Following the horrific state-sanctioned killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota this past January, a trend emerged in folklore circles on social media, asserting that ICE’s next target should be Appalachia, as there are “numerous undocumented immigrants” to be found hiding in the woods there. An Instagram reel from author Piper CJ offers helpful advice: “This group of individuals is known to communicate largely through whistling at this stage, so that should be your key, and you should follow those sounds to find them.” Other advice instructs ICE agents to search primarily at night, to promptly answer if they hear their names called in the woods, and to not worry about deer that “look a little strange, that’s just how they look.”
Piper, who has a Master’s in folklore, was one of several Instagram users posting content with the premise of encouraging ICE agents to do exactly what local superstitions tell you not to do. Of course, it’s difficult to credit the originator of this trend, seeing as viral memes on social media behave much as folklore does. That is, they produce endless variations in lieu of a single, easily identifiable “author.” And considering the rage and grief incurred by the state violence carried out in Minnesota this past winter, it’s easy to imagine that some content creators, Appalachian or otherwise, may have conceived of this idea concurrently as a cathartic response to Good and Pretti’s killings. Pluck the perpetrators from the civilized urban environments they’ve been terrorizing with impunity and throw them instead into the pitch-black woods, a place that, in our cultural imagination, ritually punishes outsiders for their ignorance and arrogance.
But I think I should tread carefully; I’m an outsider, too. I moved to northern Georgia in 2019, though, like much of the country it seems, I was unaware that “Appalachia” extended into Georgia at all. Georgia Appalachia is not Tennessee Appalachia is not Pennsylvania Appalachia. Even the pronunciation differs depending on where you are (Appa-LAY-shuh in the North, Appa-LATCH-uh in the South). Yet the region is often viewed as a monolith, written off politically, dismissed culturally, linked in the mind to poverty, opioid addiction, backwardness, and exploitation. Never mind the region’s complicated alignment during the Civil War, the labor resistance movements of the early 20th Century, the union songs that went on to inspire folk singers of the Sixties. Never mind Cherokee, North Carolina, which lies an hour and a half away from me, populated by a folk who successfully resisted their own displacement. Economist Richard M. Simon notes that Appalachia is often defined by its relationship to labor. “The penetration of capital,” he says, “transformed the Appalachian frontier region symbolized by the mountaineer and the long rifle into an industrialized region symbolized by wage-labor (coal mining) and railroads.” But my Georgia Appalachia had copper and gem mines and few railroads to speak of. In the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority dammed Appalachia’s rivers, supplying the region with electricity in exchange for a few flooded towns, their inhabitants forced to relocate, their ancestral dead exhumed and reburied. The dams created a new cache of recreational lakes to bring in tourists, and this tourism economy is what primarily supports and afflicts the remote rural area I now call home.
All this to say, it’s a complicated place, a nexus of narrative contradictions that make it both a wondrous and frustrating place to live.
At the college where I teach creative writing, many of my students are locals. I’ve had the honor to teach two folklore courses there, not because I consider myself an expert, but because I’m always hungry for stories. Certainly, the students have obliged. I know about the ghost in the Theatre building, which demonstrates a special ire toward femme-presenting students. I know to never pick up hitchhikers on mountain roads, and to never shoot a deer that moves strangely and looks straight at me, and I know that if I hear or see something in the deep dark woods behind my house, I should pretend as if I didn’t. I add these stories to my bank of knowledge while the students learn how so much folklore is inextricably bound to place. Often, folklore is a means of demarcating the boundaries of a place, its rules and taboos and local secrets. These become ingrained in us to the point where place becomes invisible, even when it’s unforgivingly, oppressively real.
So, I ask my students: What consideration do you give to place when writing fiction? After an awkward pause they often concede, Not much consideration at all. Not in a first draft, anyway; they’d rather prioritize character and plot. Cue scenes of bodiless people quipping with each other inside featureless rooms. How do you even have a story until you have a place in which it occurs? How can you have characters without bodies, or locations those bodies can inhabit, or even some sense of where those bodies are from or where they’re going? In The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin describes the chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships.” Plot (a sequence of events in time) and space. A plot only becomes “artistically visible” when time “thickens” and “takes on flesh;” space, in turn, “becomes charged and responsive to the movements” of plot, and the two form a knot that makes a story. Literally, story embodiment. But many of my students have lived prominently in a digital landscape, which tricks them into thinking of place as something amorphous and abstract. Now more than ever place is an afterthought, though I have to admit, it always kind of was. That’s why we call it the background.
But this is illusory thinking. As a writer, and especially as a writer of horror, I find it important to remember that we’re subject to place in ways we’d rather not be. In Dorothy Allison’s essay, “Place,” she describes it as emotion, as people, the locus of all fear and anxiety. Place, she says, “is your specific tender body that your momma loves so much,” as vulnerable as it is inescapable.
Let’s consider the ICE agents again, this crew of arrogant outsiders in the Appalachia woods. Say one of them has been separated from his team—had to stop and pee, maybe, such a pesky bodily necessity—and now it’s just trees and endless dark on all sides, and there’s mud and rot under the leaves, causing his boots to slip. The hairs of his arms begin to rise, and he can hear his own blood pounding in his ears, and now he can sense someone nearby, someone walking, but because he didn’t grow up in these woods, he doesn’t know the difference between the sound of a deer in the brush and the sound of a man, and because his eyes are unused to the dark, he can’t make out the shape past the beam of his flashlight, whether it’s man or deer or some other ungodly thing. Even so, he can feel it looking at him, seeing through him, rooting him to the spot. And for all his pride and posturing, the heavy black weapon at his side, the tactical gear strapped to his chest, in that moment, right before his knees give way, surely, he remembers a truth he always tried to forget—that no place, certainly not this place, belongs to anybody.
