Vandalia: The Fiction and Truth of West Virginia
Stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the snowy peaks of Alaska’s Brooks Range in the Arctic Circle to Florida’s swampy Everglades in the Gulf of Mexico, the United States of America is as diverse topographically as it is culturally. Each state of the U.S. may as well be its own country made up of its own jargon, customs, state song, and origin story. Take, for example, the landlocked, rugged state of North Dakota and the tropical islands of Hawaii. From their locations, climates, and people’s lifestyles, how could they be more different? Even the name “United States of America” juxtaposes the ideals of state independence and national unity which is further developed in our government’s system: a federal republic.
In the early 2000s, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey set out to compile a collection of fifty authors on fifty essays. Upon returning to the States after living abroad for four years, Weiland “was hitting the Americana hard”; he wanted to “experience again some simple American virtues: the essential looseness of American lives, the vitality and variety of American vistas, the cut and jib of American talk.” From this stemmed the questions: what makes Americans Americans? Yet also, what differentiates Americans in one state from another? And zooming in even further, how can we capture “the richness of lives we don’t know,” the nuances in each American?
Weiland compares State by State to “a road trip in book form,” something that is “personal, eccentric, and partial” rather than comprehensive, exhaustive, and formulaic, for that was already attempted by the WPA American Guide series. In the 1930s during the Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project employed over 6,000 American writers to create tour guides of more than 500 pages each of every state. While Weiland and Wilsey sent the WPA guides of their assigned state to each of the contributors as inspiration, they hoped to receive personal stories, one of each state. We seem to know little about “America and the lives lived here,” our knowledge coming only from personal experience, history taught in school, maps seen in atlases, and American media consumed. The fifty states together constitute America’s identity, so perhaps the best way to know more about our country and its people is to learn “each state’s particularities and idiosyncrasies, their beauty marks and moles.” Those distinctions also appear in the state’s people: where you’re from largely defines your character and differentiates you as an American from someone in another state.
Wilsey experienced the road trip firsthand in the fall of 2002. He set out to drive from west Texas to New York City with his friend Michael Meredith and his dog named Charlie Chaplin. Perhaps the most surprising part of this excursion was that they were traveling in a pickup truck from 1960 (the same year Steinbeck took his trip which became Travels with Charley) that went, at most, 45 miles per hour. However, the slowness was what Wilsey longed for. Not only did the 9/11 plane crashes happen twenty blocks from his apartment, but also in the months before that, several of his loved ones passed away. This road trip would give him the time and space to grieve those losses.
San Antonio was one of the cities that Wilsey, Charlie, and Michael Meredith stopped in. They met a man named Don Harris who delivered to them a monologue about the city.
“San Antonio has always seemed to me to be a city out of a Borges story, particularly one with
knife fighters, political thugs, and Hispanic-Irish gangsters, like Death and the Compass. The
past here is so intense that it’s also the present, and nothing ever really disappears. The city’s
always existed with wild Indians, soldiers, priests, vaqueros, pachucos, socialites, aristocrats,
writers, and working people, in a constant mix. Conrad’s favorite writer, R. B. Cunninghame
Graham, the Scottish lord—the real king of Scotland some say—spent several years in San
Antonio, attempting to become a cattle baron, going broke, and then, out of desperation,
beginning his writing career with an account of a hanging in Cotulla for the San Antonio
Express. Stephen Crane wandered around with the Chili Queens in the same plaza where the
Comanches would ride into town and receive tribute – pay or the town would be burnt and
looted. Till recently it was represented by Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez, the boxer
congressman – who flattened another congressman with a single punch, and tried to impeach the
first Bush.”
He goes on for quite a bit more…
Don Harris’s disquisition on San Antonio perhaps serves as an appetizer to the fifty state essays that follow Wilsey’s introduction; he offers his personal perspective on the city which, although it may differ from San Antonio’s other residents, is more valuable than a vague, superficial list of facts and statistics.
Wilsey’s road trip perhaps didn’t turn out to be the most pleasant, luxuriating, and easeful getaway that he had thought of. Meredith needed to arrive in New York City in six days which was impossible. Their friendship was fragile; they “tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends,” here Wilsey quoting Jack Kerouac describing his and his driving companion Neal Cassady’s relationship in his travelog On the Road. Death seemed to hover over Wilsey throughout the trip, as Charlie dug up a dead animal in Kingsport, Tennessee the night that Wilsey and Meredith decided to part ways in order for Meredith to arrive on time. Just as Weiland alluded to, Wilsey’s road trip experience somewhat parallels a reader’s journey through State by State: the initial excitement and relief of immersing into a new state and leaving one’s familiar home, the surprise and intrigue whilst enjoying the story, and the careful, critical eye that’s always alert.
West Virginia is located in the pocket between Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, and Maryland. It is the only state with two panhandles that jut out of its main body. American journalist John Gunther suggested that West Virginia’s geographic outline resembled a squid, but I think it’s shaped like a frog leaping towards Tennessee. The Appalachian Mountains run through the entire state, thereby earning it its nickname, the “Mountain State.” From the 1670s, colonial Virginia (when Virginia and West Virginia were one state) viewed these tall, rugged mountains as a valuable buffer protecting it from the French and Indians. However, this geographical barrier seemed to gradually isolate western Virginians from the rest of Virginia. Eastern and western Virginia were not only divided between slaveholding and non-slaveholding, but the Virginian state government also refused to build necessary “internal improvements—turnpikes, canals, and railroads” in West Virginia. For a variety of reasons, on June 20th, 1863, West Virginia became its own state.
Jayne Anne Phillips was born in West Virginia on July 19, 1952, grew up in West Virginia, and graduated from West Virginia University in 1974 with a Bachelor of Arts. She then went on a cross-country trip to California, an experience which influenced her writing. Later, she graduated from Iowa Writers’ Workshop, taught at universities such as Harvard and Boston University, and founded the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Rutgers University–Newark. In 1976, Phillips published Sweethearts, her first collection of short stories, but it was her third collection Black Tickets (1979) that brought her national recognition as a writer, earning her the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. Nadine Gordimer, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, called her “the best short story writer since Eudora Welty.” After Black Tickets, Phillips wrote her first novel Machine Dreams (1984), following up with Shelter (1994) and her most recent novel Quiet Dell (2013).
Phillips’ debut novel, Machine Dreams, follows the Hampson family’s experiences from the Great Depression through the Vietnam War. The novel begins with Jeans Hampson’s vivid memories: “I was three years old. I saw my hands on the phone box, and my shoes, and the scratchy brown fabric of the dress I was wearing.” She tells stories from her childhood until her adulthood in the form of a letter to her daughter Danner. Then, Phillips alternates perspectives between each family member, staying in first person, painting the power struggle between Jeans and Mitch in their marriage, the extraordinary bond between siblings Danner and Billy, and finally the breaking down of Danner as she struggles to keep her family intact.
Phillips’ second novel, Shelter, is set in a West Virginian girl’s camp where sisters Lenny and Alma undergo a rite-of-passage. Writing in the third person this time, she creates a barrier between the reader and the characters, distancing the reader from the characters’ thoughts, unlike in Machine Dream. Furthermore, she immerses the reader into the camp culture and its surroundings, conveying the camp’s isolation and eeriness.
Quiet Dell, her latest novel, is based on a true story of Harry Powers’s murder of a widow and her three children in the title town of West Virginia. Similar to the exposition of Machine Dreams, this novel starts with Annabel recounting childhood memories with her sister Grethe, father, and grandmother in their hometown in Illinois. The family tells their last year alive, how they were lured to Quiet Dell. Then, Emily Thornhill, a Chicago reporter, picks up the story, determined to ensure that Powers is convicted. Phillips grasps her creative authority to bring justice to the widows and children murdered by Powers.
Phillips’ essay contains so much: West Virginia’s origins, family legends, and Buckhannon’s football games, but it is her authentic yen for contemplating fiction and truth and her transparency in revealing herself as a fiction writer, despite her task, that ties the piece together. She begins the essay by painting the lush landscape that hosts an abundance of life: a paradise full of birds swooping through the verdant forests, bears, deer, and bison roaming the mountains, and schools of fish swimming in the rivers. The land was home to “miles of towering evergreens, mountain glades that suggested northern tundra, acres of rhododendron, and the ancient box huckleberry.” Phillips emphasizes how the Native Americans preserved its wilderness and beauty, using it “only for hunting and attendant ceremonies and rituals.” Then, the Europeans arrived, creating the colony of Virginia. They had sought western sea routes to Asia but instead discovered the rivers snaking through leafy hills: the New River Gorge and the rushing waters of the Kanawha at the Great Kanawha Falls.
Though more colonies formed, wild western Virginia remained at the frontier of European colonies, attracting ambitious and tenacious settlers. Phillips tells the story of Morgan Morgan who was originally thought to be the first settler of western Virginia and “recognized no Crown.” Phillips refers to its inhabitants as either “oppressors or [those who] fled oppression,” people seeking the freedom to either control others or their own lives. This included two hundred Germans who were kicked out of Pennsylvania. In 1762, one of Lord Fairfax’s nephews became the first magistrate in charge in the town of Romney; however, Phillips claims that “government was fiction” in western Virginia.
During the French and Indian War, a group of Shawnee raided Draper’s Meadow, a Virginian outpost with a population of around twenty, killing or capturing most of the residents except William Ingles who sought refuge in the woods. On the other hand, his wife Mary was captured and taken to Ohio where she learned skills such as making salt. She ultimately escaped and trekked more than eight hundred miles back to Draper’s Meadow, exhibiting extreme tenacity. Today, Draper’s Meadow, now known as Blacksburg, belongs to the state of Virginia, located near its southwestern border with West Virginia. Phillips’ inclusion of this anecdote despite the town’s modern location indicates West Virginia’s transcendence of boundaries; rather than a state or colony closed off by man-made ley lines and natural obstacles, West Virginia prevails as a region influenced by its neighbors.
Phillips reveals the nooks and crannies of West Virginian history, disclosing the shocking might-have-been about West Virginia: it was almost established before the Revolutionary War!
“Lord Dunmore’s War left them [early Colonials] a mobilized force and cleared the way for the Revolution, sweeping away Benjamin Franklin’s already approved proposal that western Virginia be declared a fourteenth colony. The colony was to be called Vandalia. Vandalia: a name for a paradise, a word Cervantes used to denote an imaginary place in his mythical Don Quixote.Had revolution held off another year, western Virginia’s secession from Virginia eight decades later need never have happened; Vandalians might have forged a more viable world in the mountains and forests, a world not so easily bought and sold.”
Phillips conveys the semi-tragic nature of West Virginia’s statehood, as she emphasizes “the name [Vandalia] and the paradise were forgotten.” What if the colony of Vandalia had been created? Perhaps West Virginians have a nag in their hearts that they don’t fit in with the others. Phillips elaborates on their isolation in colonial Virginia: instead of Vandalians (who were never formed), “frontiersmen fought the Revolution from sixty isolated forts in the mountains… they helped win the war but lost the peace: political skirmishes between eastern and western Virginia began in earnest.” One can really see how Phillips, a native West Virginian, is suffused with melancholy about not being separated from the Old Dominion from 1775.
This reminds me of Benjamin Franklin’s reflection on his failed Albany Plan of Union (1754) when he was on his deathbed in 1790. The Albany Plan of Union was a plan to unify the British colonies of America under a centralized government long before brewings of the American Revolution even began. Had the plan succeeded, perhaps the separation of the American colonies from Great Britain need not have happened, saving them many resources and hardship. With a centralized government, Franklin realized that the colonies could have erected a militia to fight in the French and Indian War. Then, Britain wouldn’t have sent military personnel to the colonies nor taxed the colonies after the war to pay off debt. The Proclamation of 1763, Stamp Act, Boston Massacre, Tea Act, and finally the Intolerable Acts likely would have never existed, nor would the colonists’ resentment of the British empire that grew from them. The American colonies could have coexisted in the British empire in Franklin’s plan.
Phillips further portrays the divide between western and eastern Virginia, especially in their values. To western Virginians, “Geography was morality: There were no plantations in the mountains, no acres of fields. Farmers and woodsmen in the still wild western territory sustained themselves, growing what they ate, trapping, hunting.” But what led to their independence and self-sustainment? Was it the wildness of the land? Or eastern Virginia’s neglect of its western counterpart? For their own hard work, western Virginians were taxed more because owning livestock costed more than owning a slave, on which eastern Virginia’s economy depended. When West Virginians advocated for more funds for public development, Virginia constructed a lunatic asylum named the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, “for indigents and outcasts, for the odd and insane and homeless.” As the first publicly funded institution built in West Virginia, Virginians seemed to condescend to West Virginians right out of the gate, shunting their own crazies out to the “only state mental institution west of the Alleghenies.”
When it comes to the Civil War, the state of West Virginia is, well, one could say, ground zero. Formed as a state during the war, the state is symbolic of the preservation of the Union. Only one month after Virginia seceded from the Union on April 17, 1861, the Pro-Union Virginians chose to remain with the Union and created the Restored Government of Virginia. Although West Virginia obtained statehood in 1863, it was not only the location for seven battles, but as both the Union and Confederacy fought over its ownership throughout the war, “some towns changed hands fifty times.” Virginia and West Virginia continued to face conflicts. After the war, Congress and the Restored Government of Virginia required West Virginia to pay fourteen million dollars of Virginia’s debt. This was an insult to West Virginia’s independence founded on the very blood spilt in the Civil War. In response, West Virginia passed the Test Act, disallowing fifteen thousand Confederate veterans the right to vote which in turn bolstered Union veterans’ egos.
West Virginia wasn’t given much time to celebrate its independence, as “the capitalists moved in,” and the actual land and wealth of the new state was “shipped… to the northern cities”. Even as recently as the 1980s through early 2000s, West Virginia continues to suffer from exploitation of its natural resources. Coal companies encroached on the Appalachians and “simply blast[ed] off” mountaintops, dumping all of the debris into the rivers below, “destroying watersheds and the checks and balances” of the surrounding ecosystem. The harmony between the flora and fauna and the people was disturbed; the once sacred hunting grounds, the formidable peaks that protected colonists were disfigured by mere man-made explosives. In addition to the abuse of the land, Phillips includes the mistreatment of West Virginians. The out-of-state companies “brought in their own men,” and the revenue flowed into the economies of those states, not that the money could ever compensate for the damage imposed on the Appalachians. Still happening today, after their business is finished, the companies “‘restore’ the tops of the mountains to level, moon-like landscapes, seeded with grass and little trees, and move on,” demeaning the grand peaks and lofty trunks that once stood. Housing a diverse ecosystem comparable to the Amazon rainforest, West Virginia, Phillips laments, “is no longer paradise.”
After presenting a rich portrait of West Virginia’s history, Phillips has not only established herself as a proud citizen of her home state but also passed the knowledge onto us readers. Yet is its history representative of West Virginia today? What does Phillips try to convey about West Virginia through this essay? Answers can be found in her commentary on story and fiction, integrated into the discussion of her family history. Phillips remarks that “if all stories are fiction, fiction can be true,” a rather unconventional and philosophical comment amidst the narration of her family legends and the depiction of the history of the land that became West Virginia, as well as its formation in the 1860s. She puts to us: if a story is fiction, then it must be made-up to some extent; if fiction can be true, then what is non-fiction? Phillips adds that fiction can be true, not necessarily in its content, “but in some transformed version of feeling.” Prior to this remark, she reveals two stories: 1) her father was neglected by his parents who left him to his aunts when he was a baby to take care of him, which inevitably incited 2) rumors and gossip amongst the townspeople, themselves stories, fact or fiction, depending upon the teller. While neither her family’s nor the townspeople’s version of the story may be entirely true, the telling of both versions has certainly shaped each of their perspectives on Phillips’ family.
The intertwining of fiction and truth continues throughout the essay as Phillips recalls her mother’s reasoning for preventing her sons from playing football. In high school, her mother had fallen in love with a classmate, William Goodwin. The “youngest of five brothers”, Phillips calls him “an adult child” possibly because his father died from a heart attack when William was 12. All the other brothers became doctors and administered special care to their mother, but “she, too, died”. The author’s mother and William were together for two years until on the way home from a date, William complained of chest pain, which the doctor diagnosed it as heartburn. Still worried, Phillips’ mother phoned one of William’s doctor brothers who said, “Tell him to keep still until I get there,” but he got out of bed, “to wash his face”. He “died in the bathroom of the rooming house,” from a heart attack. Phillips’ mother was asked to plan his funeral. This event marked the author’s mother so much that she possessed an unflagging fear of her loved ones dying from heart attacks. At least twenty years later, Phillips’ mother carries this experience with her, referencing it or unconsciously reacting to it with her now growing sons. “She said she’d seen a boy die on the field once, hit too hard. The story may have been fiction. She’d seen a boy die: That was true. Or she’d seen it in her mind, over and over, the boy on the bathroom floor, in the rooming house.” Here, Phillips distinguishes between the fiction and truth of her mother’s logic: while she hadn’t seen a boy die on the field, she had seen a boy, namely her lover, William, die. However, her fictional story that she had seen a boy die on the football field transformed her sons’ realities as, in accordance with their mother’s wish, they didn’t play football in high school.
Phillips’ commentary on truth and fiction harkens back to the idea of Vandalia, a name for paradise, well-suited to describe the would-have-been fourteenth colony. It not only represents the possibility of western Virginians seceding from main Virginia before the American Revolution but more importantly West Virginia’s identity. Although Vandalia never materialized, Phillips remarks that “if there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist,in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own”; Vandalia is not lost but forever stored inside the memory of West Virginians and their descendants. It doesn’t matter that West Virginians today weren’t alive to experience the near-formation of Vandalia because “story conquers all distance,” including time and physical separation. Phillips illustrates West Virginians’ eternal bond to the land and each other. Regardless of whether they stay in West Virginia or leave, “they share the feel and smell and mind’s eye image of a narrow road in summer, a dirt road or a paved one, bordered by woods and fragrant weeds, overhung with trees, twisting deeper.” All of them “stand in the middle” of West Virginia’s story; they are West Virginians forever.