We Might Be Related

I'm not even kidding.

Oct 01, 2020

Hi Friends,

Thanks for joining me for the very first edition of Sweet Tea! We’ve got a lot to talk about, so let’s dig in.

My people are from the North Georgia mountains. If your people are also from the North Georgia mountains, after thirty minutes or so of going back through our family trees chances are good we would find a relative or two in common somewhere in the distant or not so distant past. That’s the way things are in many parts of the South.

Just last year I met a new cousin for the first time. He stopped by my church’s pumpkin patch* where I was working and said, “Hey, Karla. Your mom told me you’d be here. I’m your cousin Bob Reece.” We had a great talk while his wife picked out a pumpkin or two.

Bob is related to me on my mom’s side of the family. Her mother was a Swain from Blairsville, Georgia, and she knew Bob from visiting with her mother’s family growing up. He lives not far from me now, and I’m glad he stopped by to say Hey. Mom connected us because Bob is also the nephew of one of our more famous distant cousins, poet Byron Herbert Reece, whom I had recently written a story about for Okra Magazine.

“Hub” to his friends, Byron Herbert Reece was a brilliant and talented poet living in an environment that wasn’t always favorable to writing. He was born in 1917 to a farm family who lived in a one-bedroom cabin on Wolf Creek in the Choestoe (cho-ee-sto-ee) community outside of Blairsville. He was a precocious child, reading all of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as well as the Bible by the time he started school at age six.

He was born into farming, though, and as his parents’ health deteriorated—they both had tuberculosis—he had to quit nearby Young Harris College to help on the farm. As he put it, “The leeway between us and starvation was narrow. I had to farm.”

This set up the tension that would frame much of the rest of his life. He was pulled between the poetry he wanted to create and the work he had to do to feed his family. After years of submitting poems to literary magazines, Reece published his first collection of poems, Ballad of the Bones, in 1945 and quickly discovered it’s hard to make a living as a poet. The book was met with critical acclaim but not with book sales. He couldn’t make enough money as a writer to stop farming, and the work of the farm made it difficult to find time to do the writing he wanted to do.

He worked on his writing as best he could around the planting seasons. He did two stints as the Poet in Residence at UCLA and worked in faculty rotations at Emory University and Young Harris College when he could. By the end of his life, he had written four collections of poetry and two novels, received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection, Bow Down in Jericho, and five Literary Achievement Awards from the Georgia Writers Association. He was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2001.

Sadly, Reece’s story ends tragically. He contracted tuberculosis and had to spend time at the tuberculosis hospital in Rome, Georgia. He fell into loneliness and despair that he wasn’t able to shake. If you’ll indulge me for quoting myself, I really can’t wrap up his life and work any better than I did in my article.

Reece’s struggle with both tuberculosis and a deep loneliness that followed him throughout his life cut his work short when he died by suicide in 1958. Much of Reece’s poetry, on the other hand, is a celebration of his mountain home and the rhythms of the seasons. While our modern lives can cause us to lose feelings of connectedness to people and place as we move more and more online, Reece’s work links us to a different time when our communities were more rooted to the land and each other. With a life finely tuned to the seasons and natural cycles of sowing and reaping, he teaches us to feel those primeval cadences as well. Lively imagery and the playful rhythms of mountain ballads give his mid-twentieth century poetry a fresh and relevant feeling today. Reece deserves to be read more widely.

I have been drawn to Reece’s life and work since the moment I first started studying him. I feel his writerly frustration with trying to make a living at this craft. I find the juxtaposition of the farmer-poet fascinating and wonder whether his peers at home truly appreciated his talent as a writer or whether his peers in the literary world truly understood the pull of his life as a farmer. I understand his ties to the land because the Georgia mountains are my heart too. I know he deeply loved and was loved by his family.

But I only know him through his biography, talking to professors who teach his work, and quick Messenger chats with Bob, and I wish I could have met him personally. While the Blairsville community is not exactly the back of beyond—former Georgia governor Zell Miller is from nearby Young Harris—the Wolf Creek area is quite remote by current standards and is a favorite of ours for weekend rambles.

The Byron Herbert Reece Society strives to continue his legacy today. The Reece Farm and Heritage Center, located on Highway 129 a mile north of Vogel State Park, not only preserves the relics of his life as a farmer, it celebrates his work as a writer. While the acres Reece farmed are now at the bottom of the lake at Vogel State Park, the Society conserved the farmstead including the barn and outbuildings. They moved the farmhouse to its current location to serve as the Visitors’ Center.

It’s always fun to find family you didn’t know about. While Reece’s story is sometimes one of frustration and loss, I feel a kindred spirit with him and his struggle to find balance between the thing he needed to do and the thing he wanted to do.

This is my personal favorite of Reece’s poems:

Roads
By Byron Herbert Reece

A pace or two beyond my door
Are highways racing east and west.
I hear their busy traffic roar,
Fleet tourists bound on far behests
And monstrous mastodons of freight
Passing in droves before my gate.
The roads would tow me far away
To cities whose extended pull
They have no choice but to convey;
I name them great and wonderful
And marvels of device and speed,
But all unsuited to my need.

My heart is native to the sky
Where hills that are its only wall
Stand up to judge its boundaries by;
But where from roofs of iron fall
Sheer perpendiculars of steel
On streets that bruise the country heel

My heart’s contracted to a stone.
Therefore whatever roads repair
To cities on the plain, my own
Lead upward to the peaks; and there
I feel, pushing my ribs apart,
The wide sky entering my heart.

*Every October Due West United Methodist Church hosts a pumpkin patch on the lawn of the South Sanctuary to raise money for the Youth Ministry. If you’re in the area, you should stop by and buy yourself a pumpkin or three.