Majestically arrayed in an ancient blue suit, frayed white shirt and new brown boots, Floyd Handshoe, 51, la bored at a seignorial pace last week, hoeing rocks into potholes in the road. So did half a dozen other unemployed fathers of Handshoe Hollow who have enrolled in a federal make-work project known in the mountains of eastern Kentucky as the Happy Pappies. As they demonstrated the blessings of the poverty program, other local residents—mostly the pappies' wives and small children—harvested potatoes behind a mule-drawn plow on Will Handshoe's land beside Upper Quicksand Creek. Will, 72, who is distant kin to Floyd and unchallenged patriarch of the valley, had foresightedly taken the day off to go squirrel hunting.
Handshoe, like all the other "hollers" of Appalachia, is a narrow, creek-carved slash between rugged hills. Measuring six miles from head to foot, it accommodates some 200 mountain folk, a tiny grocery store that also serves as a post office, and a one-room school.
The people of Handshoe Hollow are in no sense comic-strip characters —though to bemused social workers their ways often seem as anticly unreal as those of Snuffy Smith or Moonbeam McSwine. While they have few worldly goods and little interest in acquiring more, most mountain folk of Southern Appalachia cling stubbornly to an ar cane way of life and the bucolic virtues—hardihood, close-knit family ties, fierce independence of outside authority—that were the models of an earlier America. With federal funds coming in, no one in Handshoe Hollow goes hun gry any more. Nor are the pappies very happy.
Writing Good. To help such people, who do not feel poor and who resist change in any form, the anti-poverty warriors face obstacles as impervious as the Cumberland's timber-topped mountains. To date, Washington has poured $1.2 billion into its Appalachia program, mostly for 3,350 miles of new roads; the aim is to lure new industries to Appalachian cities and give mountaineers ready access to the jobs thus created. But, as evidenced by the few person-to-person anti-poverty projects that have been launched thus far under the program, the challenges of transforming the mountaineer into a middle-class American have become even more evident.
Along with most other holler folk, Floyd Handshoe is virtually illiterate. To keep his job, according to federal regulations, Floyd—the father of 14 children—must struggle ignobly off to school two nights a week, when most menfolk thereabouts have other things on their minds. His wan, dark-haired wife says hopefully: "Floyd never could read. I notice now he can write his name real good. They act like it hurts them to go to school, but it don't." Nonetheless, the Handshoes' main aim in life is not to qualify for factory jobs but simply to go on living as they and their ancestors have for centuries.