The Red Flannel Rag

continued to tell the truth when his way of life was questioned. He dropped out of

school in the third grade.

Virgil’s experience effectively changed my behavior and made me begin to

questi on my community’s way of living. There was no way I was going to school with a

red flannel rag around my neck. Although I resisted having it tied on my neck, my

mother insisted that I wear it. I just made sure I took it off on the school bus before I

arrived at school.

The other children in my first grade were bused in from Dayton or Bridgewater or

lived in the Mt. Clinton area. They made up the vast majority of the students at Mt.

Clinton Elementary School. Two busses brought the mountain children to school.

The red flannel rag incident was only the first sign that I was not like the other

kids in our school who didn’t ride across Little North Mountain on my school bus. As

each incident occurred, I realized more and more that to avoid humiliation for being

different, I needed to watch and listen before I wore something to school that my

mother wanted me to wear.

I grew up living in two very different worlds separated by a narrow range of the

Allegheny Mountains called Little North Mountain. I was born and raised in an

Appalachian community, but I went to school with mainstream American children just a

few miles outside that community. I often picture myself straddling Little North

Mountain with one foot in my small Appalachian community and the other foot in the

Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. I am facing westward in my picture, so my right foot is

in Appalachia, and my left foot in the Shenandoah Valley – a very different, mainstream

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