Circling on the Side of the Road

Kathleen Stewart’s book was thought-provoking and engaging to me, but when I actually sat down to consider what to write about, I found myself challenged. Maybe this is because while I enjoyed reading this book, I thought I was going to get more out of it. I thought I was going to get more of the people. What I got were segments of their stories punctuating what felt like a long meditation on the nature of creating meaning, of narrative for taking fact and producing meaning, on the process of re-membering and unforgetting.

I have read bits of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which Stewart references in the first chapter. She says she could “describe the rooms and rafters, the cracks in the walls, the damp underneath of the houses where dogs and fleas and other creatures lie, the furniture…” (p. 21) and to be honest, I wish she did. I understand what she was doing in the constant cycle of her discussing the people of the community and her own role there in deciphering their stories and imitating them. At the same time, I am less interested in her role as folklorist as I am in the stories of the people there. For me, it would be sufficient for her to set up the dynamics, her own recognition of the limitation of narrative and to move forward. When she brought up narrative and narrativity, I assumed we were going to get more of that. I wanted more. I loved the sections where we got the “side of the road” stories told by community members in their own language.

At the same time, I also feel like the way Stewart chose to write this book was in tribute to the way in which the people of the West Virginia coal towns she came to know made sense of life. Their way was not to offer a simple explanation but to offer different accounts. The truth was not derived from the literal. Rather, it was derived from the feeling they got, the relation of a singular event to their belief systems and values. Their stories take place on the “side of the road,” and where an event actually took place is of less concern than the placement of the event in the community collective conscious, in the relationship to other events that each community member has their own story about. Stewart says, “Imagine the kind of place where, when something happens, people make sense of it not by constructing an explanation of what happened, but by offering accounts of its impacts, traces, and signs” (p. 57). I believe that this is what she is attempting to do with much of her book—offer glimpses, through her own limited perspective and account, of the people she met, the stories they told, the cultural events she witnessed. I wonder if she felt, after getting to know the community well, that this was the only way to tell their story.

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This is sort of an aside, but in the interest of differing accounts and the way our brains make connections, reading this book also called to mind the song “Side of the Road” by Lucinda Williams, one of my favorite songwriters. In the song, she and her lover sit on the side of the road, and in this space of non-being, she can contemplate what her life would be without that person. The non-space of the side of the road allows for the sort of quiet space where nothing actually changes, but the mind is free to wander and contemplate.

The Side of the Road- Lucinda Williams

“You wait in the car on the side of the road
Lemme go and stand awhile, I wanna know you're there but I wanna be alone
If only for a minute or two
I wanna see what it feels like to be without you
I wanna know the touch of my own skin
Against the sun, against the wind

I walked out in a field, the grass was high, it brushed against my legs
I just stood and looked out at the open space and a farmhouse out a ways
And I wondered about the people who lived in it
And I wondered if they were happy and content
Were there children and a man and a wife?
Did she love him and take her hair down at night?

If I stray away too far from you, don't go and try to find me
It doesn't mean I don't love you, it doesn't mean I won't come back and
stay beside you
It only means I need a little time
To follow that unbroken line
To a place where the wild things grow
To a place where I used to always go
La la la, la la la, la la la, la la la
La la la la, la la la, la la la, la la la

If only for a minute or two
I wanna see what it feels like to be without you
I wanna know the touch of my own skin
Against the sun, against the wind”


~Lisa