pockets and bought jalopies for the long trek south. Others came by train. A few hitchhiked their way down a circuitous corridor of decaying pavement that led them to an odd little town beneath the timbered shelter of the Blue Ridge.
They were the outsiders. They didn’t belong. They looked around them. It wasn’t New York. And it wasn’t home. It was somewhere in between, not unlike purgatory.
Whispers drifted down the streets of Abingdon.
“The boy’s lost his mind,”
“He wasn’t quite right to start with.”
“He ain’t never been himself.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He’s always playing like he’s somebody else.”
“The prodigal’s back.
Robert Porterfield heard the grumbling and the complaints. They did not bother him. Only failure troubled him. He would not fail. In time, Porterfield was advertising: “Ham for Hamlet.” He immediately strung up a large banner across Town Hall that said: “With the vegetables you cannot sell, you can buy a good laugh.”
Abingdon smiled. Abingdon had not laughed in a long time.
On June 10, 1933, the curtain rose on a three-act drama called After Tomorrow. Admission was thirty cents, but the farmers who lived back among the highlands liked the idea of swapping victuals for tickets. With money becoming as scarce as hen’s teeth, it was a time-honored practice in rural America. Country folks bartered eggs for sugar, corn for tobacco, tobacco for rent, cows for cars, and cars for more cows. In the Blue Ridge, the fine art of bartering had already been a way of life for two centuries.
After Tomorrow was played before a full house. Sure the admission had been a nickel more than a movie ticket, but these were real actors, performing so close that those on the front row could reach out and touch them, see the sweat on their faces, smell their breath whether they wanted to or not.
Down below, the prisoners were unruly. Loud. Abrasive. Curses filled the silence. For them, “after tomorrow” would be no different than “the day before.” The actors were unruffled. Of course, Town Hall also held the fire house, and when the alarm sounded, those on stage merely froze in their positions, waiting until the wail died away before moving steadily ahead with the performance.
As the season ran through the summer, theater patrons found all sorts of ways to pay for their tickets. Live hogs. Dead snakes, tasted like chicken. At least they did when an actor had an empty table for supper. Toothpaste. Underwear. A dozen eggs. Tobacco. And vegetables. Wash tubs full of vegetables. A jar of homemade liquor, for medicinal purposes, of course, and actors were always sick of the rain, sick of the sun, sick of rehearsals, sick of the prisoners, sick of the howling dogs that replaced the prisoners in the cells below the stage. The dogs were suspected of having rabies.
Robert Porterfield looked up late one afternoon, only thirty minutes before the curtain was scheduled to be raised, and he saw a farmer and his wife walking slowly down the street and toward the box office leading a cow and carrying a battered tin bucket.
“How much for a ticket?” the farmer asked.
Porterfield thought it over and answered, “I guess a gallon will be enough.”
The farmer tied the cow to a lamp post, knelt down, grabbed a teat, and milked a two-gallon bucket half full. He showed it to Porterfield. The lady in the box office smiled and handed him a ticket.
“What about your wife?” Porterfield asked with a puzzled expression.. “Doesn’t she want to see the play?”
The farmer shrugged and leaned against the wall.. “Probably does,” he said. “But she can milk her own ticket.”
As the first year ended, Porterfield counted the coins and realized that the troupe had eaten well but had earned a mere four dollars and thirty-five cents in cold, hard cash. He promptly sent it to the Motion Picture Relief Fund. The troupe didn’t need the money. Members of the company already knew they had notched themselves a successful year. Together, they had gained slightly more than three hundred pounds.
Playwrights fully expected to receive royalties for their plays that were performed on the theatrical stage in Abingdon, Virginia. They generally received money. No. They always received money. Porterfield didn’t send them any. This was, after all, a barter theater. Instead of royalty payments, he sent whole Virginia hams to Noel Coward, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, and George Bernard Shaw.
No one complained, no one, that is, except the crusty and iconoclastic George Bernard Shaw. “How could you do this?” he asked Porterfield.
“It’s a perfectly good ham.”
“No doubt,” the eccentric Irish genius said. “But I am a vegetarian.”
Robert Porterfield understood. There were times, he knew, when he needed to make exceptions, and this was one of them. He apologized profusely. He swore that such a grievous error would never happen again.
Shaw accepted the apology. He sat back and awaited his royalty check.
Robert Porterfield sent George Bernard Shaw two crates of spinach.
Anvil With A Song
Somewhere on the outskirts of
Spruce Pine, North Carolina
Pop: 2030
The Scene: Spruce Pine nestles within the timbered ridges of the Blue Ridge Mountains that cut through the heart of North Carolina’s Appalachian country. The Blue Ridge contains the highest mountains in eastern North America with a hundred and twenty-five peaks climbing taller than five thousand feet.
The Sights: The highest in North Carolina is Mount Mitchell, reaching up for 6,684 feet, and the region can be viewed with a leisurely drive along the famed Blue Ridge Parkway, often regarded as America’s favorite highway. The road winds along the rooftop of the region, easing past mountain meadows with split rail fences surrounding old farmsteads and weaving together two national parks: Shenandoah in Virginia and the Great Smoky Mountains, which links Tennessee to North Carolina.
The Setting: Gillespie Gap, hidden away in the distant shadows of the Blue Ridge, nestles among such communities as Bald Creek, Rabbit Hop, and Hoot Owl Hollow. It is a land rich with artisans, its ridge lines settled in another century by a rare breed of independent, practical, and stubborn people who never asked for anything more than the Good Lord had given them.
From corn shucks they braided harnesses for mules and wove dolls, rugs, and scrub mops. From river cane and split oak came baskets. And leather was used to make their own shoes, vests, hats, rawhide chair bottoms, and even hinges for wooden doors. The creative mind of the artisan remains.
The Story: Perhaps for the first time this afternoon, Bea Hensley’s anvil was quiet, and there was total silence in Gillespie Gap. Even the winds had died away. Not even the winds dared
