The Many Thoughts of Wanda Kidd

           

People move to the North Carolina mountains for a multitude of reasons.  Some come for the beauty, the solitude, golf, and the weather, which are real draws, but I came for the people. 

                                                            MISS ALICE

I read Catherine Marshall’s book Christy when I was seventeen. It was set in a community deep in the Smoky Mountains in the early 1900s. I loved the story, but I mostly loved the characters who created it; their authenticity, resiliency, and profound wisdom spoke to my soul. I was particularly drawn to the character of Miss Alice. She was a Quaker missionary who helped Christy, fresh off a train from her very privileged and sheltered home in Asheville, to learn about herself and the culture of the people of the mountains. The young Christy was a lovely character, but even as a teenager, I was drawn to the wise and wounded healer who doled out encouragement, gentle chastisement, and vision to anyone who sought her advice. Because Miss Alice had faced her own life issues, she encouraged others to pursue answers to their challenges, even if they were not the choices she would have made for them.  As arrogant as it seems now, I wanted to be that person and began planning for that reality.

FINDING MY WAY

So, along with about a third of my graduating class, I applied, was accepted, and even went to orientation at Appalachian State, one of the two North Carolina universities in the mountains. I was on my way, or so I thought. However, circumstances changed that trajectory and delayed my college plans, but the desire to live in the mountains was still a guiding dream.

Three years later, when I was again planning to head to college, I felt I was out of step with my peers at Appalachian, who were then Juniors, so I decided to look for another school.  My sister, who would be a true freshman, was heading to Western Carolina University, and I felt she needed to find her own way. So, I looked around for another college, and the one that accepted me on a late application was UNC-Wilmington. Ironically, Wilmington was nine hours from the mountains, and I felt like my mountain hopes were slipping away.  

While a student in Wilmington, I became a live-in nanny for a family with four children. Ironically, the parents were transplanted mountaineers who grew up under Mount Mitchell’s shadow in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Midyear, one of the grandmothers came to live with us as well. She had generational knowledge of the area, and I asked her probing questions and absorbed as many stories as possible. That experience continued to pique my interest in both the culture and the people of the coves and hills. 

At the end of the school year, all the pieces fell into place for me to transfer to Western Carolina, and on a day in late September, my sister Amy and I headed for the mountains. The first time I rode down Balsam Mountain into Jackson County, I knew it was where I was supposed to be, and for that season of my life, I was home.

I was on a mission. After years of envisioning the part I would play when I could serve in the mountains, I had arrived and was eager to get started. While settling into campus life, I looked around for opportunities to find a youth group that wanted a volunteer to work with their teenagers.  I guess I thought I would be an itinerant youth minister, wandering throughout the mountains and coves, dispensing wisdom and Biblical insights. I was fresh off working with my home church as their summer worker, and the year before, I had been a small group leader with a Young Life girl’s group in Wilmington. Who would not be eager to allow me to serve with their youth? It never dawned on me that there might be some hesitation because there was nothing like a zealous young Baptist in the 70s.

REVERAND MIDDLETON

My whole sense of purpose was jolted when I called the Tuckasegee Baptist Association office and offered my services. The Associational Missionary at the time was Rev. Walter Middleton, who was revered by everyone who knew him and was nothing but kind to me when he forestalled my request to be placed in a small mountain church to serve with their youth.  I assured him I did not want to be paid; I just wanted an opportunity to serve.

I shake my head when I look back on my brash audacity. Could there have been any more red flags to my request?  Thirty years later, when I was placing vetted and recommended young adults in various churches across the country as summer interns, I tried to imagine what Pastor Middleton must have thought. Nothing is more terrifying than a volunteer that you cannot fire unless it is a stranger volunteering to seek access to your young people. In addition, the two questions natives ask of an interloper in the mountains are: Where are you from, and who are your people? If you were not born there, you better be related to someone who was, and if you grew up east of Black Mountain, you were a flatlander.  As an unrelated flatlander, I had no good answer to recommend me for a posted position, much less one no one asked for. Yet, he was kind and respectful, telling me he would think about it and get back to me.

However, I was undeterred. The phrase, “Yet, She persisted,” was nothing new to me.  I called Rev. Middleton every month because it still had not dawned on me that there was no church in The Smoky Mountain in 1975 that wanted a young woman they did not know to come into their church and talk to their young people about literally heaven knows what. You see, I had never lived where no one could vouch for me, someone who knew my daddy or my grandaddy, my mama, or at least an aunt or uncle or third cousin.  I was entirely out of my element and too naïve or unaware of the bind in which I had placed this good man. After all, I had a calling, which was not how it was supposed to play out in the romanticized version of my own “Christy” experience.

WAYNE

I do not know if I wore him down or if he had a revelation, but when I called him in April, he offered me an opportunity that was exactly what I was hoping for.  Rev. Middleton said that a man named Wayne Bryson up in Glenville was starting a youth group for the whole community.  He was a member of Hamburg Baptist Church, but his vision was to offer all of the youth in the area a place to gather and talk about matters of faith. He said he had spoken to Mr. Bryson about me and would talk to me if I was willing to go up the mountain to speak with him.

This is where people usually point out all of the dangers and foolishness of my trusting nature, but I didn’t spend that year only going to class. I joined a church close to campus, took one of the homesick first-year students across the mountain to her local Halloween carnival, and succeeded in making the curmudgeon storeowner at the crossroads smile by making him homemade banana pudding from his overripe bananas.  Then, I continued to call Rev. Middleton monthly.  I put effort into forging my mountain credentials, and I was confident he was not sending me on a fool’s errand.

So late the following Monday afternoon, I headed up the mountain on the winding and narrow Highway 107 by waterfalls and steep drop-offs in my underpowered Ford Pinto.  I pulled into a driveway that led to a small but well-maintained home with a shiny dark green dump truck backed into its pullout.  Wait, I had seen that very same immaculately cared-for dump truck go by my rental house multiple times a day for months with just one man driving it, and it was the man who was stepping out on the porch to welcome me.

Hi, I’m Wanda Hardee,” I said. He extended his hand and said in the kindest voice I had ever heard, “I’m Wayne Bryson and Preacher Middleton said you were coming; you ready?”

“For what?” I asked. “To meet the group. It’s Monday night, and they should be here pretty soon.” “Really? I thought you were going to interview me to see if you wanted me to help with the group?”  “Oh, I have been praying for you, someone to help me, and I really wanted a woman to talk to the girls.  If Preacher Middleton sent you, I think you are an answer to my prayer. So welcome. Let me introduce you to my wife, Sandy.” 

He was not at all what I expected.  He was a slight man who turned his whole body when he spoke and had a twinkle in his eye that belied his constant pain.  He told me within the first five minutes of meeting him that he had experienced a life-altering automobile accident, and his survival hung in the balance for weeks.  They had to fuse his neck, and there were other lingering conditions, but there was an unmistakable joy in the man who drove that green dump truck.  He said that when he made it through, “he turned his life over to Jesus,” and one of the first things he wanted to do was help young people avoid mistakes similar to those he made.

THE PEOPLE

And just like that, I found my “Miss Alice,” for whom I did not know I was looking, and for the next two years, I went up that mountain every Monday and many days in between. I worked alongside Wayne and with one of the last youth groups before Cash’s Valley (Cashiers, NC) transformed into the elite and prestigious destination it is today. I had a lot to learn, and they had a lot to teach me. Together, they introduced me to those who shaped their people’s culture and faith. It was a sacred journey.