Ethos

The concept of ethos (the Greek root for the word ethics) in rhetorical study traces back to Aristotle, who argued that trustworthiness was essential in a credible speaker. To be heard and believed, one must be able to prove one's ethical character. In modern academic writing, ethos includes the moves writers make to establish their credibility, including things like citing experts on the topic at hand. Ethos matters to Appalachian rhetoric too, as I've experienced it, but I've noticed that there are particular methods for creating it. It's established by foregrounding roots, family ties, and place-connections. Ethos comes from establishing a voice that doesn't differentiate itself from the audience, that doesn't present its ideas as more provable or logical than what the audience might have; it comes from saying that I am one of you, I am part of this place, of these people.

This is my ethos.

The stories I tell are part of my experience. Maybe they will echo ones you've heard, or maybe they can encourage you to think about your own. That's something I've found the most useful ones do. So, let me tell you a story.

Like most of the stories I think of as mine, this one started before I was born. "Pap" is a regional term meaning grandfather; I grew up knowing that my Pap's own grandparents had built what was known in our family as the old house. I never knew them, of course, nor even Pap's mother, the last person to live in it, but I knew their house intimately. The old house was unlivable by the time I was born, and when I think on it, it's the sagging walls and rotted out floors that I remember. It stood there, thirty feet from the front porch of our trailer, till I was fourteen. As a child, I could sit on our porch in summertime to watch the once-white curtains blowing through a broken window on the old house and imagine I was seeing a ghost. It wasn't scary, really, the old house or the spirits in it. They were family.

And what a family to have. William Gallagher (the first) built the old house with his mother, wife, and kids after he came home from the Civil War. We have a picture of him in his Union uniform, crossing his pistol and knife in front of his chest, defiant and strong. War may have tempered these traits a bit before the end. Having survived the Battle of South Mountain and, barely, Antietam, he never had a good word to say about war when he told his kids about it. In fact, me and Mom had to rediscover the names of his battles because these weren't what got passed down to us. Individual battle names were, in the family memory, forgotten. Instead, what we learned from him, like his children and his children's children, was that war was hell. The story goes that he would tell his children, "I run five miles to get into the army. And once I was in it, I'd a-run ten to git out, and been glad just to go home." William's father went into battle at his side, and he never did come back from it. Dying away from home: wasn't much worse you could say about war than that.

I know my ancestors' names and stories and words from what got told generation to generation. Writing didn't tell the stories, mouths did, but sometimes written words featured in the stories themselves. Inside the old house was the letter informing William's mother that her husband, Elza, was dead in some forsaken war hospital in Tennessee and for a price could be brought home for burial. (She couldn't pay. In Tennessee he remained.) I know that my great-great-grandmother, Sarah Narcissus, held together her family and families around her as a root doctor. The old house kept two well-worn volumes of herb lore and advice on home maintenance to scaffold the learning she likely got from her own momma, even though their pages had long since become so crumbled and mildewed as to be mostly unreadable. The old house held the albums containing tin-type photos of relations whose names were documented, but about whom we've lost all else. It held the Bibles my great-grandmother Maud Lula's father had used when he was a preacher at the Baptist church on the next hill over. All of these were held on to, not because of what their writings could tell us, but as artifacts around which stories were told, remembrances kept.

Grandma, Pap, and Mom eventually agreed that the old house should come down, as it was getting dangerous for the kids to play around those sagging walls and broken windows. I don't believe any consideration other than our safety would have made that decision possible. Pap called a neighbor, who had a backhoe, to see about doing the job. What we didn't realize was that this neighbor would take to the task with initiative. He showed up the next day while we were all gone at work and school and with his backhoe pushed the old house, including so many of its precious contents, over into the wooded holler below and crushed the remnants into pieces in his tracks. I came home from school to find that those walls, by which I'd measured my life up until then, were gone completely.

But the place remains, and the stories with it, and that is what we hold to. Not long after that my parents, brother, and I moved out of the trailer and into a house we'd had built a little further out the ridge, and my cousin moved into the trailer. Eventually, she would add to the family two babies, and when they'd outgrown the trailer, she had a double-wide moved in to the precise spot where the old house had been. The location of the old house is a place that centers the extent of our farmland, bracketed by my parents' home on one end and my grandparents' on the other. All told, the blood of seven generations of Gallaghers have lived on this land; the houses come and go, yet the land remains, the pole around which we seem to rotate.

Is there something rhetorical in it, then, these generations, these stories, these artifacts, this place? In other words, is it part of how I learned to identify myself and to communicate that identity? Did it communicate to me about what was good and right and worth expressing? The short answer is yes, but it isn't an answer I've always known consciously. Yet these are the most recent incarnations of questions I've considered for years, since the day one of my middle- school English teachers told us we were Appalachian and perhaps even before then. There was never, at least in my family, a time when it was overtly and specifically stated: this here is your home. It's who you are. So where did I get the sense of it so strongly? I'd noticed since I first started to make sense of stories that ours weren't much like the ones I saw on TV. I noticed differences in how people talked, lived, and interacted, even before I'd noticed the value judgments people could and did make about these. Questions about the sources of these differences, their causality and implications, have been with me, then, since childhood. In rhetorical studies, I've found what seems to be the most holistic way of gathering and considering these questions that has...