Hello Everyone: I just picked up a Lee Smith novel. Have any of you read them? This one is called "Oral History" published 1983, earlier ones were "Cakewalk" and "Black Mountain Breakdown". I always loved Catherine Cookson because she wrote in Cockney dialect (English), and this author writes in Hillbilly dialect. Lee Smith has also written "The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed", "Something in the Wind", "Fancy Strut", and she's written for several mags,including Carolina Quarterly and Southern Exposure. Her expertise is in the SC NW mountains. The first chapter is by Granny Younger - names she uses are familiar ones to our Matneys and Broadwaters, some of our McCullys are from NC, this is all hill country. I'm just going to type some of the dialogue for the names and the language - if you want to know the plot you'll have to round up the books. Maybe we can look for them and trade paperbacks. My space bar isn't working all the time so if I run words together hope you can figure it out. "His Daddy, Charles Vance Cantrell, was a big old man as mean as a snake and hard on women and children. He had him one gold tooth in the front. Charles Vance Cantrell was Irish or so he said at one time. He had him a long gold chain with a big watch on it that had some dates and "Dublin" carved into the back,but don't you know he lost it in a poker game at old Joe Johnson's store like he lost those mules and everything else he owned sooner or later except his land, and Lord knows it's surprising how he never lost that too. He never put up his land. Anyway, Charles Vance Cantrell - they called him Van - was a fat old man who gambled a lot and would just as soon strike you as speak. He come by ship, he said, and then by wagon, and they was religion mixed up in it someway,but of course you couldn't never prove it by Van Cantrell. He brung that wife of hisn, that Nell, from Ireland with him,or so we thought, although wasn't nobody sure since she was so ashy-pale and she never said a word until Van went off to fight in the war after which she perked right up. It would have been all right with me if she had not, now that's the truth. I never give a fig for Nell. Anyway, Van went off through Indian Grave Gap, over Snowman Mountain and down into West Virginia, where he joined up with the Union. Nobody knowed if he joined with the Union out of principle or because, what I thought, it was the quickest army to get to, and Van Cantrell ever loved a fight. Now some men hereabouts took up one side or the other. There was nary a slave in the county. So they done what they felt to do.It split some families down the middle. I'll tell you that. Churches too. They is a church in Abingdon that to this day has got one door for those who stood with the Union in the war and one door for Johnny Reb, and this is true, and I'll swearit. To this day Van Cantrell stayed with the army as long as he could,and lost one leg above the knee afore he come home.Things were different when he got back, he found out right away. Old Nell was up and farming! She had planted her some cabbage and some corn; she had three hogs on the side of Hurricane Mountain. She never got back in bed neither. She didn't have to, since Van was laid up hisself and couldn't get around like he used to do. Thank God! is what she thought. But she needed some help of course, and so she had them three boys right in a row- stairstep boys, with Almarine in the middle. The other two, Riley and Shelby Dick, took after their daddy, and they growed up a fighting and a-fussing just like him. They would throw your wash off the line.I've seed it, they tromped on their mama's beans. It was clear from the beginning that they would kill each other or get kilt theirselves before they was through, which is what they nearabout did. To be continued: