Race and Radicalism in Appalachian Poetics

1

I was recently able to verify that the Appalachian poet Don West (1906– 1992), along with his wife, the painter Constance “Connie” Adams West (1908–1990), visited the political prisoner Lolita Lebrón (1919–2010) “several times” when she was incarcerated at the Federal Prison Camp (FPC) in Alderson, West Virginia. I had long suspected that they had visited Lebrón but the otherwise extensive paper trail that the Wests left behind is almost totally silent on the Puerto Rican revolutionary. In 1932, the Wests founded the radical Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, and in 1965, they started the Appalachian South Folklife Center, in Pipestem, West Virginia, which is about thirty miles from Alderson. The Wests lived in Pipestem from 1966 to 1982, where they worked toward a communal vision of an anticapitalist, antiracist Appalachia that was both unswervingly traditional and bracingly leftist. Lebrón was held in Alderson from 1954 to 1979, which means that the Wests were Lebrón’s “neighbors” for thirteen years.

I have been visualizing these meetings since I first read West’s poems addressed to Lebrón. Although these two otherwise forgettable poems, “Lolita Lebrun” and “Visit to Lolita Lebrun’s Home,” each start on the wrong foot, with West inexplicably misspelling Lebrón’s surname, they have distilled for me complex questions about poetry and politics in the Americas. Years later, I am trying to articulate these questions from a more sober distance. What overlooked portents from the past, what speculative futures (not) to come, what missed or unrecorded encounters would be revealed in picturing these two radically different radicals, one from north Georgia, that seedbed of Trumpian white supremacists, the other from Lares, that hotbed of Boricua revolutionaries, joining hands within the empire’s prison walls? And what’s at stake in reading politically radical (or radical-adjacent) poetries in the US through the figure of a minor poet, and a white, rural, and folk one at that, a poet who is largely unknown (or forgotten), at least in these pages?

When so many prominent poets and writers (past and present) have been exposed as white supremacists, West seems a rare white exception who could (mostly) endure the legitimate scrutiny of present (not to mention past) standards, even as his poems can feel dated, anachronistic, even “bad.” His durable relevance comes in no small part from his willingness to express unwavering solidarity with Lolita Lebrón and, more broadly, from his support of anticapitalist and antiracist struggles across the Americas. These commitments materialized in his writings and actions, which were always entangled.

Picture it, then: the man known as an agitating educator, a “phantom Appalachian revolutionary,” as the scholar Jeff Biggers describes West’s “legendary” reputation, this white poet-preacher jailed in eastern Kentucky on charges of “conspiring to overthrow the government by the use of churches,” as his biographer James J. Lorence details, this antiracist activist whose Georgia home the Ku Klux Klan reduced to ashes, this militant union organizer for the Kentucky Workers Alliance (KWA), the United Mine Workers (UMW), and the Communist Party (CP), among other organizations, this man who knew more than a little something about getting thrown in jail for acting on his ideological convictions, the man with a 2,398-page FBI file who was accused by the agency of the profane belief that “laborers [were] the very backbone of the United States,” this man, getting on in years, rolls up, decked out in his trademark overalls, to the gates of the Federal Prison Camp, where the Puerto Rican independentista was incarcerated until 1979, when Lebrón’s fifty-seven-year sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. The poet Don West has come to greet a comrade.

But, first, picture Alderson as a brig, a ship, whose wake, to borrow Christina Sharpe’s figure for the aftermaths of transatlantic slavery, rolled roughshod across the Appalachians before grounding to a halt thirty miles from The Greenbrier resort, that refuge for presidents and billionaires, and the other half of a roiling Appalachian dialectic with the Folklife Center. In his aptly named second collection, Black Box, the Affrilachian poet Frank X. Walker delineates a geography of mass incarceration in which to place the FPC Alderson. This geography spans from the seventeenth century to “those twenty-first century Amistads/upstate/downriver.” Indeed, federal supermax prisons dot the hills and hollows of Appalachia, where they are given names such as Wallens Ridge and Red Onion, and where they are often the largest employers in remote mountain counties. Alderson was an early node on this map, a ship whose long wake the supermaxes would follow.

West’s poems, essays, and pedagogical writings consistently conceptualized Appalachia as an internal colony of US Empire, where the ugly stuff—extractive industries, deforestation, prisons—could be hidden away. For West, for better or worse, Latin America was little different, beyond the question of geographic scale. So, this is what I’m imagining: when West meets Lebrón he is pretty certain he understands Lebrón’s and Puerto Rico’s colonized condition, because it’s one that he shares. He’s desperate for their liberation, at least as much as he desires the emancipation of the dispossessed in his midst. But, and this is a big but: he’s free, and she’s behind the colonizer’s razor wire and guard towers. He may be a leftist radical who’d been red-baited and blacklisted throughout the US South and hauled in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), but she’d taken more extreme measures, shooting up the US Congress in 1954 with three other Puerto Rican Nationalist Party members, shouting: I did not come here to kill. I came here to die (an old battle cry of Puerto Rican nationalism).

In his own words, West is coming to see a “freedom fighter,” one he admired without reservation. “We greet you and would welcome you/to our mountains with no prison handcuffs,” West declares in the poem “Lolita Lebrun,” published in 1982, in his last book, In a Land of Plenty. “You are one with us,” the poem proclaims of West and Lebrón, Puerto Rico and Appalachia. I have long wondered about this line: is it possible to read this moment as one hillbilly simply asserting his solidarity with another? The Boricua poet-critic-translator Urayoán Noel implies that this might be precisely what’s happening. In “The Wayside Story,” Noel ludically performs the ways in which Puerto Ricans are hillbillyized, much like Appalachians. “Each exports its own hillbilly,” he slyly suggests,

Just like me, so quaint, so silly,
In dire need of a fix (a shave?)—
“Leave your pigsties! Smile! Behave!”

West alludes to this very relationship between Appalachia and Latin America broadly in essays such as “Romantic Appalachia: Or, Poverty Pays If You Ain’t Poor.” In “Lolita Lebrun,” he even foreshadows the Puerto Rican debt “crisis” of 2015:

Trains drag a part of us
by Alderson Prison toward Wall Street
where handcuffs for freedom
are forged and fastened.

West’s consonance (check out the “f ” sounds) aligns in a shared metonymy Puerto Rico, a US colony, and Appalachia, which anti-extraction activists refer to as an internal colony, a “national sacrifice zone.” They are “dragged” in pieces together toward finance capital’s epicenter, where the PROMESA bill was orchestrated in 2016 to “bailout” the Puerto Rican archipelago. In reality, the debt management regime was designed to ensure that disaster capital’s hedge funds could continue to plunder Puerto Rico while blaming its people for the empire’s chains.

In his foundational book Affrilachia, Frank X. Walker likewise attempts to bring Appalachia and Puerto Rico into alignment. “Jíbaros” is dedicated to Walker’s friend and fellow Affrilachian poet Ricardo Nazario Colón. In self-described “k-mart spanish,” Walker pinpoints the limits of his knowledge and solidarity while conjecturing that the “caribbean seas/ [and] appalachian mountains” are “umbilically linked.” The Bronx-born, Kentucky-based Puerto Rican poet’s own book, Of Jíbaros and Hillbillies, directly conjoins the rural folk heroes of Puerto Rico and Appalachia, those much-maligned, misunderstood, and stereotyped emissaries from an illusory past of independence and autonomy in their respective mountains.

An important predecessor in the literary history of these conjunctions is the Nuyorican poet Felipe Luciano. Luciano was the chairman (and cofounder) of the Young Lords Party and a founding member of The Last Poets. His poem “Jíbaro/My Pretty Nigger,” which the poet memorably performed in Sing Sing Prison in 1972, insists, as Urayoán Noel writes, that “African Americans and Puerto Ricans share a destiny.” It is this “destiny” that Walker and Nazario Colón chase in their poems. The speaker of “Nosotros,” also in Black Box, declares his solidarity across time and space on the grounds of exploited labor. “I used to be you,” Walker’s speaker proclaims, somewhat precipitously suggesting that Latinx workers have fully replaced African Americans in the most exploitative, alienating, and demeaning jobs.

Even before composing his Lebrón poems, West consistently demonstrated his understanding of this sort of class struggle as racialized and globalized. He knew that racial divisions would undermine the collectivities necessary to breaking the reign of capital. “A sense of international consciousness pervaded Don’s life and work,” so George Brosi described his friend’s thinking. Yet this relatively flat portrayal blunts the edge of West’s writings and actions. Poems such as “For These Sad Ashes,” which laments the KKK arson that destroyed his house and library in 1958, buttress West’s embodied politics of radical commitment. As West critiques Manifest Destiny and US imperialism in Latin America in the poem, my mind races to the fascist Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who presides vulture-like over a burning Amazon. Then, when West makes his call “To peasant peons” of the Global South, I want to read the paternalistic language as an awkward route to solidarity. In short, for the redundant “peasant peons” I want to substitute hillbillies, although I’m unconvinced of my conflation:

Of Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, Santo Domingo
And other lands where our country
Supports decaying dictators
Grieving that only dictators
Now look to America with hope
In their eyes ...

Notwithstanding West’s essentialist views on gender (he calls Lebrón the “epitome of eternal woman-kind” in “Lolita Lebrun”), his pro-Black, pro-labor, and antifascist politics would fit the resurgent left activism in Appalachia and the South. His understanding of settler colonialism is also fraught, given his pride in his white ancestors’ early settlement of, and (in his account) intermixing with the Cherokee, in the north Georgia mountains. Yet with the exception of poets such as Jake Adam York and Melissa Range, his explicitly antiracist politics make him something of an outlier among white Southern poets (especially of his generation), for whom race and ethnicity have often been considered taboo or treated through a racist lens. Such is the case with Frank Stanford (1949–1978), the Arkansas poet and cult favorite whose collected poems were published to fanfare in 2015, after decades out of print. Even filtered through his seductive Ozarkian surrealism and the advocacy of the once-in-a-generation poet C.D. Wright, Stanford’s casual bigotry surely reinforces the stereotypes of the South that West labored to dispel. West may have been a “folk” poet, who believed “the test of a true revolutionary” was the ability to “move among the people like fish swim in the open waters” (as he wrote in 1967). Yet, rereading him now, as the world burns, West seems to me like a water tower in a fiery field. But I am also aware that for others, such as the poet Joy Priest, the promise of water will be a mirage.

2

I have been working my way toward a tentative conclusion on Don and Connie West’s meetings with Lebrón, about which we know so little. What did they say to each other, and in what languages? Did they become friends of a sort? Yet these questions are coming to matter less to me than West’s solidarity with Puerto Rican independence and with Lebrón’s militant act. West staked this position not to virtue signal or to express empathy, but for the common causes of decolonization and liberation and—this is crucial—to support her act of anticolonial violence, which he places explicitly in the lineage of the American Revolution. Compare this radical position, for instance, to Democrats’ advocacy for Puerto Rican statehood, a policy preference staked with little regard for Puerto Rican autonomy. From his little piece of flyover country in Pipestem, smack dab in the middle of what would become known as “Trump Country,” West saw the scale of the work that needed to be done, always recognizing that any local conditions and actions must be placed in a global, materialist frame in which violence might be legitimate.

Pipestem is sixty miles north of where I grew up, in southwest Virginia. I recall going to family reunions as a child at Pipestem Resort State Park, knowing nothing then about Don West or Lolita Lebrón, the FPC, the Folklife Center, or writers with FBI files who were hauled in front of HUAC to pledge their allegiance to the US, just I did each morning at my public elementary school. Nothing, that is, about poetry or radical politics. Two decades later, when I was studying the intersections of poetry and political movements, activisms, and agitations, West became a key figure for bringing into conjunction the worlds—North and South, urban and rural, America and América—that are usually conceptualized as distinct regions or opposed as binaries of civilization and barbarism.

I began asking myself: What did my studies in Latinx literature—Puerto Rican and Latinx poetry in particular—and my very Appalachian poems have to do with one another? How would I map Columbia, South Carolina, where I now live and teach, with Colombia, the nation-state? I went in search of a materialist conception to activate the stories congealed in their common namesake, the conquistador who set Becerillo, his bulldog, and other dogs, on Indigenous peoples. West’s writings on “our colonial status” in “Romantic Appalachia” and elsewhere facilitated my understanding of the shared historical geographies of the US South and Latin America (the Global South), which I came to call, following the Boricua poet Victor Hernández Cruz, “Broken Souths.” In short, I began to see West’s “our” in hemispheric terms, as a collective of “Broken Souths” resisting from across the Americas the forces that would rend them.

Thereafter, West was on my lips when someone in New York, where I lived and taught for ten years, dismissed Appalachia as a racist backwater beyond redemption. Have you heard of the Affrilachian Poets? Have you ever read Don West or Dorothy Allison or Nikki Giovanni? I’d offer in our defense the prose introduction to West’s Clods of Southern Earth or his essay “People’s Cultural Heritage in Appalachia” to reflect their assumptions and the city’s segregated schools, the worst in the nation, back at them. I admired and emulated West’s arguments for multiracial class struggle, for food, shelter, meaningful work, and dignity for all, for mountain folks and the dispossessed most broadly.

Along with Muriel Rukeyser, whose long poem The Book of the Dead was composed after a short trip to West Virginia from New York, West was a spiritual guide as I wrote poems from Brooklyn about the mountains. Unlike his fellow poet-farmer Wendell Berry, West was a mountain man who also found his people in New York (even though he retained a “negative impression” of the city) and in Europe. West helped me to envision an alternative mountain South, one that I wanted to claim as well as one that invariably claimed me, one where I’d learned the foundations for antiracism and anticapitalism, where I could curse those godforsaken “Friends of Coal” bumper stickers with a team behind me.

Without West’s poems, essays, and lived example, I could not have conceived of the persona of the “Urbilly,” who embodied for me the explosive intersections of urban and hillbilly languages, energies, and lifeways. In disavowing insular politics, West intuitively understood that he would have to address his own racial personhood. His writings frequently addressed his whiteness, sometimes awkwardly, and sometimes defensively. As a model for how I would address whiteness in my poems and essays, then, West would be destined to fall short, especially when I isolated him from the messy relationships his writing and activism generated during and after his life.

West remained by my side in more recent years while I read the raft of superb books on Appalachia, from Steven Stoll’s visionary Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia to What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia, Elizabeth Catte’s trenchant corrective to the liberal promotion of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Sadly, I searched in vain for West’s name in Catte’s list of “Suggested Resources” for reading the region from the left. Then, most acutely, West led me through Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. Decades earlier, West’s “Appalachian Blues” had prophesied the national role of J.D. Vance, who is now prosecuting the far right’s culture war while running for the US Senate in Ohio:

Find an articulate hillbilly,
for front man,
prime him
trim him
use him

Although Appalachian Reckoning’s contributors circle around this conception of Vance, as in What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, the collection never mentions West by name. Yet West is one of the best of “a long Appalachian tradition of speaking up and talking back,” as the editors of Appalachian Reckoning, Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll, describe the sustained pockets of resistance against state and corporate power. This tradition is being extended powerfully by the Affrilachian poets Frank X. Walker and Keith S. Wilson, by white poets such as Melissa Range, and by those who are not natives to, but who have been thinking with and from Appalachia, such as Erika Meitner. Meitner writes the region with a critical generosity from my hometown in southwest Virginia, where she teaches at Virginia Tech alongside the poets Carmen Giménez Smith and Nikki Giovanni.

3

Don West was a poet of Georgia, Appalachia, the South, the US, and the working class. But to read him exclusively in regional terms, even in the frame of the nation-state, mistakes the scale of his works, which often moved between local and global concerns. Most broadly, West belongs in a transnational lineage of anticapitalist poets. The scholar Chris Green notes that the leftist journal New Masses put West’s Clods of Southern Earth on their list of gift books for subscribers in 1947. The list is a who’s who of radical intellectuals, Black and white, including W.E.B. DuBois, Karl Marx, Ann Petry, and Upton Sinclair. West’s book was designed to reach readers who didn’t read poems, and it was distributed widely among workers’ cooperatives, labor unions, and advocacy groups. Though now long out of print, in the late forties the book reached the number of readers poets nowadays (apart from the Instapoets) could never imagine.

This genealogy includes “folk” poets of popular song and vernacular speech. I’ve often thought of West as a poor man’s Bertolt Brecht. Standout poems such as “Automated Miner,” “Miner’s Widow,” and “Visit” approach the style of the exiled German poet-playwright, who, like West, had to defend himself in front of HUAC. Green’s scansion of the ballad form of “What Shall a Poet Sing?” repudiates the widespread reception of West as a “crude” poet. The short poem recalls Brecht’s iconic quatrain about singing “in the dark times.” Like Brecht, West found levity in darkness. Consider this compressed stanza of “Stereotypes,” where hard stresses create a propulsive bounce:

Redneck, Cracker
Goober picker
Eat poke sallet
Drink pot licker.

Another of West’s poetic relatives is Langston Hughes, who blurbed his friend and comrade’s books. West’s “Brown Brother” ends with a reference to “the white man’s curse,” an inversion of the white man’s burden. The poem, with its cringe-worthy, trying-too-hard title, is dedicated to Hughes, another poet who was called to repent before HUAC.

Then, there are the farmer-poets and poets of labor. I have loved how West mocked the agrarian fugitive poets, for their aloof poetry and right-wing politics, in “They Take Their Stand.” It probably goes without saying that his scorn for that reactionary Nashville crew, with their enduring influence on the US poetry world, has stood the test of time. West fits better among sharecropper poets, like Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, a Native American poet from North Carolina. Her poem “The Change” laments the decline of the traditional agricultural practices that West revered and worked to revive. Most powerfully extending West’s legacy is Mark Nowak. Nowak founded and leads the Worker Writers School, which runs creative writing workshops with worker centers and trade unions. I can imagine that Nowak’s Social Poetics, which tells the history of these workshops, would be near and dear to West. In addition, Nowak’s documentary photobook Coal Mountain Elementary addresses the Sago, West Virginia, mining disaster of January 2006, using verbatim testimony from miners and remixed lesson plans for schoolchildren from the American Coal Foundation. This pedagogical imperative follows in the lineage of West the poet-educator who worked his entire life outside the confines of creative writing programs.

Rereading West now, it’s even possible to place him on the west coast, where for all of his travels he spent little time. In Oakland, the press Commune Editions calls itself a “purveyor of poetry & other antagonisms.” Juliana Spahr, a Commune publisher and poet, was born and raised in Appalachian Ohio, and remains committed to thinking carefully about the region. She addresses this personal history, including the times she was called a “hillbilly fraud,” in her contribution to the anthology Hick Poetics. Like the Commune poets, West insisted that his poems are “collective,” for he understood poetry as a popular art form emerging from below through shared song and speech. Like them, his writings criticize liberals as vigorously as they do corporations and the right. Like them, his poetry was one tool in struggle’s toolbox, the one from which all the others were forged. Yet, unlike many of the Commune poets, West, a lifelong socialist (and arguably an unrepentant communist, though he often denied it, as his long FBI file shows—see his poem published in 1934 in the Daily Worker titled “Listen, I Am a Communist”), believed the state, harnessed properly, might help to produce and ensure the common good.

The anti-copyright pages of Commune Editions’ books provide a succinct corrective to the fetish of literary “property,” a position that West shared: “we encourage the sharing of this book and everything else: omnia sunt communia.” Pair this statement with Commune’s mission, as a “purveyor of poetry & other antagonisms.” Then, consider West’s own “No Copyright” section of In a Land of Plenty:

Purposely this book is not copyrighted. Poetry and other creative efforts should be levers, weapons to be used in the people’s struggle for understanding, human rights, and decency. “Art for Art’s Sake” is a misnomer. The poet can never be neutral. In a hungry world the struggle between oppressor and oppressed is unending. There is the inevitable question: “Which side are you on?”

Rereading this ars poetica, my first impulse was to ask, Which sides would West be on right now? Then, I saw: his sentences take sides. Don West was antifa, organizing stateside for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Don West would march with Black Lives Matter. Don West would stand with the Water Protectors at Standing Rock. West would topple Confederate monuments in Durham, Chapel Hill, Charlottesville, and Richmond. He might have been confounded by the horizontalism of Occupy, but the man certainly despised Wall Street. Against the calls for civility and the false prophets of the “white working class,” the example of Don West offers a warning and, more enduringly, a dogged model for poetry’s role in remaking the world, from Puerto Rico to Pipestem and beyond.

And yet such conclusions give me pause. Doesn’t deifying West in this fashion ultimately undermine his political commitments and their heightened urgency in the face of ascendant fascism, climate change, and the retrenchment of the carceral state? After all, intersectional alliances— literary and political—remain in progress, tentative, halting. Promising movements are afoot, on the ground and in the realm of culture. Consider the alliances of Latinx and African American activists in Jackson, Mississippi, to advocate for the city’s undocumented migrants. Listen to the Lua Project, which is based in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The band’s “Mexilachian” music combines Son Jarocho, an Afro-Mexican music from Veracruz, Mexico, with traditional Appalachian music. Yet these conjunctions remain largely speculative and provisional.

Nearing the end of this meditation, I am realizing that I have wanted to conjure Don West’s meetings with Lolita Lebrón without having to extend my speculation to his potential views on trans rights, the wage gap, and #MeToo, among other contemporary political issues. In this sense, have I been conducting a failed exorcism of my own racial personhood? Have I been protecting my innocence by shielding West from scrutiny? West wasn’t a white savior, and he should not be exalted as the white vanguard of a multiracial labor politics. Those models are dead and should stay buried. And to inter their scattered remains I turn to the poet Joy Priest, author of the award-winning collection Horsepower, Affrilachian poet, and Louisville native, whose poetic meeting with Don West presents a convincing counternarrative and a searing warning.

Priest’s poem “Denial Is a Cliff We Are Driven Over” features an autobiographical speaker who encounters West from the poet’s lived experience as a mixed-race woman from Kentucky. When Priest seeks the common ground I have found with West, she runs into the historical violence of property relations, which stops her in her tracks. “Denial Is a Cliff We Are Driven Over” nonetheless begins with a good-faith desire that is rapidly thwarted:

I want to believe Don West
when he writes: none of mine

ever made their living by driving slaves.
But in my grandfather’s mouth that utterance

would’ve taken on another meaning.

For Priest’s white grandfather, a taxi driver in Louisville, her Black father is a source of shame. But hers is a poem of comparative genealogy, so Priest prefers a materialist framework for mapping inheritance to an affective measure of ancestry emphasizing shame or resentment. As such, the poem deftly recounts the poet’s historical research. Her grandfather owned the house he inherited; his name also belonged to him. In contrast, her father is descended from enslaved persons whose surname came from their owners, for whom his ancestors propagated yet more property. In this comparative lens, West echoes “the voice of the dead whispering/history.” That is, West resembles her racist grandfather more than he does a revolutionary literary elder. To put it more intimately, he is the troubling kin she’s born to rather than the family she would choose.

At the end of the poem, it becomes clear that the poet has been trying to figure out how to speak to West. Here, Priest’s speaker summons the elder poet directly, pointedly addressing him as “Mr. West.” This distancing, dissimulating, and arguably diminishing locution carries the slightest trace of respect necessary for performing the racialized, gendered propriety historically required of southern Black women. (Wild aside: Am I also hearing Priest address Kanye West?) This rhetorical sleight of hand leads to the speaker’s conclusion that shared poverty and class politics cannot so easily overcome the living legacies of slavery. And here I had been picturing Don West’s and Lolita Lebrón’s meetings holding the suspended promise of a shared hemispheric resistance to colonization. Joy Priest didn’t have to imagine meeting West. She read his words, heard her grandfather, and centuries of history flooded the name robing the men vested with the power to punish and to forgive: Priest. That power now belongs, in poetry at least, to a woman named Joy.