In August 1940, five days of thunderstorms and torrential rains brought massive flooding to large parts of Western North Carolina.
Raging rivers and streams engulfed homes and towns, wiped away roads and railways, and tore down hills and ridges, transforming them into avalanches of rock, dirt, trees, and shrubs barreling away at 40 miles an hour. Farmers turned their livestock out of barns to give them a chance for survival, and returned after the waters had receded to find all that they owned washed away. The Great Flood of 1940 killed people, destroyed millions of dollars worth of property, and left those who had little to begin with poorer than ever.
This catastrophe provides the backdrop for Donna Everhart’s The Road To Bittersweet.
At the heart of this novel is 14-year-old Wallis Ann Stamper. Wallis Ann is living with her mother, father, older sister and younger brother, in a cabin on the Tuckasegee River when the storms and the flood strike. Forced to flee their home in the middle of the night, Wallis Ann and her family are separated, undergo terrible ordeals and privation, and when finally reunited, find their home and barn destroyed.
After their arduous attempts to rebuild their cabin fail, the Stampers pack up their few remaining belongings and set out looking for work, shelter, and food. One relative treats them so poorly that they leave his cabin after only two weeks, whereupon they find some work singing in churchyards and on street corners—Wallis Ann has a beautiful voice, and her older sister Laci, though she has not spoken since birth, has a savant’s talent for playing musical instruments, particularly the violin. They finally find work in a traveling carnival, where they meet a crew of eccentrics and misfits. Here both Laci and Wallis Ann fall in love with Clayton, a daredevil and high diver, and the family faces yet another crisis when a jealous Wallis Ann shares a secret about her sister and Clayton with her parents.
Such a barebones synopsis doesn’t do justice to Everhart’s novel. Here are a few of the many reasons readers should travel The Road To Bittersweet.
First, Everhart imaginatively recreates the Flood of 1940. Not only has she clearly researched the terror and devastation brought by the flood, but she also has the talent to put the reader into the middle of the muddy waters. When these waters sweep Wallis Ann away from her family, we feel her terror as she fights for survival, and her hunger, thirst, and fear as she searches for her missing family. On this solitary journey, she encounters Joe Calhoun, a distant neighbor trying to drag a fallen tree off his dead wife and child. Wallis Ann helps him with the mule and harness, and after they have moved the log, she sees that the little girl is alive.
“Mrs. Calhoun was surely gone, the nasty blow to her head visible, yet her face remained beautiful, and so was the child’s cry. I clambered over crushed wood to reach her, and lifted her out and away from the ruin. She clung to my dress, shaking, covered in dirt, leaves, and dried blood. She stank to high heaven, having soiled herself time and again.”
This passage gives us a second reason for reading The Road To Bittersweet. The quality of Everhart’s prose, her eye for detail—”she stank to high heaven, having soiled herself time and again”—and her ability to replicate the dialect of rural North Carolinians in the 1940s make the story a true pleasure to read.
Then there is the character of Wallis Ann herself. Though she is unusually mature—she saves herself from the flood, survives while searching for her family, and does the work of a grown man in trying to help her father rebuild their cabin—Wallis Ann also makes mistakes, some of them catastrophic. Assigned to watch her three-year-old brother Seph, for example, she becomes distracted, and the thirsty toddler drinks water from a “puddle of nasty-looking water. I pictured dead animals, overrun privies, and no telling what all else the water had come into contact with while creating these little contaminated cesspools. I envisioned poison filling his gut.”
And so it does.
Finally, Wallis Ann and her family exhibit those strengths associated with the proud, independent people of Appalachia. Reading this tale of a flood that occurred less than 80 years ago, we realize how much life in these mountains has changed. The Stampers and their neighbors are all small-time farmers and mill workers, eking out a living, dependent on their own resources for their survival. A flood today can bring the same amount of destruction as in 1940—many readers remember the Flood of 2004, one of the worst in our region’s recorded history—but we possess far greater resources for anticipating the storms and the rain, and for recovery from rivers and streams that overflow their banks. The Stampers have only their own ingenuity, their labor, and their neighbors.
In The Road To Bittersweet, Donna Everhart has not only told a fine story based on an historical tragedy, she has given us a vivid reminder of the pride, resilience, and courage that marked so many of the families living in these mountains.