Book Review: The MacLeod Place

Title: The MacLeod Place

Author: William H. Armstrong

Date: 1972

Publisher: Coward McCann

ISBN: none

Length: 188 pages

Quote: “If they ever decide to finish that highway along the mountaintop, all these cussed up-and-down roads will be straightened out.”

And the home of seven generations of MacLeods will be destroyed. The active generation of MacLeods, Torm and Logan, were killed in The War. The grandfather, Angus, who is bringing up young Tor MacLeod, won’t have much left...

William H. Armstrong had just achieved fame with a novel called Sounder, about a Mississippi sharecropper’s son and dog waiting grimly while the sharecropper serves time in jail for having stolen the Christmas ham they enjoyed. One can imagine his friends in Virginia asking, “Why don’t you write about our poor people?” So in The MacLeod Place he documented how the federal land-grabbing that built the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway, and specifically the Skyline Drive, caused as much pain to as many children as unequal pay and sentencing did in Mississippi.

The story naturally includes a lot of Virginia history. Angus’s explanation of “new ground” is much nicer than the way my elders described the Clearing of the Forests, though believable. His oral history of his ancestors' experience of slavery rings true. His sheep-keeping lore is informed by Armstrong’s own sheep farming experience. Angus’s history includes the often overlooked Mennonites, too; in the end the MacLeods’ friendly relations with a nearby Mennonite settlement are what save their family from emotional collapse.

As in Sounder, Armstrong’s voice can be oldfashioned and ornate. Angus feels that “time was running a fast race even at the snail’s pace of a man trailing behind a plow.” Not all of his generation agreed that Hemingway’s style was better than Bryant’s. Since my grandparents could sound like Angus, I find Armstrong’s style quaint but pleasant. It does remind me, though, that although the publishers tried to blur it into a could-be-happening-somewhere-now kind of story, this story is taking place in the 1940s; Angus’s “Pa” was running the family farm in 1859; Angus was probably born in the 1870s or 1880s, Torm around the turn of the century, young Tor about 1930.

What hurt this novel’s sales was not the perfectly appropriate oldfashionedness of Angus MacLeod, but the fact that it’s not a feel-good story. Like Sounder, it’s a protest against social injustice. Characters suffer, survive, and achieve a reasonably happy ending, but the point of the story is that the things that cause them to suffer ought not to have happened. Sounder’s Human shouldn’t have gone to jail and Tor MacLeod shouldn’t have had to give up a single corner of the MacLeod Place. The reaction of our chattering class is instructive. Sounder called out people it was fashionable to blame: those racist trash Virginians prefer to imagine living only in places like Mississippi or Alabama or big cities up North. More, more, the (mostly left-wing) chattering class cried. So Armstrong gave them a novel that calls out the greedy federal government, specifically the Roosevelt Administration so many older Virginians so loathed because stories like The MacLeod Place were true. The silence of the Literary Left was deafening.

Armstrong admits that Angus made mistakes too. Profoundly introverted and self-directed, Angus is too busy with his own work to verify that his farm is scheduled for destruction, to talk with other farmers who do or don’t want to sell their farms and determine whether a reasonable compromise would satisfy everyone (as it probably would have done). Tor, young and optimistic, wants to imagine that adults will naturally reach a happy compromise; he thinks his grandfather’s dislike of noisy motors  is oldfashioned, and secretly looks forward to the day when he’ll have the right to farm the MacLeod Place with tractors. Nevertheless the greedheads in the federal government completely ignore the protests of Angus and likeminded farmers, claiming that “many” (how many?) want a highway to run all the way along the mountaintop, all through the most valued farms, where litter and petrochemical residues will wash down into all the towns below.

A different novelist might have written a longer, richer, more densely textured story with some insights into the lives of the people who didn’t join Angus’s first protest in time to make a difference. I suspect there was a good bit of Armstrong’s personality in Angus. Armstrong prefers to focus on only the one man and the one boy, with only cameo roles even for their closest friends. It works, as it worked in Sounder, because these novels were written for self-absorbed teenagers. We see why even Tor thought his grandfather’s activism was too much, too soon, right up to the moment when he realizes that in historical fact it’s been too little, too late. We’re left to fill in from our own store of understanding not only why some of the neighbors didn’t join Angus’s petition, but how Tor would have been studying at school how this whole story was exactly the sort of thing his ancestors came to America and put all that work into farms like the MacLeod Place to avoid.

Our ancestors didn’t want to be either victims or profiteers from any “law of eminent domain.” The melodrama to which that evil “law” leads should never have been dramatized in an American story. It has already been written in the history of ancient Israel (see 1 Kings 21 through 2 Kings 9, inclusive), where King Ahab, the definitive coward, having mortgaged his wealth to boost The Economy, offended God and humankind by seizing just one little vineyard, and how this led to the violent deaths of his whole family and the ultimate collapse of his country. We failed to purge “eminent domain” out of our law in the United States, and it may yet destroy our civilization.

Ironically, because The MacLeod Place is a grim wake-up call that too many left-wingers ignored, Sounder now reads like something long ago and far away, but The MacLeod Place is remarkably similar to contemporary stories like Little Pink House. If you’re going to read one of Armstrong’s books, The MacLeod Place should be the one. White Americans particularly need to know that, although cultural misunderstandings and racist bigotry were real too, everything that greedheads like Martin Van Buren were allowed to do to Native Americans is something that the current incarnations of their greed would be delighted to do to fellow White, English-speaking, nominally Christian Americans. Without improving our federal law with a provision like, “Government may claim the right of first refusal when private property is sold, but may never under any circumstances seize the homes of law-abiding citizens,” none of us is really secure in our own homes.

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