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It’s not easy to classify Jeremy B. Jones’ “Bearwallow,” cited as the best Appalachian nonfiction book of the year in 2014. You’ll do best understanding what Jones set out to do in his first book by considering the Author’s Note at the start: “This book is a memoir, not only about my life, but also about the life of a place.”
Photo Above: Jeremy B. Jones. Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland. (Blair, 2014). 253 pp.
Having left his home in western North Carolina for college and, then to teach in mountainous western Honduras, Jones discovers himself “working back to Bearwallow…finding residues of home.” He returns to Edneyville to teach English as second language at his elementary school, renting a house “dead in the view of Bearwallow Mountain.”
Over the course of the year, Jones works with immigrant families who have come north to work the orchards. He teaches himself clawhammer banjo and bikes the mountains. He digs deep into his family history, all the way back to his Dutch ancestor, Abraham, a veteran of the Revolutionary War who at 75 “set off into the wild…to an area labeled on the map only as “the Wilderness.”
And he ponders the “The Grand Highlands at Bearwallow Mountain,” the planned development on top of Bearwallow that will change his homeplace forever.
Jones takes on a lot in his book: centuries of Carolina mountain history; generations of family history; local politics and development; his own ambivalence about what it means to be Appalachian:
I have trouble knowing what to do in these mountains. I find myself fighting a constant battle between escaping and settling. So I do both.
Jones manages exactly that in “Bearwallow.”
Jeremy B. Jones. Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland. (Blair, 2014). 253 pp.
The story above first appeared in our May / June 2024 issue.
