Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (32 page)

The threat of violence my grandparents experienced in southwest Virginia, which drove them to Tennessee, existed still—in Tennessee. The alarm it had engendered in them existed still—in me. Whatever may have caused the feuds, the feudists have left their descendants in the southern Appalachians a legacy of anxiety that still haunts those hills and valleys a century later.

When I was in the second grade, in 1952, a man in a town outside of Kingsport went into a general store. His wife’s cousin was sitting on a barrel. The cousin’s daughter sat in a chair beside her, holding her eighteen-month-old son. The man’s wife had recently left him, moving back home to her parents, the Blairs, because he had forced her hand onto a hot stovetop to reprimand her for some domestic failing.

After entering the store and spotting the two Blair women and the baby, the man calmly pulled out a pistol and shot the women. The baby fell to the floor, screaming. The older woman died right away, the younger woman soon thereafter. The man explained to the horrified bystanders that he had shot them in order “to worry the Blairs.”

The man was taken to jail. Sheriff Blair, a relative of the two murdered women, agreed to open the killer’s cell to a mob of four dozen local men. They planned to drag the killer behind a car until dead. When this posse arrived, though, a phalanx of highway patrolmen had taken charge. They fired shotguns into the crowd to disperse them. The killer was declared insane and sent to the hospital wing of the state penitentiary for the rest of his life, where he entertained himself by creating superb architect­ural drawings.

As recently as 2011, I was driving through the Cumberland Plateau, minding my own business and enjoying the colorful autumn leaves. Suddenly, looming over me, framed by orange and scarlet foliage, appeared a giant billboard advertising an indoor firing range. At the top stood a huge cutout of a pistol, pointed upward at an angle. The barrel resembled an erect phallus, the trigger guard outlining a testicle. Printed in giant black letters were the words
Man Toys!

Pulling over and studying the sign, I felt the same Pavlovian stab of nausea that I feel whenever I see a swastika or a Confederate battle flag. There seemed no way to avoid the recognition that, as the Bible says, the sins of the fathers are visited “on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.”
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The automatic mental process of stereotyping developed because it had survival value. Early humans had to decide very quickly whether a stranger posed a threat, and those decisions usually derived from past experiences. Someone whose appearance resembled that of a previous attacker was also regarded as dangerous. A few defining physical characteristics served as a kind of psychic shorthand. The problem is that physical appearances don’t offer a reliable gauge to inner intentions. A tramp can be a millionaire in disguise. Stereotypes present only one facet of the complex gem that is each individual.

Stereotypes also serve another function. Those in a position of power often stereotype those who lack power as inferior and therefore deserving of exploitation. As already mentioned, this is what has happened at varying times to blacks, Native Americans, Appalachians, and all women everywhere.

But people don’t only stereotype others; they also stereotype themselves. We humans don’t automatically know who we are. It takes time and experience to figure that out. Young people typically try on the roles their culture offers them to see if one will fit, like an off-the-rack Halloween costume. A few people have the courage to try on multiple costumes and cast aside those that don’t appeal to them. Stripped, they are then free to find their true identities from within. But most take the easier route of sticking with a prepackaged identity. This is what many young men who became feudists did, copying the examples of their fathers who had been guerrilla fighters during the Civil War, of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers who had fought natives during the settlement era, and of their more remote ancestors who had been Border Reivers.

This is what some young men in the Southern mountains are doing still, donning the hillbully stereotype bequeathed them by their male ancestors, mistaking cruelty for justice and stupidity for heroism. This stereotype has somehow managed to replicate itself down the generations, even though most of us no longer have herds to protect and no longer face attacks from vengeful natives or from ravaging guerrillas.

But just as a few young men in Appalachia have adopted this swaggering legacy of misplaced machismo from their forefathers, I myself have also inherited the stereotype handed down by the women of the feuds. Those passive bystanders loyally kept the home fires burning, watching their sons and husbands butcher one another and then cleaning up after them. Like them, I have accepted, excused, and even laughed at the obnoxious behavior of modern-day hillbullies, as though jokes were talismans that could ward off their attacks.

Even before they can read books, children read the facial expressions, body language, and tones of voice of their elders. They absorb the loves and hatreds, hopes and fears of the adults around them without knowing it. Obsolete stereotypes that have kept us prisoners of the atrocities in which our ancestors participated—as perpetrators, victims, anxious bystanders, refugees—infest both the hillbullies and me.

The Cumberland Mountains used to be incredibly beautiful. They probably will be again, once the coal corporations have buried the streams, poisoned the drinking water, shipped all the mountaintops to India, and gone back home to count their profits. Those who now live in the Cumberlands are mostly wonderful people with a proud tradition of brave pioneering forebears. A few who aren’t so wonderful have a chance of becoming so if they can shed the shackles forged by the violence of their ancestors. Around eighty Hatfield-McCoy feudists, far less than 1 percent of the population of Pike and Logan counties at that time, managed to terrorize thousands of peaceful, law-abiding people.
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Hopefully, this will never be allowed to happen again.

I have finally realized that to fear the hellhounds of today is to feed this outmoded stereotype. At some point the mouse being batted about by a marauding cat must rise up on its hind legs and defy its tormentor—even if the cat then just bites off its head for a tasty snack. Although I still set my security system, I returned the pearl-handled Lady Smith and Wesson to my friend. Like a horse whisperer, I now calm my own inherited terror of hellhounds who attack in the night with self-assurances that such episodes are ancient history that need alarm me no longer.

I have also recently bought a bridge in Brooklyn. . . .

In keeping with the American way—of turning pristine
first-growth
forests into furniture and majestic coal-filled mountains into rubble—the mind-numbing horror of the Hatfield-McCoy feud has itself become an industry.

In 1949, Metro Goldwyn Mayer released a film called
Roseanna
McCoy,
starring Joan Evans as Roseanna and Farley Granger as Johnse Hatfield. Picture
West Side Story
set in the Southern mountains with an ending in which the two lovebirds canter off into the sunset astraddle one horse—rather than with Johnse’s marriage to Roseanna’s cousin Nancy, the death of their illegitimate baby daughter, and the death of Roseanna from depression, as actually happened.

A second movie was made for television in 1975, starring Jack Palance (of
Shane
and
City Slickers
fame) as Devil Anse. Palance’s Devil Anse comes across as a lovable old coot who adores his wife and children, and who tries to restrain his followers from their deadly antics. The plot tampers with the chronology of feud events to make the incomprehensible comprehensible. For instance, the hanging of Cottontop Mounts and the death in prison of Wall Hatfield, which ended the feud, occur earlier in the movie to account for some of the Hatfield animosity toward the McCoys. The most egregious episode of the entire feud, the New Year’s Night Massacre, becomes a scene in which the McCoys attack the Hatfield homestead in the dead of night instead of the other way around.

In this version of the feud’s termination, Devil Anse Hatfield and Ranel McCoy sneak through the wilderness, tracking each other like beasts of prey, periodically shooting one another in non–life threatening areas. They finally bond over their mutual decision not to shoot a buck, thus, presumably, renouncing further shooting of human beings as well.

Several cartoon series have also featured plots based on the Hatfield-McCoy feud, including
Looney Tunes,
The Huckleberry Hound Show,
The Flintstones,
and
Scooby-Doo.
Why anyone considered such historical violence amusing fare for children is a topic for another book.

Dr. Leonard McCoy, the irascible physician on
Star Trek,
is depicted as being descended from the feuding McCoy family of Kentucky.

One of the country’s longest-running TV game shows,
Family Feud,
took its name from a nod to this epic struggle. In 1979, descendants from both the Hatfield and the McCoy families appeared on the show, carrying antique rifles and dressed in period costume—
Little House on the Prairie
dresses for the women and frock coats for the men. A bewildered pig munched feed at the front of the stage. Both families smiled good-naturedly about their ancestral history of mutual hatred. Fortunately, the contest proved a draw.

Theater West Virginia performs a musical about the feud in an outdoor amphitheater several nights a week every summer. Because Devil Anse Hatfield was a West Virginian and one of his nephews, Henry D. Hatfield, became governor of the state, this version of the feud has been sanitized. It ends with a revival in which Devil Anse and two of his sons are baptized and, in Devil Anse’s imagination, unite with the McCoys to sing a gospel song about the glory of God’s forgiveness—rather than with the imprisonment and hanging of Hatfields that actually ended the feud.

There is also a Hatfield-McCoy dinner theater in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, gateway to the Smoky Mountains (where the feud didn’t take place) with two shows nightly. A building constructed especially for this event resembles two giant cartoon hillbilly shacks. Inside, spectators sit at tables eating fried chicken with all the fixin’s while onstage a cheerful comic plot with almost no connection to actual feud events features some of the most admirable achievements of Appalachian culture: singing, the playing of musical instruments, and clog dancing. Many in the audience are, of course, Hatfield or McCoy descendants, who are seated on opposite sides of the theater. They cheer as though at a football game at any mention by the actors of their respective surnames.

An ATV trail, inexplicably christened the Hatfield-McCoy Trail, winds around five mountains in southern West Virginia. It attracts dirt-bikers and ATV riders from all over America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. The precipitous trails through the dense forests do give a sense of the world the feud participants must have inhabited as they cut timber and hunted game (and one another).

The tourist office in Pikeville, Kentucky, offers an audio CD guiding motorists from site to site around feud country to the accompaniment of feud-related songs composed and sung by Jimmy Wolford, a country singer descended from Ranel McCoy. Explanatory roadside markers identify various points of interest on the driving tour.

The Hatfields and McCoys of today seem at peace with their ancestral heritage. My McCoy cousins say that the feud was mentioned only in jokes as they were growing up and that they themselves never felt animosity toward any Hatfields. In 2000, Bo and Ron McCoy and Sonya Hatfield organized a joint Hatfield-McCoy reunion that drew five thousand descendants of the two families from all over the nation.
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This reunion has been repeated every year since. Bus tours take attendees to the various massacre sites. Marathoners—around 450 in 2011—race along roads that wind through feud territory. They cross the finish line in Williamson, West Virginia, where Devil Anse Hatfield and Ranel McCoy impersonators congratulate them. A tug-of-war across the Tug Fork, featuring as combatants ten T-shirted descendants from each family, provides a climax to the reunion.

The only blip of rancor to appear on this screen of harmony is a lawsuit brought by Bo and Ron McCoy in 2002 against John Vance, a descendant of the notorious Bad Jim. John Vance had closed the access road to the cemetery containing the graves of the five McCoy children killed during the Pawpaw Murders and the New Year’s Night Massacre. In the end, the descendants of Ranel McCoy, though not the general public, were awarded access across Vance’s property to the cemetery.
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In 2003, perhaps in response to hard feelings generated by the cemetery conflict, Reo Hatfield and Bo and Ron McCoy organized an official truce between the two families—even though hostilities on both sides had largely faded over the ensuing decades to bemused disbelief at the strife promulgated by their forebears. Reo stated that, in the wake of 9/11, Hatfield and McCoy descendants wanted to illustrate that Americans could overcome their differences and band together in the face of adversity.
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And it appears that they have.