• By MEREDITH REDLIN
• FOR THE SOUTHERN QUARTERLY

Ya shore cain't miss 'em--the central crude icons in their cartoon glory dominate the drawings of Bruce Burris in these pieces from the "trail a fears" installation. The caricatured people are ugly, dirty, ignorant and, above all, familiar. They are the stuff of jokes--the Daisy Mae-s and worn-out hags, Jed the moonshiner and his violent, feudin' cousins--and they are some of the oldest images of Appalachian America. The "trail a fears" is also Route 23, the road along which these images are crowded, and along which dreams of escape from poverty can find factory jobs in the north, if only the people were able. What has made these people funny is their poverty, the apparent inability to deal with the modern world when they are driven by their poverty into it, their mindless violence and love of drink; what has made them funny is their worthlessness which oddly bestows worth on all of us who are not them.

Yet, for all their familiarity, it's also a little jarring to see these images outside of cheap truck stop joke books, where they normally reside. It feels, culturally, like a step backward--a glorification of the crudity of the stereotypes, rather than a refutation of them. It's nicer to think that such unsubtle images of class and cultural hierarchy in America had been left behind, obscured by the many institutions which have been fighting these same Appalachian stereotypes uitl such success. And yet if that success is exactly what these drawings are calling into question, for the institutions are represented here as well. The Appalshop cameras are focused on the cartoons of people, stills and outhouses. The words of William Goodell Frost, president of Berea College untill 1920, "...the aim should be to make them [Appalachian students] intelligent without making them sophisticated" wind in and around the many other words which have been employed to fight the cartoons. Despite the linguistic analysis of mountain speech, the careful manufacturing and marketing of traditional crafts, the planned revival of folk art and ways-despite all these words which crowd the drawings, the lingering images of hillbilly heaven have not been undone.

The drawings in "trail a fears" fall heavily on the rural/urban cultural hierarchy, and reveal its pervasive durability. In their recent book, Knowing Your Place: Cultural Hierarchy and Rural Identity, Barbara Ching and Gerald Creed comment that to be rural is always less than to be urban, and "being down south is being at the bottom of the cultural heap." (14) The stereotypical image of the Appalachian people is not overcome by the intellectual work issued from universities and arts organizations. All their effort to define hillbilly cultures do not protect those cultures and their people from being at the bottom of modem culture. Instead, like the tourist-driven Hillbilly festivals, these images carry on a new, commodified existence as curious and antiquated objects of study, of difference, and of continued unworthiness.

Burris' view is legitimately that of the outsider. Legitimate because of his emphasis on including all images of the Appalachian experience, whether crude or sophisticated. Outsider because he's not "from here" and makes no pretences to be. But the drawings which comprise the "trail a fears" are not about the real life of Appalachia, just the opposite. They are about the enduring fictions, the everlasting inequalities, the American bogey men and women which ensure a better social position for the rest of us.