What led you to write a story about the railroad’s entrance into western North Carolina?

Let me see—what year was it that I wrote that? About forty years ago? (laughs) I didn’t choose the railroad as a topic, and I was surprised when the publisher put a railroad on the cover. It was more the story of this mountain and grading a road on it. The fact that it was a railroad meant that it couldn’t have more than a 5% grade. One could visualize the mountain—at the bottom of it, the road starts and it had to go up through the mud cuts and the tunnels. The climax of the book would come when it emerged at the top. And so it was a natural story.

Tell us about growing up in West Asheville.

I went to what had been called Lee Edwards High School; and I went to Asheville Biltmore Junior College. I was an announcer at WISE radio. At 18, I could have stayed on as an announcer and pretended that my work was a national necessity, but I wanted to join the Army, which proved to be a very great thing…World War II was most unlike Asheville [Ehle was a rifleman in the 386th Infantry Regiment]. After the war ended in Europe, I was in the Far East, and was scheduled to land in Japan on Honshu Island. When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, I was on a ship. As far as Asheville is concerned, sometimes I’ve gone back to visit. My parents lived there until they each passed away. They’re buried in Arden, which is a little bit strange because they didn’t live in Arden. And the church to which they were loyal was not in Arden. But I believe my mother wanted to be buried pretty far up the hill above everybody else. She did not want to have a problem with tree roots. My parents would go out on Sundays, apparently. All my brothers and sisters and I had already moved to somewhere else. We all had used to go for drives on Sunday afternoons out of West Asheville to see how the other people lived in Grove Park and Biltmore Forest and Lakeview Park. My parents aspired to living in one of those places, and before they passed away, they lived in all three, one after the other. But they found, on one Sunday afternoon, this beautiful Episcopal cemetery up there in Arden. John Marsden and Gladys Starnes Ehle.

What led you to become a writer?

Bertha Hunt was a teacher at Asheville High School. She taught forensic speech. Her classroom was right across from Mrs. Welch, who taught drama. My mother thought that I should be able to make a speech. My grandmother and my mother, too, had the idea that I should be a minister anyway, and that I would have to be able to speak. So I was registered for the speech class. On the first day, Mrs. Hunt said, “We are now going to assign each of you to make a speech.” She gave us the topic and even gave us some of the information, and on Monday I went in with my little speech. I’d never written anything as far as I can remember. And I became a writer thanks to Bertha Hunt. Because my speech went over with the people, and my next one, too, and the rest just followed along. And finally, after the war, when I got to Chapel Hill, I registered for writing courses. I took eight different writing courses as an undergraduate and graduate student. Was there a compulsion? I don’t know. It just turned out to be something I could do as well as my contemporaries—and better than some of them.

What was your first speech about?

Ferdinand the Bull.

Where did your self-confidence come from?

[After school, over the phone] Mrs. Hunt talked for thirty to forty-five minutes about what happened in the class that day. She rarely said anything during the class sessions. She had two hours. She taught English and speech and she rarely talked about English at all. If there was anything to be said about English—punctuation or prepositions—she would assign the subject to one of the students to come up and make a speech about it, which worked out just beautifully. And where was Bertha Hunt meanwhile? She had put her desk at the back of the room so that she could watch the students perform. Did she ever criticize anybody? Not to my knowledge. Did she ever tell them how to write a speech or make a speech? Not to my knowledge. She didn’t even call the roll. She had a student call the roll.

She called you up and spoke for half an hour?

Her husband was ill and was in some kind of sanatorium. So I supposed she was lonely and had time to call people, and she did talk quite a long time when she called, virtually every afternoon. That’s when I realized I didn’t hear well out of my right ear…Never did I receive anything but encouragement…She had debate teams. She told us what the national topic was…We had to go to the library and dig out the information. We had to travel. We went to Kentucky, to Florida…and we won. All those students who had had a lot of instruction, we beat ‘em. So I became a writer thanks to Bertha Hunt and the teachers at Chapel Hill…I’ve never written autobiography. I’ve written stories.

What are the settings for your stories?

The first of the mountain books—in terms of chronology—was “The Land Breakers.” Where was it set? They could have been in Spruce Pine. There was a trail going up there. It could have been Cebo or the Swannanoa valley…The first book I wrote about mountain people was “Lion on the Hearth.” I always imagined it took place at the bottom of Lexington Avenue.

Did your family do much hiking or camping?

My mother was afraid of snakes. She was afraid of coons, too. She read about coons being rabid. We were protected from hikes and Boy Scouts and things like that.

The bear hunt in “The Winter People” is so realistic.

I did talk to people and do research. I think it was a pretty good bear hunt.

How much of “The Road” is documentation and how much is fiction?

A great deal of research was done. When I worked for Terry Sanford when he was governor [Ehle was Sanford’s special assistant from 1962-1964, developing educational, integration, and anti-poverty projects], I asked the State Library if they would mind finding out what their records showed about this mountain [during the railroad building era]. They found quite a lot of material having to do with investigations about why so many people had been dying up there, being killed by disease and explosions and other things. There were two such committee investigations, and they gave me those reports. I hired a research person to go trace the steps in Asheville, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh. So I had a lot of information when I left Raleigh. But then I got involved in—friends of mine were arrested in the Civil Rights movement and I was unable to do anything but write about them in a book called The Free Men. When that was finished, I had all this stuff about The Road, and I started writing it. I just started at the bottom of the mountain. The prisoners were almost all Black. There were possibly a few White people. The word would go out in eastern North Carolina towns that they needed more laborers for the railroad, and so they would find them—in the courtroom. It was too bad. I wasn’t sure about the women prisoners, and I must admit, I didn’t have much evidence of that…Paul Green read the manuscript and asked me to take that out. He said, “You just put that in there, didn’t you?” Paul was embarrassed by anything that had to do with sexual activity in my opinion…But I would say it’s pretty accurate. Now, the story about the little boy getting into the contest about blowing up a chestnut tree. I just made that up. And the preacher at the end gives what I think is a very good sermon to the prisoners. The mountain girl, I’m afraid, was pretty much left over from some kind of tradition. I must have seen her in a movie or something.

What are your thoughts about mountain women?

The only mountain lady I ever knew really well was my grandmother, Lily Starnes, who was perceptive and intelligent and used to write me letters. She read the newspaper every morning. She kept up with the politics of the day…She did have Roosevelt’s picture in her bedroom sitting room—along with one of Jesus; and of her husband, who had passed away…She lived in Emma. Her father was a dairyman…I’ve been to his cemetery and my cousin, Hal Starnes, wants to go up there to see his great-grandfather and great-grandmother’s cemetery plots…The Starnes family came to America in the early 1700s from the Palatine district, where they were fruit growers…They migrated down from the Hudson River Valley to Pennsylvania and then to Virginia. Some of them went to Kentucky and were killed by Indians when they entered the Kentucky forbidden land. Some went to East Tennessee and settled there. Some of them were killed there by Indians in Sevier’s settlement. Those fellows came back from King’s Mountain and made the mistake of getting involved in a battle with the Indians. So they were killed. Then some of them went down and settled in Mecklenburg County—in Monroe, what was then Mecklenburg County. One of them was a captain in the American Revolution. He was killed in South Carolina at Camden. His name was John Starnes, and his younger son left home and his wealthy brother, being the oldest, inherited everything. John eloped with a girl from Hickory and settled in Haywood County, and her father waited until spring to go find her. And he found her, and he found they were doing pretty well…They had built a one-room cabin and they had cleared the land, planted corn, and had a few head of cattle, some pigs and chickens. So he left them a couple of slaves and went home.

Let’s talk about your abiding concern for the place of African-Americans in our society, starting with your first novel.

That’s right. I didn’t realize at the time that that was what I was doing. [William] Morrow [publisher] had trouble getting the stores to stock it.

What were you finding in yourself that led to your choosing that subject for a short story before it became a novel? When did you realize that concern?

There was nothing in the novel to indicate that I was concerned. It was a novel telling a story, and the people in it were realistically presented as best I could—presented as people rather than caricatures, and in that sense, it’s quite a departure. I was simply writing novel about people who happened to be Black. If I had decided that the end of it to change it to White people, I’m sure I would have had a more saleable book. But that didn’t occur to me. The story was told about a fellow named Jordan who had worked his way through all the jobs in the part of North Carolina where he lived, in the piedmont. He had a wife and two children at home and he had to figure out what to do about it. And his rich brother came back to town, and that created a challenge.

What were some of the projects you worked on for the State? They included programs that addressed segregation as well as the needs of students with special skills?

The North Carolina Fund, the first statewide anti-poverty program, that was one of my projects under Terry Sanford; the North Carolina School of the Arts; the N.C. Governor’s School; the N.C. Advancement School, which closed about ten or fifteen years after it was founded; the N.C. School of Science and Math, which I helped Governor Hunt start; and some other projects. After that, I worked to integrate the Southern prep schools, and did integrate twenty-one. I helped them integrate, I never imposed it—with Southern students and Southern money. And I had a project for about eight years to identify the best high school Black students in math, and the best ones in verbal ability, and had special summer programs for them in North Carolina universities. So those were the things…But we’re getting a long way from books.

It’s been said that you were designed to be a writer. Is expressing truth dramatically your main interest?

My first writings were for radio. Some of those had to do with race, just stories….That was the series called “American Adventure.” [All of the tapes and scripts are available in the John Ehle Papers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.]. I played both Horace Williams and Edgar Allan Poe.

Which episodes in “The Road” do you consider the most dramatic?

I always meant to read the book myself. It’s been some time since I read that book. It’s amazing. When you write a book, you’re very much involved with it—the story and the people. Then you finish the manuscript, and you’ve got to rewrite…In the old days, including this book, the discarded pages were always three feet high. That was always the case. So, the manuscript itself would go into a regular 8½ x 11 box that makes a little coffin. And you send it up to your editor and publisher and they maneuver it into a book. Back in those days, writers weren’t involved in the release of a novel. You weren’t asked to do a national tour or appear on television. There were eight or ten national reviews and some local reviews. One had a clipping service…Being a writer back then meant—really, the question was, “What is your next book going to be?” You didn’t sit down and read the one that had already been done.