My Day at the Greek Festival in Huntington

It was the Greek festival in Huntington. It was there I had the opportunity to watch the young people dance their traditional dances to ancient songs.

The dancers held white handkerchiefs that they used to keep time with the music. But they also used them to connect to their dance partners or to wipe their brow. These dances were an expression of joy. I can easily imagine these dances taking place at weddings, anniversaries or at the birth of a child.

But after watching the youth of this community dancing joyfully to the songs of their birthright, I couldn’t help but come to feel a tinge of jealousy. Because theirs is a community intent upon maintaining a culture. They shared their traditional foods, wore their traditional cloths, and taught their children the dances of their fathers. They promoted within themselves a sense of family, tradition, and that of community. All these things bound together by their religion and culture.

During a course in Appalachian Studies, I learned that mountain people would often meet on a Friday night and move the furniture either to the porch or against the walls. They then would dance to fiddle music until morning. But if this ever was a part of my culture it had been abandoned long before my time.

There coexists among our people pockets of other cultures, but for the most part, we share a common past. A past that at best shared only a fragmented culture. Our abandoned culture cannot be so easily retrieved. What traditions we may have had have been decimated by the effects of a barrage of influences such as intermarriage among different peoples, divorce, puritanical religious practices, technology and even roller rinks.

The lucky ones among us are those families who are blessed with musicians bent towards our traditional music. Through this music we can still hear the vestiges of our ancestry. I hear this music and I think of the squirrel hunts of my youth. I think of possums, persimmons, and pumpkins. I think of the cool autumn breeze cutting through a flannel shirt and my grandmother’s smile and I can feel the warm trembling crooked hands of my grandfather cradling my own while keeping time with that music.

What we are left with are boring weddings relegated to fellowship halls and church basements, complete with lukewarm sherbet punch and bad music. The only dancing that we might do may be to the Electric Slide or some other tired old pop song played once nationally but now only lives in our hollers or in the tape decks of 1970’s jacked up Novas with loud exhausts.

Somewhere along the way we were made to feel bad about where we came from and we did the worst thing we could do, we abandoned our music, our culture and our dances. We then began to embrace tired trends that made their way from California and would adopt them as our own. Instead of our youth trying to emulate the character of our forefathers, they now mimic the black urban culture of which they are completely ignorant.

Where are the dances of my fathers? How can I express my joy?

The only way I know to tie myself to my culture is to eat me a plate of squirrel gravy and biscuits along with a glass of buttermilk. Oh� and pass the apple butter. After I get done, I might get up and dance me a jig if I only knew how.