The sky darkens above the old auction barn somewhere near Douglas County. Wind picks up, dust blowing past already dusty trucks and cars. First raindrops are fat, hitting dusty rock with a plopping sound. The barn briefly becomes night as the first sheets of rain hit and lightning splits the sky. The rain is welcome. Gardens and fields have gotten too dry. One person runs to a truck, another shoulders a box of goods aimlessly, walking in the downpour as though the rain was not even there. Briefly, there in the storm, the separation between man, earth and sky has lifted.
The auction pauses and, as the light brightens, the faces in the crowd become again visible. Craggy faces, rough beards, old women with the remnants and trappings of beauty, young women aged beyond their years, round faces of children, gaunt faces of age, questioning faces all, questioning places and times, asking and endeavoring and hoping, all without words. Life in the Ozarks hills has rarely been easy, that much is certain, and life takes its toll, taking so much but giving a rough-going honesty in return. The real language of the Ozarks is the one without words.
The movie house darkens, that summer of 2010, darkens over a bleak Missouri landscape and a haunting soundtrack born of the same Missouri hills. Amidst the bleak dark, faces worried the screen, faces darkened by poverty, turmoil, angst, alcohol and drugs. Audiences responded, reacting to the gritty realism of an Ozarks portrayed authentically, the pain and nightmare of meth addiction and the resulting drama made for memorable cinema. Winter's Bone won multiple awards, earned over $16 million, and catapulted Kentucky-born Jennifer Lawrence into the throes of superstardom. The movie was filmed mostly in Taney County.
The light in the auction barn again shifts. A young woman in high denim shorts ups her bid. She can't be a day over 25 but is missing most her teeth, giving her the profile of an old, old woman. Her daughter stays at her truck, playing with a dog. The old man with his finger in the air keeps the bid going, higher and higher. His blue eyes will not relent and neither will he. These are the faces of a savvy filmmaker's delight, unique, memorable, intense faces, perfect to set the tone, to stage a scene for the real story, written by someone else entirely.
"Hell, I survived a stroke last year and I'm still here," one of the old men is saying. The young tall woman in short shorts shoulders her daughter as she strides back to her truck. The auction is over and the rain is over but their stories are not. And these people are not extras in someone else's film. These are real people, not for public use or public consumption. Some might be rich, most poor, but nobody asks. Honor prevents the question. The promises of globalism never trickled down to folks here in the hills and those here make do with what they have, just as they always have, ever since Schoolcraft was a naive geologist traveler from upstate New York, appalled by the lack of manners of the rough and ready settlers in Potosi, Missouri, in 1819.
Hillbillies occupy a strange place in the American psyche, intriguing, entertaining, exploitable, unfindable, uncouth. Most of us hillbillies hide in plain sight, dressed in the clothes of modernity. The best hillbillies leaned into expectation in the 20th century, dressing up our own culture to a hillbilly factor of 10 just to sell our culture to the unwitting tourist, 100 percent Beverly Hillbillies in reverse. Paul Henning knew what he was doing, after all. The code and nobility of the hills is hard to understand for flat landers with flat ways and flat codes of being. The uncanny undercurrents of Celtic blood, red and fiery, mixed with the ways of the Cherokee and the Osage to create an unspoken culture, one currently in danger of being replaced by the culture of modern education, modern pop culture, modern globalism with its bloopy infographics and soothing tones, all chosen by a graphic artist in some city somewhere to incite trust.
Taming hillbillies, coercing them into modern ways, making them fit in neat, tidy little boxes with proper lines, all for their own good. Social work has its hands full in the hills, perhaps to no avail. Perhaps that's for the better, after all. Modern social work has no time to understand the honor code of the hills, the code without words, the code without explanation. The preppy, trendy, big brotherness of modernity with all its seductive trappings only fills so many gaps but if it ever succeeds in eradicating the perceived backwardness of our culture, or ensuring we all look and sound alike, shopping at the same great global milk cow of culture, something unique and powerful and proud and strong will have been lost for good, making us, beyond the pastiche of banjo and broom making, nothing more than a bunch of hillbilly voyeurs.
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