Lige of the Black Walnut Tree

Growing Up Black in Southern Appalachia.

Mary Othella Burnette, an 89-year-old African American woman, was born in 1931 and reared in Black Mountain, North Carolina. While much has been documented about White communities in Southern Appalachia, little has been written by a native mountaineer about African Americans living in that area.

Ms. Burnette’s grandmother, whom she knew well, was born into enslavement on a plantation located in Black Mountain, where the restaurant Louise’s Kitchen now stands. In August 2020 Ms. Burnette published Lige of the Black Walnut Tree. “Lige” is short for Elijah, a cousin she never knew.

The remarkably detailed accounts of her family and Black residents of Black Mountain’s Cragmont community are a rare glimpse into a world rarely described. Ms. Burnette’s maternal grandfather, George Payne, lived in Shiloh, was a blacksmith and supervisor on the Vanderbilt Estate, and is buried in Shiloh.

All of Ms. Burnette’s stories are rare, and most of them contain vibrant and emotional depictions of characters she grew up with and around from early childhood through the mid-1940s, a time when the sun was setting on the lives of the few surviving family members of freed slaves and their community-minded heirs who settled in the Swannanoa Valley after 1865.

As these original stories display the social and cultural norms of a fading era, they also reveal how residents of those times faced oppression with a steadfast belief in America and held on to their unwavering hope for better days. Thus this thoughtful work becomes an open window into African American history.

Ms. Burnette’s love for Black Mountain, combined with her loyalty to Valley residents and other characters she adoringly describes, brings these beautifully written, historically and culturally significant stories to life.

Lige of the Black Walnut Tree has been nominated for this year’s Thomas Wolfe Award. It is available only on Amazon and is not carried by local book stores.