When I was a child I lived in America. Like the characters in the books I read, like the people I saw on t.v., I lived in a real neighborhood. Daddy drove off to work every morning; Mother stayed home and cleaned house. She never baked cookies, it's true, but she was there when my brother and I bedraggled our way in from school every afternoon. The kids that lived on Hillcrest were American kids. We had a neighborhood bully. We had a budding beauty queen. We had Barbie dolls and G.I. Joes and sleds and bikes, and we all got new clothes twice a year, fall and spring. We were, of course, oblivious to everything but our immediate concerns, to all that was peripheral.
        I would have been as intently oblivious as the rest had it not been for my mother, who taught me the concept of "around here." Mother, born in Louisiana, moved to California at fourteen. She wound up in Johnson City (on something very close to a whim) when her best friend decided to go to Milligan instead of to a college in one of those small mountainy states in the north. (The irony of ending up in a mountainy state in the south was not lost on Mother.) I can never remember a time that Mother did not drill away at the idea that we were different, that since she was not from "around here," and since she did not talk or think or act like she was from "around here" there was no reason my brother and I should, either. My daddy, whose people had gotten to what would become East Tennessee in 1768 (two years before the law said they could be there), didn't see anything wrong with her logic. He had been schooled at an early age, of course, to believe that his grammar and accent were "bad" and that if he wanted to make something of himself he too would have to speak differently, as if he were not from "around here." As he had learned, so would we.
         Frankly, I never thought I was from "around here." The fact that I knew the difference, or some vague approximation of the difference, and the fact that all of us kids thought we were just regular Americans, somehow placed us in a class of otherness -- and betterness, I'm afraid -- than the unfortunates who could not escape the stigma of "here."
         To do Mother justice, and to use her phrase, Johnson City must have seemed like another planet, a planet on which she didn't want us to have to live if we chose not to. How could we know there were other worlds if we did not understand the difference between here and there? And where, in all honesty, could Mother have learned anything good about "around here"? Daddy himself didn't see it, beyond pride in and loyalty to family. And who in the world would have wanted to be like those people on The Real McCoys, or Jethro and Ellie May, or Lil' Abner or -- god forbid -- HeeHaw?
        The first fissure in the crystalline assurance of my difference was opened by my California grandmother. Mother and I flew out when I was eight (my brother stayed home and went to Tweetsie and killed his goldfish by overfeeding it.) The flight was as magical as any child could have hoped it would be. I watched the lights and clouds, answered the stewardesses politely, spilled nothing on my new linen blazer and skirt, and read almost all of the new Happy Hollisters book Mother had bought me for the trip (in the book, the Hollisters flew to Puerto Rico and solved a mystery that had something to do with sugar cane.) Somehow, it was still evening when we landed in California; I remember being surprised to see that everything except the pink air was brown and grey -- no green anything, anywhere. That wasn't to prove the biggest surprise. The first thing Grammy said to me, right after I had only just said hello, took me completely by surprise. "My goodness, Amy!" she said. "How southern you talk."
         I was flabbergasted. "We don't sound southern," I told her. "We talk just like the people on t.v."
         It took me years to understand why they all laughed.

         That summer, too, right after Mother and I returned, another crack opened. Daddy's family had to move. My grandfather Tipton had a house and store in Keystone that had been bought up to make way for urban renewal. Nobody really wanted to try to explain to me why they had to leave if they wanted to stay, so I would follow around behind them, trying to find the answers in their quietness, their sadness, their muted frustration that was not quite anger. I wanted very much to know what would happen to the old wood and glass counters, to the drink machine with its icy, metallic smell, to the huge scale in the feed room out back, where Daddy used to try to ride the one-eyed pony kept to pull the grocery wagon. I never asked them. After that last afternoon in the store, Daddy never drove us through Keystone again.
         But the place my grandparents moved was wonderful! They had kept a farm in Roan Mountain -- a house, a barn, the family cemetery, sixty acres, woods -- ridge top to field on one side of the road, pasture to river on the other. For a girl in love with Laura Ingalls Wilder, it was heaven, even if the only livestock around were chickens. I saw my first deer there, my first fox. I weeded a garden there for the first time. I found horse shoes, and the split shoes of oxen, long lost in the stalls of the old barn. I listened to my grandmother tell me about a panther that used to roam the woods; I couldn't understand how it had gotten there, and she couldn't understand why I though it had escaped from the circus (Walt Disney called them cougars, or mountain lions, or pumas, like the shoe).
         The monthly drive to the farm was formal, a slow ritual procession into the past. It did not occur to me, then, that you could not be any more "around here" than my grandparents were. Instead, they too seemed to be like the people I met in the books, books about the frontier. I had never read about mountain people, or hillbillies, or mountaineers -- those words were not words I knew. But I knew about farmers, and frontier settlers, and that was who I saw my grandparents to be. I knew one of my uncles on the farm read Camus and Sartre and Kierkegaard for fun (big books, I thought of them), and that my other uncle played piano in a jazz dinner-dance music trio. I knew my grandfather sang gospel and played the banjo until he got too old (that was not real music, though, I was made to understand). But there was no contradiction. All I had been taught to watch out for was the mysterious taint of "around here" -- and none of my people seemed to me like they were from "around here."
         Of course my relatives who had never lived any place but Roan Mountain (or Elizabethton) did fall into the abyss. I probably wouldn't have figured that out, though, had they not all sat on the porch in the summer and compared me -- much to my detriment -- to proverbial country cousins whom I had never met. In fact, my own family was the first group to which I firmly attached that amorphous phrase. And Mother was right. I wasn't like them, and they weren't like me, so whatever Grammy had said about my accent (that casual remark nagged me for years), I still didn't act like they did.
         Then, at fourteen, I read Christy -- for years, my favorite novel (other than True Grit). I saw in Christy much of what I believed about myself. And the book gave further meat to the bones of "around here." "Around here" really meant "out there," out in the mountains, where pioneers (that again) had fallen from nobility into darkness and despair. Christy taught me that it was okay to like folk songs -- read, ballads -- but that everything negative I had heard about all the other music played by those from "here" (or "there") was true. (Including my grandfather, an idea that bothered me, because I loved him and I loved it when my brother and I would sit beside him in his spare, neat room, and he would take his rosewood banjo from its case and scratch out a few notes for us.) From Christy I learned the word mountain. It was always an adjective, sometimes of approval (as in mountain crafts), usually of opprobrium. It was the word hidden beneath Mother's euphemism.

         From the state of Tennessee I learned the term "eminent domain."
         No sooner had my grandparents gotten to Roan Mountain (six months, I believe) than the state sent a surveyor to inform them that the area was going to be made into a park, and that they would, sooner or later, have to sell out and move again. The sooner or later took eight years; the summer before my senior year in high school they were back in Johnson City, in a house behind Bell Ridge -- which marked the perimeter of what was left of Keystone.
         From the beginning, then, there was a duality to those hours I spent on the farm. Even before I really understood what the adults were talking about when they came (as they inevitably did) to the subject that made every visit end bleakly, I felt like the hours I could spend there had already been portioned out in meager ration. Always happy when I arrived, I was always depressed by the time we went home. And as I got older, I got angry, and frustrated. There was another "out there," one in which powerful people could do whatever they wanted to whomever they pleased, people against whom no one could stand.
         Things really became skewed when I got to high school. Like every other adolescent I knew, I hated my hometown -- because it was my hometown. I wanted out. Period. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go (and in my case, nobody to date, so even teen romance was out of the picture). Worst of all, it had finally dawned on all of us that, to a real extent, we had to admit that we were from "here" -- since we had been born "here" and raised "here." What a terrible moment of truth that was! Instead of plain Americans, we had become a deformed hybrid.
        That horrible revelation caused the pressure to be as unlike "around here" as possible to intensify. It was the age of the unconventional; everybody looked like a hippie, even the kids in the sororities and fraternities (technically they were called service organizations) who ran the school. Difference (within rigid convention) was the cachet everyone sought. I was different all right. I was smart, and although I was fairly quiet, I did speak out in class when I got aggravated. And I got good grades. And I read a lot. And all that added up to more difference than most of my peers could stomach.
         But when I was sixteen, the smartest, hippest teacher in the school discovered me.
         She taught history and political science. She was not from "around here." She was a feminist. She promoted "creativity." She used polysyllabic words. She liked students with brains. And she gave me a place to belong.
        In her classroom, everybody else was beyond the pale.
        From her I learned a new of version of "around here:" the phrase "to get out of here."

         Despite the fear that I was sealing my own coffin as far as dating was concerned (I will thank you to remember how young I was), I finally came out in her class and said that I was a feminist. I began writing essays criticizing -- well, anything I could think of, mainly the big boys with the big bucks like the ones pushing my family off the farm (although at that time I hadn't made the connection). It seemed that I could not go too far; the more politicized I became, the more she egged me on.
         She also egged me on in my hatred of Johnson City, which under her encouragement soon became a generic hatred of anything "mountain" -- except the farm, of course. She urged me not to go to school at ETSU, to become a lawyer, not a teacher, to "get out" as soon as I could. (My uncle the piano player was urging me to do the same thing; Mother, however, for what reason I could not fathom, had started pushing the other way.) Her words did not fall amongst the tares. I jumped to take her elective course my senior year, giving her another chance to reinforce my drive to get out. And that year I had another teacher, her rival in coolness, who drove me even farther down that road. (But this teacher did tell me that teaching was a good and noble -- if underappreciated -- profession, and that it was okay if expediency -- not to mention my parents -- forced me to go to State, as long as I "got out of here" as soon as I graduated).
         Eventually I fell from grace with both of them, into the ranks of the unredeemed; it was inevitable. I decided I liked State. I decided being a teacher wasn't such awful karma. But tellingly, even as going to the farm had made me both happy and sad, I could not feel the one way about "here" that they wanted me to feel. I tried and tried, but only part of me detested "here" in the way that they had groomed me. I hated it, but I was drawn to the woods and the high places. Probably the most bizarre manifestation of this split would present itself when my friends and I would drive our clunkers (Falcons, Fairlanes, old Chevys) way up in the hills, to Beauty Spot, to the Roan, to Watauga -- any where we could get to and come back from in an afternoon. We would sit in the sun, mountains all around us, and talk about where we were going to move once we graduated.
          It sneaked up on me, the resolution to this conflict I could not even name. It sneaked up on me through my stereo. SInce high school I had listened to electric English folk, Steeleye Span, Pentangle. One afternoon in the Record Bar, looking for new British music, I came on a record of Kentucky fiddle tunes. I think I bought it because somebody said, "You don't like that stuff, do you?" It turned out that I did. Officially, I still made fun of country music, and I still sat with Daddy during HeeHaw only because it made him happy, but the worm of doubt had crept to the vine of separateness from "here" that had shaded me so long. So when I got the chance to go to the fiddler's convention in Galax that summer (I was twenty by then), I went -- just because I went nearly anywhere I got asked to go just to get out of the house, and just because someone said "Why do you want to go there?" And at Galax I discovered that I liked "that stuff" even more than I thought.
         And that somehow, despite everything, many of the songs they sang that weekend, many of the tunes I heard, had by some miracle already instilled themselves in my brain. Where I had heard them before I had no idea.
         Something similar had happened to my life-long friend whom I ran into that fall when school started. (I ran into her because for awhile we would get mad at each other and not speak for two or three years, but like family, we always made it up.) She too had "discovered" mountain music -- her sister had bought the Nitty Gritty Circle album about the time I was in Galax. She too wanted to learn to clog. And she too wanted to find out more about the musicians in her family -- both of us, coming slowly to see for the first time that maybe all this stuff from "around here" was something that wasn't quite as awful as we had been taught to believe. (Yes, we still thought "maybe.")
         And she told me about an anthropology class her sister had taken that was taught by a man who played the fiddle.
         You had better believe that I hotfooted it to the next class that man taught. And in that class, for the first time, I began to sort out the conflicts, the duality, which I had balanced blindly for so long. I had lived in America until I was fifteen. I lived in a non-place after that. But in that class, I learned that where I lived was Appalachia -- and that Appalachia was now and had always been a part of America, too.
         I came from a place that was two places at once. I could hardly believe what that class gave me, a gift beyond imagination. Think of it! "Around here" actually had good points beyond all the bad ones we had all so dutifully mastered. (Meaning, it was okay to keep liking my family the way they were.) "Around here" we had a living culture. (Meaning I didn't have to make fun of country music any more, and that I didn't have to pretend that I was watching HeeHaw just to keep Daddy company). "Around here" we had a history of exploitation -- both inside and outside. (The meaning of which I understood all too precisely.) And heresy of heresies, "around here" wasn't really such a bad place to be from -- or to act like we werefrom, or even to talk like we were from. (Meaning that I could finally say things like "sulled up" and "trifling whelp" and "striped snake" in public if I had a mind to.)
        I learned many, many more things about "here," many more things than there is time or necessity to tell. But I want to tell the one thing I learned that never came up in the text, or the lectures, or the tests, except perhaps by implication.
         I learned that more than just land can be eminent domained.