REVIEW: FALLING LEAVES AND MOUNTAIN ASHES by Brenda George

Obediah himself once knew a life of prosperity and splendor, being a descendant of a wealthy aristocratic family who owned vast tobacco plantations and several distilleries in the Graves Mill area. His refusal to join the Confederate army during the Civil War, and his wild, unsavory lifestyle, had him disowned and banned from his family (who were all killed in the war anyway and their plantations totally destroyed by fires). His deeply-rooted resentment of authority allowed him to ignore the rights and wishes of the wealthy landowner, Devon Ansley,  on whose land Obediah defiantly established himself as a squatter.  To him, Claw Mountain was his inviolate kingdom and his mode of rule, both in the mountain and off,  was fear. He claimed Ansley Devon’s property as his own divine right, after Ansley decided for unknown reasons to abandon it.

 ”All in all, Obediah had sired an awesome tribe of twenty sons (three having died in infancy and one in childhood). The Buckos, as they became known, soon became greatly feared. Mean-spirited and wild, and from a very young age, they drank 100-proof whiskey produced from their father’s hidden still-site, and roamed the mountains, rocking shacks and cabins and folk with impunity, and using their guns and knives at the least provocation, a fact of which Obediah seemed immensely proud.”

In the media of yesteryear, the Claw Mountain dwellers were depicted as backwards, ignorant and shiftless. They were also caricatured as hillbillies living in squalid conditions. The agenda of the government and private interest group behind it was to vilify them enough so that their final destiny would not be frowned upon by the general public. But then an author such as Brenda George comes along and put the heart back into the people and their mountain and  expose these “false claims”  against the people.  (How false it was is debatable though).

There’s no reason to think that somebody who comes from the mountains can’t succeed. It’s just changing the contours of their expectations, and maybe the geography of their hearts. This story proved it.