Stinking Creek: The Portrait of a Small Mountain Community. This item is unavailable.Stinking Creek: The Portrait of a Small Mountain Community

Illustrated with 43 photographs. Half works of the people in this book are named Brown. They live in Browns Hollow, the wrong side of the track in Stinking Creek, and they belong to a vanishing culture – they are Hillbillies. This is a moving, intimate look at the Kentucky Mountain people of stinking creek buy a man who got to know them By living with them and listening to them. Fetterman lets them speak for themselves, both in words and magnificent photographs he took almost every one of the books speakers. Stinking Creek is not simply a sociological study full of facts and figures: it is also a look into the soul of a small, almost totally cut off world. We meet men like speed Sizemore, an old survivor of the mines, who is sustained by his religious beliefs - and welfare; we listen to Gilbert Bargo talk about how he'd rather die than accept welfare. Curiously among a people so poor, there is no theft and no delinquency. We meet a whole generation of young, healthy, willing people who have only the lay preacher and the welfare dispenser to turn to in their quest for an identity and a Picture future. This book is a tough and yet touching tribute to them all. It brings a vanishing region and its people to life through their talk, their attitudes, and their manners. And it is refreshingly devoid of both condescension and pity. A fresh and dramatic addition to this slim literature which exists on the mountain people, Stinking Creek is full of a sly country humor reminiscent of William Faulkner. Throughout runs Fetterman's own distrust of urban do-gooders, the questionable blessings of urban charity and his final acceptance of the Hillbillies way of life: "I may have never known what a hillbilly really is. But now I know who some of them are. And I fervently hope that those whom I do know along Stinking Creek find what they are seeking– and have been seeking ever since their ancestors left the debtor prisons and filthy streets of Britain."