Magic and A Sense of Wonder
“I am lucky. I could have been born in a city or some slums, or in a cold, dreary mansion, or in Timbuktu. Instead, I was born in a one-room shack in the Appalachian Mountains; born to a life of music and moonshine, fireflies and hoot owls. Lucky.”
With these words Susi Gott Seguret opens Child of the Woods: An Appalachian Odyssey, a coming-of-age memoir set in the mountains and forests surrounding the North Carolina community of Shelton Laurel. In 1961, Susi’s parents, newly-weds Peter and Polly Gott, traveled south in a VW bug looking for mountains and music. They eventually touched down in Shelton Laurel, then a remote community, where they were “considered by all (locals and their northern parents) to be a little off in the head.” They wanted to build a log cabin, raise their own food, light their home with kerosene lamps, and heat it with a fireplace. The natives regarded the couple with suspicion — visitors were uncommon then, and northerners who wanted to settle in the valley were rare as snow in August. But music, as it so often does, broke down the barriers between newcomers and natives. Peter Gott played the banjo, knew the lyrics to a boatload of folk songs, and was soon calling dances and finding locals to play the music for them.
It was here that Susi Seguret was born and lived until she left for college.
Child of the Woods is her affectionate recounting of those years. She and her brother Tim grew up in homes built by their parents, first a shack and then a pine log house. They helped with the chores, stuffed their heads full of music and songs, and attended the local schools. She accurately, and exuberantly, describes a hog killing, “a festive occasion for everyone, as all the neighbors gathered to help.” (Lest readers think Susi a bloodthirsty young savage for enjoying this killing and butchering, one of my granddaughters at age nine participated in a hog butchering and came away convinced she wanted someday to earn her livelihood as a butcher.) Susi and Tim gardened, picked huckleberries for pies and canning, and gathered pokeberry leaves for “poke salat.”
They spent much of their free time exploring the woods and fields around the cabin. From a young age, they roamed the outdoors, climbing trees and cliffs, splashing in creeks, chasing salamanders, observing the slow decomposition of a dead cow, running barefoot in the summers, playing Indians, learning the names of flowers and plants.
Susi also introduces us to some of her neighbors and friends. Uncle George and Aunt Dutz, for example, lived in a tiny cabin near the Gott home, “had probably never been away from home, not even for one night,” and though they were not related to the Gotts, acted as babysitters and guardians for Susi and Tim. Old Hic, another neighbor, “was always around when the neighbors called for help to bring in the hay, or kill a pig, or hand tobacco.” Robin, a girl their age whose name “spells disaster,” spent a week with them in the summers, “ visits during which she brought a whirlwind of mayhem, cutting Tim’s foot with an ax, setting jars of lightning bugs free in the closet, conducting frog races on the living room floor, and galloping a horse into a lather and a major accident. The elderly Susie Shelton, for whom Susi got is named, acted as a guiding star to the Gott family, loving them and offering them encouragement.
Because of her parents’ passion for music—the first movie she ever saw was Woodstock at age eight—Susi grew up singing folk songs, especially those from the Blue Ridge. In Child of the Woods, she again and again references songs from her childhood: hymns, ballads about love, jealousy, and murder, Christmas carols. She and her brother apparently knew scores of such songs by heart, singing them in the cabin or in the woods. Her father’s love of singing and his skills on the banjo attracted local musicians to their home and to the dances he called. (Her mother, also a singer, had a passion for drawing and painting as well.)
Several times Susi includes a few lines from these songs in her book. In one humorous passage she writes:
Late last night I went a-crawlin’ and a-creepin’
Late last night I went a-crawlin’ and a-creepin’
Late last night I went a-crawlin’ and a-creepin’
And I crawled in the bed where my Doni was a-sleepin’
Lay your leg over mine once more.
She then tells us: “It is reported (by all sources in the family) that I sang this song to my great-grandmother, Toots, over the phone when I was two years old.”
Susi’s memoir is more than a nostalgic trip through the museum of one child’s past. It is a celebration of a culture and a way of life all but vanished by the rivers of time. It is also, as Susi writes, “a treatise to the sense of wonder that gripped me as a child, a journey into the magic of the woods, all senses on the alert.”
In Child of the Woods, Susi Seguret brings that magic and sense of wonder alive.