Good Country People from Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina

Commemoration Linda Flowers (November 8, 1944-January 21, 2000), child of tenant farmers in Duplin County, North Carolina, came into this world with a powerful native intelligence and wit that carried her successfully through youthful public education in her hometown of Faison, on to an undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and then to post-graduate degrees from Ohio State University (M.A.) and the University of Rochester (M.A., Ph.D.). A fellow at the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., in 1977, she arrived at North Carolina Wesleyan College in Rocky Mount in 1980, where she became professor of English, served as chairman of the English department, chairman of the faculty, and ran the Visiting Writers' Series, among much other service and leadership she gave to both college and community. She was on the executive committee of the North Carolina Humanities Council, and she was also a member of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. Professor Flowers's funeral and burial were in Faison on January 23, and she was further eulogized in Russell Chapel at North Carolina Wesleyan on January 31. "Everything about her reflected and expressed her tenacious grasp upon this truth: that telling the truth matters," said one colleague at her funeral, adding, "not being polite, but telling the truth." At the Wesleyan service, another called her "the woman who loved the felicitously written word." That we lost her too soon is a certainty, yet it is no less certain that her life was in every way exemplary, a triumph. Out of deep respect for this extraordinary person and in remembrance of her and her work, we offer here "Good Country People," the epilogue from her much-admired Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina, which was published in 1993, and which is reprinted here courtesy of her publisher, the University of Tennessee Press. You don't see them much anymore. Not in Rocky Mount and Goldsboro, Wilson, Smithfield and Clinton; in Faison, yes, in little towns like that, sometimes. Especially if on Saturday you buy your groceries at one of the less-than-grand supermarkets, your clothes, when you have to have them, at the dry-goods store. They stay out of the shopping malls, away from the stores dazzling as operating rooms. At Christmas nine, everybody sees them (but tries not to); they stumble along, slower than other people, more uncertain, as if they're not quite sure where they are. As for the men, you can spot them without too much trouble. At the tractor places, the filling stations where they go to pass the time of day, the run-down ones; they're driving battered pickup trucks and looking out across the land, poking along at forty and forty-five. But they're not as common as they used to be, these old farmers in faded overalls, in khaki shirts washed thin and almost white, brogans, hats usually: dusty as a March field. And the women, the country women of my childhood are as scarce now almost as hen's teeth. Oh, but they were something! The beauty they'd had as girls wrung out of them, and in its place another: faces composed, purposeful as iron. A look that went right through you, bottomless and sad. People my mother's age, the blacks who had known her all her life, would stop me on the street sometimes and after getting it right ("Ain'cha Miss Geneva's gift? Ain'cha now? Ain'cha?"), they'd tell me what a fine-looking woman my mama had been; how in the fields chopping, picking cotton maybe, she could outwork anybody, them too, and did. They said she hasn't the need for conversation ("all sech as that"), and suffered no fools, gladly or otherwise, that she was all business, as good as her word and meant what she said. They'd tell me they knew my people. "Sho' do! Mist'Jim ... Miss Annie, all of em!" And they did. To have stood there on the sidewalk with these people, six or seven or eight years old, the year 1950, 1951, 1952, on a Saturday more than likely, and Faison full to beat the band, old black women congregated in the doorways, come to town. …