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THROUGH
MOUNTAIN MISTS
Early Settlers of
John Their
Descendants...Their Stories...Their Achievements
Lifting the
Mists of History on Their Way of Life
By: Ethelene Dyer Jones
Bud Hill of Hill-Vue Farms,
Blairsville, first contacted me about the newly-formed Byron Herbert
Reece
Society. Shortly thereafter, I received
a letter from Dr. John Kay of
Those with an interest in Reece and
his works and the purposes of the Society may go online at www.byronherbertreecesociety.org
to learn more and get a form for joining.
This first year, 2003-2004, is the charter membership year.
In the membership application, I was
invited to give some reminiscences about the poet and why I was
interested in
supporting the aims of the Society and perpetuating his works. Following are some of my comments:
Up until (and after) Byron Herbert
Reece’s first book of poems, Ballad of
the Bones, published in 1945, Hub Reece, as his family and
friends
called him, was a neighboring farmer close to my father’s farm in the
Choestoe
District of Union County, Georgia.
True, we had sometimes read an
occasional poem by Reece published in the
In 1945, something happened to draw
our attention to neighbor Hub Reece. The Atlanta Constitution, to
which my father, J. Marion Dyer, faithfully subscribed, began printing
reviews
about Hub’s book, Ballad of the Bones. None other than the noted editor, Ralph
McGill himself, wrote columns praising the “poet of the mountains.”
Some of the articles we read in The Atlanta
Constitution were not
as complimentary as those by Mr. McGill.
Reviews in the Sunday paper often implied that this mountain man
might
have plagiarized his poems. With
such
ability evident in the poems, and yet from one so limited in formal
education,
it was not likely, the critics wrote, that he could have produced
poetry of the
caliber of that bearing Reece’s byline.
However, we at the Dyer household knew the integrity and honesty
of the
Reece family, our neighbors. The poet
would never pass off as his own something he had copied from someone
else.
Farmer-turned-poet,
Byron Herbert Reece gathering corn on his Wolf Creek Farm, Choestoe,
Union County, Georgia, about 1946.
We had in our midst not just a
neighbor
farmer, someone I had known all my life, but a literary person of
notable
stature, receiving both accolades and criticism. From
then on, we, his neighbors, stood in awe
of him, viewed him in a completely different light.
A genius lived among us and we were proud to
know him. Yet he continued as humble and
unaffected by the acclaim as before his national debut as a literary
figure of
note.
When I visited him with my high school
teacher, Mrs. Grapelle Mock, to interview him for the school’s page in
our
local newspaper, I approached him with a sense of awe and shyness even
though I
had known him all my life. Now he was
more than a neighbor with whom we passed the time of day, talking about
crops,
the weather, the health of his parents Juan and Emma Reece, or
commenting on
World War II (as we had during that conflict and when my brother Eugene
lay
critically injured in a hospital somewhere in Italy).
Now Reece was somebody—a famous person. He
had climbed in status through the words he
penned from lowly farmer to literary giant.
He never let his fame go to his
head. He remained humble and reclusive,
preferring not to be in the limelight.
In that interview, I shyly told him that I liked to try my hand
at
writing poetry. I had recently presented
my first sonnet and another lyrical poem in my high school English
class. His advice to me, a teenaged
aspiring writer,
was biblical and fitting: “Don’t hide
your light under a bushel,” he said.
[Next week:
More personal reflections on Poet Byron Herbert Reece.]
Updated September
12,
2009
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