My mountain,
My Mother.
Weeping with the blood
of my Grandfather's fathers,
Faces, stained black.
My mountain
Wails for justice,
Losing her voice,
Like a dying wick
in a smoldering candle.

Her children,
in the corner,
surviving
on scraps
from the master's table.
Cloaked,
in darkness,
unknowing,
unseen,
While she is raped.

Everything pure.
Everything just.
Everything Sacred.
Reduced to ashes and soot for a dollar.

Labels: Appalachia, Appalachian life, coal, mining, mountaintop removal, poetry

I believe that every human being is potentially capable within his 'limits' of fully 'realizing' his potentialities; that this, his being cheated and choked of it, is infinitely the ghastliest, commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world can assure itself."
- James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Labels: Appalachia, Author, famous appalachians, James Agee, Quote of the day, Tennessee

"We're defined by where we're from, though, I know that much. And having grown up where I did, the land was inescapable. When you walk outside and there's a mountain in front of you, you can't deny its existence and its importance."
- Silas House

Labels: Appalachia, Appalachian life, famous appalachians, Kentucky, Quote of the day, Silas House

Jean Ritchie has done so much to help preserve and promote Appalachian culture and narrate our story in the last 60+ years as have many others I could pull from the filing cabinet in my mind. Using traditional mountain and folk music to sing her family's (and her own) songs, Jean has become an outstanding voice of Appalachia in a world so unfamiliar with our plight.

Jean is an artist, an advocate, and a champion of our people.







I'd love to catch her the next time she's in Viper, just to thank her for all her contributions to preserving our culture she has made. The closest I ever got was when she was Grand Marshall of the Black Gold Festival Parade in Hazard a few years back, and I was like a kid in a candy store just to see her pass by.

Labels: Appalachia, Appalachian life, blue diamond coal, dulcimer, folk music, hazard, Jean Ritchie, Kentucky, leatherwood, mountain music, mountaintop removal, music, musicians, perry county, viper

A note before you read: I took a creative writing class last semester, and this happened to be my favorite selection from the whole term. I found out that I like writing my own stories a whole lot better than those about people who don't exist. I hope you enjoy, I wanted to share one of the many memories of my childhood with you guys and gals!.



Old John Smith



I was at a stoplight today and saw a tattered sign on the post. It said Lost Dog - ”Noodles” - $500 Reward, followed with a picture of the most obnoxious looking Pomeranian you have ever seen tugging on one of those rope toys. The rope was thicker than the pup’s head. Some poor soul’s best friend probably got out of an open screen door a few weeks back when it was warm, and it seems they’re determined to pay more for Noodles’ return than they paid for him in the first place. Noodles must be some dog.

I immediately went back to another time, when I was about ten years old. There was an old man who lived up the holler above one of my grown cousins, and this man never left his house. I think every neighborhood had one of these types. You know the kind; eccentric old man whom all the kids make stories about how he killed his wife or locked her in the attic and you swear you saw her once, but chickened out and ran away. This old man was exactly that.

I grew up hearing from my family how he had been some kind of brilliant engineer, and had a breakdown in his fifties and moved from New York City to Harlan County, USA because he saw the documentary about the UMWA strikes and thought this was an isolated enough place to get away from people. At least, that was the story. He left the house only to walk to his mailbox every morning, and he even had made an arrangement with the local Mom & Pop store to bring him groceries every week.

When he came here, he called himself John Smith. Whether that was really the old man’s name or not was still in question. One of the boys in my class said that his father told him Old Man Smith was here because he was running from the mob, and was in Witness Protection. I was ten years old, and to my knowledge the mob was a group of people chasing someone around with pitchforks, axes and torches. But then again, until I reached adulthood, I lived what one would call a sheltered life.

It’s safe to say that in such a tight knit town as mine, stories like these will pop up like wildfires in August. Everybody knows everybody, the gossip grapevine has been securely set in place for generations, and if they don’t know you, they’ll figure some reason out as to why they don’t. Needlessly, these stories put the fear of God into us kids. However, the one thing we children absolutely knew to be true was Old Man Smith’s dog. It was a mutt; had the face of a Beagle, the sable and white body of a Great Dane, and the howl of a Bloodhound. You could see it run around the fenced yard and into the house, and if you got too close, the dog bellowed like you had just escaped from a chain gang. Lucky for me, I never got that close.

Well, one day that dog got gone, and I reckon Old Man Smith was having a fit. That dog must have been the only being Old Man Smith had the most contact with, so it’s reasonable to assume why he was perturbed. He had called somebody up the Creek and had them post lost dog signs all over the place. He had a quarter page ad taken out in the paper offering “a cash reward for the finding of a beloved friend” and gave a description of the dog, but no picture. I believe it was my aunt who worked at the local clinic that said someone came in from the local Humane Society and said he had made a hefty donation for them to help look for it, and the lady even said that he had called in a psychic to help him find the dog.

A week went by, then two, the talk petered out, and then a month and the ad in the paper disappeared. Everyone thought that Old Man Smith had just given up. I hadn’t thought much about the dog, let alone Old Man Smith. I was out playing in my yard one Friday afternoon, Dad was at work and Mom and my little brother was in the house. Lo and behold, Old Man Smith’s dog walked up from over the riverbank and right into my front yard. My family always joked that if there was ever a stray, it would follow me home. Animals have always seemed to be attracted to me, even when I pretend they’re not there. Maybe it was because I was chubby and looked like I knew where food was, I don’t know, but believe me when I say I was a little Dr. Doolittle by the age of ten.

The dog walked right up and sat beside me. He looked like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. I resolved right then and there I was going into the house to get him a can of Vienna sausages and a bowl of water. My mother asked me what I was doing rummaging in the cabinets, and when I told her there was a dog outside and it was hungry, she naturally threw the “You’ve brought another stray home?!?” fit she had always thrown. Convinced that the dog was going to bite me and give me rabies or some incurable disease, she went outside with me.
(Not that it would have helped matters if the dog had been rabid, but you know how mothers are).

The first thing she proclaimed when we were outside was “You’ve found Old Man Smith’s dog!” I hadn’t even thought about whose dog it was, it just looked hungry to me. But naturally, a ten year old child and the prospect of a monetary reward seem to be great bedfellows. The dog chomped on the sausages as Mom went in the house to get a leash. When my Dad came home early, he naturally threw the “You’ve brought another damn stray to this house?!?” fit he had always thrown, and then after a second or two it had dawned on him that I had found Old Man Smith’s dog too.

You would have thought that we had won the lottery in that house. My dad worked eleven hour days six days a week at the sawmill, but we never had much money to play around with. The paychecks always went straight into bills and groceries. Dad dug through an old stack of newspapers and found one that had Old Man Smith’s ad in it. He called the number and told Old Man Smith that he believed his daughter had found his dog.

My Dad agreed to bring the dog back to Old Man Smith after we ate dinner and he took a shower. However, somewhere between bites of thirty nine cent chicken noodles from Save a Lot and dreams of a new bicycle, Old Man Smith wanted Dad to bring me with him. After Dad hung up the phone it was like I had been handed a death sentence. Actually having to go up and meet Old Man Smith wasn’t exactly in the itinerary I had fashioned for myself. I was terrified of that man, and good reason too, after all, people with pitchforks, axes, and torches had chased him into the armpit of the Appalachians that was Harlan County.

I begged and pleaded with my Dad to let me stay home, but his reply was “You found the dog; you’re taking it back to him.” After my dad showered, we loaded up the dog into the old Blue Chevy Blazer with rust holes in the floor that Dad used as a work vehicle and headed up the Creek to Old Man Smith’s. I had a knot in my stomach the size of Texas as we went into four wheel drive and climbed that steep hill.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Old Man Smith was actually sitting on his porch. In the sunlight. We got out of the Blazer and Dad got the dog out on the leash and walked up to the gate. Old Man Smith got up from the porch and let us in the yard. He had wiry hair that looked like cotton batting, and it looked like the wind had blown it every which way, floating on the wind like a broken spider’s web. He looked at the dog and said “Hello old Boy.” My dad then proceeded to introduce ourselves and made small talk with the old man about how the dog came into our possession and a little joking about the miniature Dr. Doolittle standing beside him while I stood there still as a stone. Looking back, I would have made a lovely lawn ornament.

Old Man Smith had on a pair of pajamas with wide blue stripes and black house loafers. In his shirt pocket was an eyeglass case from which he pulled an old pair of horn rimmed glasses. He smiled at us, put on a pair of glasses and pulled a picture from his pocket. I noticed his hands were shaking. He looked from the picture to the dog and back again. He walked around the dog, looking at each side, checking its ears and teeth, uttering the occasional “Hmmm,” if he found something interesting. The dog acted like it knew Old Man Smith; it was as friendly as a dog could be. It felt like ten years standing there as none of us uttered a sound, as the dog licked the man’s hand.

Old Man Smith looked over to me and gently said in that Yankee accent that terrified me because of its unfamiliarity, “Well m’dear, it looks like you have found someone’s friend, but not mine. They look nearly alike, but their spots are different, see?” My heart fell. There goes the bike, I thought, but nobody knew how I felt, because I was still as wide eyed as I was when I first walked through that gate. Then he continued, “However, my dog, Boy has been gone for over a month and I fear him to be dead. I think someone upstairs sent this one to you so you would bring him to me. He looks awful lonely and he does look a lot like my dog. I would be very willing to take him off your hands and give you a little something for your trouble.”

He reached into his front pocket once more and pulled out an old, well handled business size envelope. It was stuffed with money to the point that the flap would not close. On second glance, it wasn’t just filled with dollar bills, it was filled with twenties. I had never seen that much money in one place in my entire life, it had to be twice what my Dad made in a week. If my eyes had been wide before, they only bulged more.

I looked down at the envelope, then to the smiling, kind face of the old man I had been so afraid of my entire life and realized that he was just a lonely old man who seemed to be just as scared of the world as I was of him, and he was willing to give me what looked like every penny he had in return for bringing him the next best thing to his closest companion. I looked up to my Dad with a face that said “I’m sorry,” and he looked at me with a face that I took to mean “Do the right thing”. I looked at the envelope once again and releasing the breath I had been holding, I handed the parcel back to the man and said “Mr. Smith, I can’t take your money. Just promise that you’ll take good care of him. He likes Viennies.”

He tried to hand the envelope back to me, but I wouldn’t take it. It just didn’t feel right. After refusing a few more times Old Man Smith gave in and said “You’re a good, kind girl. I’ll treat him like a king.” He and my Dad talked for a little while longer while I sat and pet the dog. On the way home, my Dad said he was proud of me, one of the few times I’ve ever heard him say it. As I came back to the present when the light turned green, I thought about just how far someone would go for the return of a beloved friend.

I really hope Noodles finds his way home.

Labels: Appalachia, Appalachian life, Harlan County, Kelli Ward-Sturgill, Kentucky, nonfiction, true story, writing

It is better to confess ignorance than provide it.
-Homer Hickam, The Coalwood Way

Homer has a new book due out in February 2008 titled Red Helmet, it's about a New York woman who falls in love with a West Virginia coal miner, and between troubles at home and tragedy striking, she must go underground and work the mines herself, donning the red helmet that is the mark of a novice coal miner. I can't wait for it. Check it out.

Labels: Appalachia, coal miner, famous appalachians, Homer Hickam, Quote of the day, red helmet, Rocket Boys, The Coalwood Way, West Virginia

Years ago, I read Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce by Robert Penn Warren. While looking for today's Famous Appalachian Quote of the Day, I came across the following excerpt from this work. Though the story is completely unrelated, deep down I feel it can apply to the Appalachia we live in today:

My father held my hand, and he died.
Dying, said: ‘Think always of your country.
Your father has never sold your country.

Has never touched white-man money that they
Should say they have bought the land you now stand on.
You must never sell the bones of your fathers-
For selling that, you sell your Heart-Being".

I can't say if it was because I was fairly young and self-absorbed when I read the poem, or that now that I'm older I can be a little more introspective, but those two stanzas stuck a deep chord within me.

Why it rings more true to the way I see my Appalachia now versus the Appalachia I was literally clawing my way out of when I was seventeen can only be ascribed to the responsibility I feel for preserving the legacy of my Appalachian heritage today. I am guilty of being ashamed of my roots for a period in my younger life. I can't take that back, but I can learn from it.

I think as we mature we begin to see the merits of our culture and upbringing, and the value of sharing it with the next generation. Traditions fade with time, simply because they go dormant, unused, unmarried with the cultural chattels passed down to the successive generation.

Each era possesses less and less to identify with it's foundations, and instead of embracing the old ways and redefining them into a new identity, they're rejected and shunned. In order to attain the "modern" ideals of the non-rural lifestyle for the sake of progress, we are "selling the bones of our fathers", and losing our unique identity as Appalachians.

Labels: Appalachia, Appalachian life, culture, identity, poetry, Robert Penn Warren, tradition

Benita Keller, a West Virginia native and excellent photographer and photojournalist, caught my eye a while back when I was scrolling through a list of photographers and decided to do a little more digging.

I came across her "Trailer & Trash: OR Looking Through Rose Colored Glasses" series, a selection of portraits staged in front of an all-pink set that takes flea market front yard kitsch to a whole new level. Kitsch and myself have been having a love affair for 26 years and counting. I fell in love immediately.

I'm a firm believer that one of the greatest statements you can make is to create a real life stereotypical caricature so extreme that it makes the audience stop and ask themselves exactly why they believe the stereotype is true. The characters in each setting of this series seem to take the trailer trash stereotype to ridiculously epic proportions, but what you end up with is a living pictorial commentary on poverty, prejudice, and sexist ideals.

Benita Keller, you rock my socks. Rock on.

Labels: Appalachia, Appalachian life, benita keller, photography, West Virginia

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
- Booker T. Washington

Labels: Appalachia, booker t washington, famous appalachians, Quote of the day, Virginia, West Virginia

"Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it."
- Jesse Stuart

Labels: Appalachia, Appalachian life, Jesse Stuart, Kentucky, Quote of the day, writer

The other day I was rummaging through my dresser for a runaway sock, and at the bottom of the drawer were a pair of aprons handed down to me from my mother when I was twenty one years old, shortly after I was married. She gave them to me because they were old, and thought that I might want to have them. My mother never wore aprons, so how and why she came upon these are beyond me. But I started thinking about what these aprons represented at the time they were given to me, and how I see them now.

Five short years ago, I was slightly (and silently) offended that my mother had passed down to me what I felt were the very symbols of feminine marital repression, the chastity belts of kitchen fidelity where a “woman knew her place”, and that was in the home. I reluctantly took them because they were a gift from my mother and I didn’t want to be rude. However, it must be said that it has never been my temperament to be the Happy Homemaker, content with baking pies and scrubbing floors while enjoying a small allowance from the hubby every week. Thus, the aprons got tucked away in the dresser.

The days of Donna Reed and June Cleaver are long gone.

I grew up in a home where my mother had performed the same household tasks her own mother had done, just like her grandmother before her. Dad wore the pants, brought home the bacon, and my mother kept the house spotlessly clean, sometimes scrubbing until her knuckles bled. She had never worked a “real” job or tried to get her driver’s license, and no matter if my father was in the wrong, she stood vehemently behind him.

As a result of seeing my mother’s life firsthand, when I was a teenager, my definition of marriage was equivalent to a lifetime prison sentence. My mother had dreams that she had never had the chance to achieve, she married far too young, never graduated high school, and then by the time she could have realized what she wanted to do, she had two children to raise and everything got put on the backburner. My mother has a voice that would bring a songbird to tears, and every time I heard her sing, it was as if she were that caged songbird longing to be free. To me, marriage nailed the self you used to be in a dark corner, and what you were going to prepare for dinner had stepped in its place. Housewives were shells of their former selves.

However, I’m nearly twenty seven years old, and I find myself living a similar life. Similar, yes; but not exact. In these few short years, I have matured, and now I see that marriage is definitely not the misogynist demon I made it out to be in my younger years. My husband works ten hours a day, and between my day to day creative projects, I clean the house and prepare dinner before he comes home. I am not a housewife. I am a maverick, a multi-tasker, and a domestic engineer.

We now live in the time of Martha Stewart and Paula Dean, successful businesswomen who make a living off promoting the home. The modern, Pro-Fem versions of Donna Reed and June Cleaver.

By all of my teenaged assumptions and definitions, my not working in a physical establishment for employment defines me as a housewife. Yes, I already have one degree. I am pursuing my own writing endeavors while working on a book of folk tales set in Appalachia. I still create artwork manically, and occasionally I make a sale or commission (occasionally is simply because I have a knack for painting things that don’t match the couch or carpet and back home that’s why people buy artwork). And, I continue to go to college part time to get my Bachelor's degree in Art History.

Yet still, I realize I am living the day to day life of my foremothers. And you know what? It’s not so bad.

I’m not a shell of my former self. If anything, I’m an upgraded version. I found a partner who fosters nothing but support for anything I choose to do, and sometimes he nags that I should be doing more because it would be a waste of my talents. I really hit a hole in one with him. Especially after my teenage self went against my own judgment of lifelong anti-matrimony because I loved him.

I am glad I didn’t listen to my younger self, because I am experiencing on the whole, a great life that has only been enhanced by his presence. If he loves me enough to support me while I am going to college and trying to get my name out as a writer and artist, by golly I will be happy to cook his dinner and wash his clothes till the cows come home. Not because he brings home the majority of the money in the house, but because we are a partnership, and he made a long-term investment by putting faith in me. That kind of faith and support means that bigger, better things will come. It just takes time, and he’s in no hurry. He’s scratching my back so I can scratch his later. I do my work outside of the traditional establishment, but that doesn’t mean that what I do is less valuable than what he does. It’s a 50/50 deal and thank goodness we both see things that way.

Back to staring at those scraps of cloth at the bottom of the drawer, I looked at those aprons for a few more seconds and saw that when I was young, I made the mistake of not putting value on my mother’s work. If I had been objective, I would have seen that she really had the hardest job of all. I only focused on all the things she hadn’t achieved, not all the great things that were a product of her running the home.

She raised two intelligent, mostly responsible kids who turned out well. She kept our family together when the only thing binding it was a strip of moth eaten cloth. She made huge dinners that kept our bellies full on less than five dollars a day. She changed diapers and wiped snotty noses, washed clothes and did the yard work. My mother deserves a medal of honor for what she’s done, and she isn’t finished yet.

When I was twenty two, my mother got her high school degree and started college. She’s been working ever since. She didn’t miss out on life because she married young and raised a family for twenty years; she was just a late bloomer. I am so proud of her and thankful that she sacrificed those twenty years of her life just to care for her family. That was the greatest love of all.

Those aprons are now a symbol of love, and remind me at every glance that I’m lucky to love and be loved. Your worth shouldn’t be measured by whether you are running the rat race or not. Equal value should be placed on anything you do, even if it does require getting your hands dirty every once in a while. To all the mothers and domestic engineers out there, I salute you.

~Kell

Labels: Appalachia, feminism, housewife, housewives, love, marriage, mother, nonfiction, symbolism, true story