Lionell Filiss and his daughter, Jemima, Big Pine, 1983.
We lost Lionell Filiss this past week. Lionell had been a mainstay in the county for well over forty years. I would see him at parties, at demonstrations, at music festivals, and most recently at his daughter Jemima’s store, the Laurel River Store, on Highway 25-70 where it turns up the mountain to Hot Springs.
I had the opportunity to interview Lionell, along with his wife Mary, and Jemima when I was documenting the building of I-26, a project that eventually became my book, The New Road. Here are some excerpts from that interview that speak to who Lionell was.
It seemed like people in our situation had a local family that sort of took you under their wing. You became some kind of extended family. The first year we were here we grew tobacco. We had seventy year old people in the fields showing us how to do it., not only showing us, but out doing it. When I first moved here, daily I’d go up to the local store. There’d always be guys hanging out. They’d done some farming work in thee morning, and then they came for a Moon Pie and a drink, and we’d swap lies and tell jokes and stuff. There was a secular sense of community. The cohesiveness may be hard for some people to believe.
The most meaningful thing I could do was to take care of Mother Earth, or at least the portion that I could take care of because anything that I did for money seemed senseless. I think the American Dream is flawed. It was less meaningful. Just the fact that I could work a patch of ground and build up the soil. Anything I did around here was much more meaningful than putting some nylon carpet down in somebody’s house. I did mention to some people the best floor I ever had was a dirt floor. You raked it once a day whether it needed it or not.
Whatever the kids are going to do they’re going to do., but at least they saw this. I thought it was important that they know that, if they had to, they could raise their own food.
Lionell was a good man. A quiet man. Unassuming. A common man. A man you could count on to help. Madison County will miss him.
Lionell at the anti racism rally in Marshall.