved. Born 30 years ago in the hills of Alabama, brought up in Tennessee, educated at Vanderbilt, Still has written some modest but unmistakable poetry (Hounds on the Mountain). River of Earth is his first novel. The problem it fairly solves is that faced by many Southern novelists: how to be sectional without being affected. The horizon in River of Earth is limited to Hardin County, Kentucky, simply by being a child's horizon, the story of what Brackstone Baldridge's boy saw and heard when he was seven and eight.

With finer imagery than that of the better-known "Mountaineer Poet," Jesse Stuart, Still makes his child's world as bright as a new dime. It was not a world in which dimes were common. On the barren slope above Blackjack Mine, Bracky Baldridge owned a garden patch, a shack with puncheon floors, a black birch tree. When the mines along the creek closed one March, Bracky's no-good cousins, Harl and Tibb Logan, came to live with the Baldridges. The dried beans ran out fast. Then soft, lazy Uncle Samp came and stayed, his thin grey mustache so long he wrapped the ends around his ears. "Even if they are your blood kin, we can't feed them much longer," Mother said.

Harl and Tibb had a secret joke; the family liked to get away from them and sit together in the smokehouse. "A big house draws kinfolks like a horse draws nitflies," said Mother. One rainy night Harl and Tibb had a long spell of snickering in the room where they slept with Uncle Samp. Next morning they left :arly. When Uncle Samp woke up, he roared and raged out of the house: what was left of his mustache stuck out "like two small grey horns." When he was gone, Mother got the children to move the beds, stove and furniture into the smaller smokehouse; then she set a match to the house.

Having firmly sketched his people in this first chapter, James Still tells of their japes and sorrows and near starvation, the rich archaic poetry of their talk and customs, in a clear, dry style as unsentimental as his seven-year-old's eyes. Before he is through with them--with Grandma, who at 78 still shucks her own corn; with Uncle Jolly, always laying up in jail awhile "or breaking ribs or taking direct action in affairs of property; with the neighbors, mean or kind, in mining camps and on hill farms--he has produced a work of art. He might easily have overdone it.

The preacher's sermon from which the )ook takes its title begins:

"These hills are jist dirt waves, washing through eternity. My brethren, they hain't a valley so low but what hit'll rise again. They hain't a hill standing so proud but hit'll sink to the low ground o' sorrow. Oh, my children, where air we going on this mighty river of earth, aborning, begetting, and a-dying--the living and the dead riding the waters . . .?" Author Still restrains even this. His boy hero goes to sleep; another begins inattentively to whittle.

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