Mountain Memories

I remember waking up in the dark in my bunk my first night in Appalachia. I was 7 years old; my Aunt and Uncle had invited us to their summer bungalow in Orange County, NY, a three-room house with a screened porch on a dirt road near a pebbly beach on a lake. I opened  my eyes, and saw nothing. Had I gone blind in my sleep? I held my hand to my face and splayed my fingers; they were invisible. My heart pounded.

By morning, I learned that, unlike the lamppost outside my city bedroom, the mountains didn’t glow in the dark, and that crickets and cicadas, not cars, were the sound of nighttime. I eventually acclimated to my summers in these parts, which continued right through college. It was here that this unsporting city boy learned how to catch frogs, swim, row a boat, hook a fish, water ski, and pilot a tiny motorized skiff, and later, a brawny ski-boat.

The mailboxes in our lakeside enclave bore English, Dutch, and German names. There were virtually no city “ethnics” like the Cusenzas, no Jews, and no people of color. It was a clannish place; we didn’t socialize, worship, or break bread with our neighbors.

As a teenager, I explored the backwoods. Strange ruins emerged from the forest: enormous water wheels, toppled stone structures, and broken-down houses—some still occupied.

As I hiked to a favorite swimming hole, I’d sometimes see the people living in these homes that time forgot. They were the only people of color anywhere in these parts, but weren’t African Americans. Our own neighbors talked about them like they were a human missing link, or fairy-tale ogres who lived in caves.

On rare mornings after dawn, I might see two silent fishermen with deep complexions glide past our dock in a rowboat, reels in hand. But they had no place in the sunlit world of our summer colony, at church or market, in pleasure boats or local watering holes. We never crossed paths; they were a liminal presence in our white world.

When I got older, I discovered that these people had a history stretching back thousands of years before the Europeans came. They called themselves the Ramapo Munsee Lenape Nation. But in the mountain world of my summers, they were outcasts, feared, loathed, and dismissed as “Jackson Whites”—degraded mix breeds who belonged in the shadows.

In my research for Blood and Soil, I learned how these resilient people survived colonization, war, rape, enslavement, land theft, the boom and bust of iron mining, environmental degradation, and modern real estate development.

Just like us, love made the Ramapo who they are today: a people of Native, Dutch, German, and African American heritage, a product of all the humanity that passed through their high country, or made a life among them.

In the end, this city kid gained some important life lessons from all those Appalachian summers. In writing Blood and Soil, I sought to imbue my characters with all of the contradictions I saw in the clans who lived in these mountains—insiders and outcasts, victims and victimizers, the powerful and powerless, who nonetheless share the same fears, hopes, and dreams that make us one human family.

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