Where It All Goes Down
The Early 1960s in the Appalachian Mountains
What Time Is It?
There are books that scream I'm set in the 1960s at readers, and then there's this book. That this tale takes place in the 1960s is much subtler, in large part due to the fact that it takes place in the isolated Appalachian Mountains and focuses on two families—the Higgins and the Killburns—who have little in the way of money and modern conveniences.
To be clear, when we say modern conveniences, we're including things like refrigerators. The Higgins still get ice blocks delivered to them from the Killburns, who still go around cutting ice for the Higgins. Ice blocks, for the record, are a pre-refrigerator method of keeping food cold.
So how do we get from no modern refrigerator to knowing we're in the 1960s? Fair question. Great Grandmother Sarah gets to her mountain sometime before the end of the Civil War, which ended in 1866. If a generation is roughly twenty-five years, and Sarah's Mountain is about four generations old (as far as Higgins' history of owning the mountain goes), that lands us somewhere around the 1960s.
Living Leftist Politics
Okay, so now that we've got our math out of the way, why is the time period important? Think: hippie-radicalism, leftist politics, alternative lifestyles, countercultures. Oh—and environmentalism. All of this was just beginning to get big in America around this time, and these values pop up toward the end of the book when M.C. and Lurhetta visit the Mound, where the Killburns live.
The Killburns lifestyle is totally counter to what the Higgins are used to. The Higgins are all about owning their mountain, while the Killburns live on a compound with a huge, extended family (M.C. doesn't know how everyone's related). The Killburn clan works together farming the land and living off of what they make, and they won't hunt and don't eat meat. Crucially, they don't believe in owning land. As Mr. Killburn points out:
If you could think about it every day, you never could own a piece of [land]. Wouldn't want to. and if you don't think about it every day, you get to believing you have a right to own it. You become a sore growing on the body. (12.95)
The Killburns are pretty much living the far-left politics of the 1960s to a tee, including understanding the earth as something un-own-able.
It's significant, then, that the Higgins are rude and closed off (check out Jones's analysis in the "Characters" section to see this in action) while the Killburns are warm and welcoming. The Higgins and their white-knuckled grip on Sarah's Mountain stand in stark contrast to the Killburns live and let live approach to life and the earth on the Mound—and since one group is kind and the other not, the Killburns and their approach to life emerge looking better in the end.
Sarah's Mountain
Though the Killburns and their free love approach to living off the land may come out looking like the superior way to go, it's important to remember that Sarah's Mountain is M.C. and his family's whole world. And as much as owning the mountain is important to them, it's important to remember that they come from a legacy of slavery, and so the mountain also represents the ability to own their own lives, to protect and preserve their family without threat. It makes sense, then, that M.C.'s imagined future has him living on Sarah's Mountain:
Mama and Daddy in the ground, he told himself. Dead a long time. That's not so bad. They lived to be each a hundred. The kids, grown old, too, and died. I lived longer than each of them. I'm old now but I can still get around. Never did leave the mountain. None of the others did, either. But buried here. Ghosts. Just like Great-grandmother Sarah and the other old ones who really did pass away long ago. (2.8)
In M.C.'s mind, Sarah's Mountain is all about family—his family, even in death. And considering how hard-won their independence has been, it makes sense that they'd have a more proprietary sense of how to relate to their land than the Killburns. After all, the Higgins were viewed as property themselves only a few generations back.
P.S.: For more on Sarah's Mountain, be sure to check out the "Symbolism" section. We've got heaps to say about this hunk of land.