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Rabun County, Georgia, where Foxfire originated, is a place of lush landscapes and breathtaking beauty. The Chattooga River forms the eastern border, and the Blue Ridge Mountains rise up in the west. For thousands of years, it was the ancestral land of the Cherokee people. Following a treaty in 1819, the United States forced the Cherokee Nation to give up four million acres that encompassed what would become Rabun County, and in the 1820s and ’30s, white settlers rushed into the territory searching for gold. They found some but more so fertile land, which they claimed as their own, forcing the Cherokees out. Many settlers eventually started farms, and some of them brought enslaved men and women with them. Following the Civil War, the first railroad reached the county, and two industries emerged: logging and tourism.6
In the early twentieth century, the federal government began to enclose and regulate the commons—or the forests from which people freely took materials and sustenance. The Forest Service bought huge tracts of land, pushing farmers out of the area; limited the numbers of cattle that farmers could graze; and decided who could log and when, giving preference to large companies. Georgia Railway and Power Company dammed the Tallulah River, destroying the Talullah Falls, known as the “Niagara Falls of the South.” The dam generated hydroelectric power, with the vast majority of kilowatts sent to Atlanta to power the New South city. Many residents gave up farms for wage work in the textile mills that sprouted up in northern Georgia and throughout the North and South Carolina Piedmont. By the 1950s, textile mills had opened in Rabun County, as well. The parents of the children who collected the Foxfire stories probably worked in factories or in the service industry, which catered to tourists visiting the area’s national parks, forests, and lakes. This was their Appalachia. In the rapidly modernizing postwar world of industrial work and store-bought goods, few people required the skills of the past. Canning, preserving, sewing quilts, gathering herbs and nuts, weaving baskets, curing hog meat—what once had been common practice began to fade from living memory.7
As the students interviewed elders, they formed and strengthened a shared connection to a fraught geographical place—Appalachia and, more specifically, the Blue Ridge Mountains that straddle the boundaries of North Georgia and Western North Carolina. The students of Foxfire set out to document the daily activities of their aging kin and neighbors before the knowledge they possessed disappeared. We can only dimly imagine what happened in the space of those interviews when adolescent youth sat with elderly women and men and asked them about their lives. What happens when that very intimate practice of sitting with and listening to a person becomes unmoored from place?
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Foxfire‘s positive portrayal of people who lived in the Georgia mountains countered the grossest, most negative stereotypes, also sold to the masses in the same era, principal, perhaps, the 1972 blockbuster film Deliverance. James Dickey, author of the best-selling 1970 novel of the same title, claimed to depict the place and people of Rabun County. Deliverance told the story of four businessmen from the suburbs who head to the mountains for a weekend of adventure. They face instead what literary scholar Emily Satterwhite describes as “an Appalachia that served as the site of a collective ‘nightmare.'” The plot revolves around the rape of one of the men by a reprehensible hillbilly, and it follows that the narrator must avenge his friend’s rape, prove his masculinity, and conquer the untamed wilderness.8
Through Foxfire, the real-life youth of Rabun County responded with stories of smart, witty, industrious people. They refused stories that claimed people in Appalachia were naturally violent and products of a culture of poverty. Foxfire emerged at a moment when the predominant images of the region were filtered through black-and-white photography that portrayed people as “white, deprived, and spiritless.” In the late 1960s and 1970s, many young people in Appalachia participated in new cultural movements to define Appalachia on their own terms, creating new media outlets and documenting in greater complexity the lives of people who lived in their communities.9
The idea of Appalachia communicated in Foxfire had the capacity to counter the harmful portrayals in media like Deliverance, but it also functioned in potentially more sinister ways within a broader political landscape, what historian Matthew Frye Jacobson has called the “evasions of whiteness.” The adult editors (all of them very likely white) demonstrated for the students an imagined past. Not unlike some of the most popular books on Appalachia then and now, Wigginton, the editor of the books, mourned that industriousness and hard work was on the wane. To study and preserve traditions of rural white people was good not just for the sake of history, but because that history contained lessons for people in the present. In such a rendering, the elders of Foxfire look more like mythic pioneers than 1970s Americans amid social upheavals, and we learn that those pioneers were consistently wholesome, good, and self-reliant. Foxfiresold a white ethnic identity that separated white Appalachians from skin privilege and the centuries-long history of American racism and domination, under renewed scrutiny in the crucible of the Black freedom struggle and 1970s liberation movements. While the early Foxfire books include an occasional story about a Black or Indigenous person, the story of white pioneer history remains intact. The presence of Black and Indigenous historical actors function as well to emphasize a parallel white ethnic identity of Appalachians.In countering Deliverance, the Foxfire project offered another form of deliverance.10
But in avoiding a complex and less-than-celebratory history, the books contributed to the history of settler colonialism in the nineteenth century, the violent clash as white settlers stole land from Indigenous people. We hear nothing of the six racial terror lynchings that occurred in the neighboring county or the dozens of others in North Georgia. We fail to learn how the Appalachian South came to be dominated by and identified with white people. The Foxfire project is largely silent on how midtwentieth-century liberation movements touched and transformed Appalachia. To sidestep those fuller stories, and to fail to account for past and ongoing harms, cuts short possibilities of building solidarity with oppressed people, one staked on a “sense of belonging” as described by Black feminist bell hooks in her poetry collection Appalachian Elegy. When detached from a complex past, Foxfire contributes to the construction of an imagined and static white Appalachia.11
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