Hillsville Remembered: Public Memory, Historical Silence, and Appalachia's Most Notorious Shoot-Out by Travis A. Rountree (review)

Abstract

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Reviewed by:

• Hillsville Remembered: Public Memory, Historical Silence, and Appalachia’s Most Notorious Shoot-Out by Travis A. Rountree
• Ryan D. Chaney

Hillsville Remembered: Public Memory, Historical Silence, and Appalachia’s Most Notorious Shoot-Out. By Travis A. Rountree. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2023. Pp. [viii], 174. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-9722-7.)

Though not introduced in this way, Hillsville Remembered: Public Memory, Historical Silence, and Appalachia’s Most Notorious Shoot-Out is, unfortunately, well suited to grappling with our present, repetitious American reality of mass gun violence. Examining representations of a 1912 courthouse shooting that left five people dead in a small Virginia mountain town, Travis A. Rountree thoroughly and thoughtfully clocks the violent event’s local, regional, and national reverberations, the multiple scales on which all collective traumas, then and today, resonate. One of the text’s strengths lies in asking us to consider connections and dissonances between how a violently traumatic event might be experienced proximally, shockingly, or even intimately, and how representations of the event are abstracted in various degrees of spatial and temporal remove. In that effort, rhetorical remembering, defined as “how individuals create public or private artifacts or memories that construct meaning about a public event,” is Rountree’s lens onto newspaper accounts and balladry of the time, museum displays and narratives, and a set of recently conceived and performed dramatic interpretations of the tragedy (p. 9). [End Page 451]

Reaching a wide American audience, the contemporary news media renderings, in particular, reflect a national-cultural construction, and thus a remembering, of the shoot-out and its succeeding events. The problem with national-cultural imaginings of Appalachia and things that happen there, as Rountree notes throughout, is that they depend, too often, “on speculation and specter instead of reality” (p. 145). Another salient value of Hillsville Remembered is thus its contribution to the critiques of literary, pop-cultural, and even scholarly representations of Appalachia animated by stereotypes of “hillbilly” lawlessness or nostalgia for the noble but naive backwoodsman, two generically familiar projections of an uncivilized Other onto Appalachian peoples and places. The way newspapers swarmed to document but mostly sensationalize the Hillsville tragedy emblematizes such projections, inflected with anxieties and desires of America’s waning Progressive era. These tropes were signified, for instance, by cartoonish representations of Floyd Allen, the man whose trial and conviction sparked the violence, and his familial accomplices as both fearsome gangsters and pitiably primitive naifs. This media coverage eclipsed, as reporting today often seems to, the local and regional interpersonal, economic, and political dynamics that might have aided in a more substantive contextualizing of the events.

Rountree’s most singular attempts are his explorations of the more ambivalent portrayals and conflicted affects found in balladry that emerged out of the shoot-out and of “official” and “vernacular” narrative representations in local and regional museums (p. 52). Here, both sympathetic and humanizing lights are cast, and both bootlegger and outlaw stereotypes are summoned, depending on the particular ballad or display analyzed. But the greatest challenge Rountree faces and largely meets is to highlight the potential for healing in the Hillsville community of today through rhetorical empathy for those affected on all sides of the tragedy, as well as the value and poignancy of feminine voices and silences occluded by the heretofore male-centered spectacle of past violence. He does so largely through performance theory–informed examinations of Frank Levering’s series of plays about the shoot-out, enacted in the Hillsville courthouse itself.

In the deconstruction of all these forms of remembering, binaries emerge that the author does not always present as such: outsider or local, sensationalized or realistic, othering or humanizing, abstractly mediated or performatively embodied, violent or empathetic, voiced or silenced, and masculine or feminine. If there is any risk in relying on such binaries as ballast, it lies in Rountree’s own rhetorically forceful alignment of the last three opposed pairs as a set of particularly equivalent differences, which could be read as reifying the very gendered categories that enabled the silencing of feminine voices in the first place. On balance, however, invoking these tensions, whether explicitly named or implicitly engaged, is a useful...