Cleo Williams

Gratitude for Shoes: Growing Up Poor in the Smokies Cleo Williams

An important goal in writing Gratitude For Shoes is to dispel the myth that mountain people are stupid, lazy, feuding "hillbillies," and portray them as the highly intelligent, resourceful and hard-working people they truly are. Survival was never easy for the early settlers in the Great Smoky Mountains. People "made do" with what they had and what they could glean from a rocky garden and hillside corn patch, and from picking wild berries and grapes, canning, preserving and drying food. Sometimes, in order for his family to survive, a man had to resort to making illegal corn liquor. This is a story about growing up in a family of ten children in the immediate post-depression era, living high in the mountains on a steep winding dirt road, eight miles from the nearest town. Much effort has been made to use authentic mountain speech, along with giving details about activities of daily living, including housing, clothing, food, school, work, play, attitudes and customs of the time. A good education was considered an impossible dream, especially for a girl, but Gratitude For Shoes tells how one little barefooted mountain girl overcame almost insurmountable obstacles in order to achieve that goal.