The Stories We Echo

By Georgia Curtis Ling @GeorgiaCLing

I thought I was marrying a city boy from Columbus, Ohio. It turned out his roots ran just as deep in Appalachia as my own, maybe deeper. Hanging in our entryway is the proof: a sepia portrait of a family dressed in their Sunday best, posed on the front porch of a white clapboard two-story, framed against a mountain ridgeline. A mustached man seated, three young sons distributed across his lap, his wife standing behind him, and along the porch rail five girls and a cat, every one of them with the particular stillness of someone who has been told not to move—the work of some “picture man” who roamed those rugged roads, carrying a camera capturing faces of rural families, charging five or ten cents a family, making what living he could.

My husband’s ancestors put down roots in Matewan, West Virginia—Hatfield and McCoy stomping grounds—and one sweltering summer day, we went to find the family in the portrait. His great-grandfather Moses Alley didn’t belong to either of the notorious feuding families, but his farm shared a fence line with the Hatfields—they were neighbors.

Those roads are no joke—the terrain ranks among the roughest in the eastern United States. Improvements were in process, but at the time the only way in was a two-lane road barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other without flinching. It wound up and up through dense tree cover, the guardrails low and the drop-offs steep, until finally cresting a peak—with a view that might have been beautiful if your stomach hadn’t already dropped into your shoes. Then the road corkscrewed back down into a valley and then up again, and down again. I lost count of the mountains. I did not lose count of the Dramamine.

Matewan had a population of 600, and on that Sunday afternoon it seemed like all 600 were somewhere else. We walked the empty streets with the low feeling of people who have driven a long way for nothing. The single restaurant in town was open, so we went in and ordered, and that was where we stumbled onto our real treasure: an elderly woman named Mrs. Aileen Phillips, who read us for strangers the moment we walked in and came over to find out why. When we explained what we’d come looking for, she pulled her chair closer and didn’t stop talking for a good while. She sent us back out the door with directions, a cemetery location, and a key to the Historical Museum.

With Mrs. Phillips’s directions in hand, we headed back into the mountains, and a mile outside of town we found it—what was left of it. The farm had mostly been sold off over the years; what remained sat on a high ridge with the creek and valley spread out below. The old house had nearly disappeared into the hillside, consumed by decades of kudzu vines and brush, the small family cemetery beside it half-hidden behind a leaning fence. We made a run at that fence in the full heat of the afternoon, the mosquitoes treating us like a buffet, but the combination of unstable footing and the very real possibility of rattlesnakes eventually talked us out of it. We took our pictures from outside—my husband and son on the ground where Moses Alley’s family had worked and buried their dead—and stood there a moment in the blazing heat, thinking about what it had taken to build anything at all. But they did build something—legacy. Moses and his wife, Martha, who raised her children in the faith, had carved out a life up there, hemmed in by mountains and no shortage of trouble, and something of it lasted.

Moses Alley came into the world in 1862, two years after the feud’s first killing, and spent the next three decades of that bloody war living fence-line close to one of its principals without ever being drawn in. He farmed, he built things, and like his father before him, he was a circuit-riding preacher. His children would remember him building coffins for the feud’s victims, but that was the extent of it. Mrs. Phillips told us she had heard him preach as a little girl and that it felt, she said, like “a touch of heaven.”

Heritage moves through us whether we invite it or not. Moses Alley never laid eyes on his great-grandson, and yet here my husband is—a preacher’s kid with deep roots from Appalachia carrying the same Word to hungry ears. That is the echo of one quiet mountaineer who passed down a spiritual heritage from generation to generation that’s reached thousands of people across the world. There’s even something of Moses in the way our son moves through the world—the instinct toward peace in a place that didn’t always reward it. The feud ran out of steam before Moses did. By the time he married his third wife—a Hatfield—he had buried two others in that little cemetery you could see from the front porch. He spent his whole life on that mountain—built coffins for the dead and preached the gospel to the living, and kept the peace with his family and his in-laws both. But the mountains that hemmed him in couldn’t contain what he left behind.

What moves through our writing moves through us first. What we believe has a way of surfacing in what we write, even when we aren’t trying. The novel that wrestles honestly with darkness, that insists on mercy, that keeps circling back to the possibility of restoration, redemptive hope—it carries something spiritual the reader may not be able to name but will recognize. The last page of the book you’re writing is where the book ends. The echo is something else. 

Your book you’ve poured your heart and soul into goes into a box, onto a shelf, into the hands of someone you’ll never meet, in a moment you can’t anticipate. Somewhere down the line, on a day so humid the cardboard boxes have gone soft, someone—maybe even your great-grandchild—is up in a sweltering attic sorting through what the dead left behind, and pulls out a paperback, your paperback. She sits down on the dusty attic floor with it, back against an old trunk, and opens to the first page. Something in those pages finds her at exactly the right moment—though she won’t know that until she’s finished. The headshot on the back cover won’t tell her much. Neither will the author’s bio, or the sales figures, or whether the book was ever reviewed. It won’t matter. She won’t be searching for you. She’ll be searching for something else entirely, and she’ll find it there anyway. Because the novel carries your echo long after you’ve gone quiet.

“Each generation tells of your faithfulness to the next.” Isaiah 38:19

A bestselling, inspirational storyteller of hope-fueled fiction, Georgia Curtis Ling was born and raised in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Eastern Kentucky. Influenced by her heritage, Georgia has a unique voice in Inspirational Christian Fiction with her contemporary Appalachian tales, which include her bestselling Spring Valley Heartwarming Romance series and the Pastors’ Wives Club Suspense series, including the #1 Amazon Bestseller Contemporary Religious Fiction But There Were Signs and her latest release, When Daylight is Gone.