We Were ...

The magnetism and shame of growing up contrary in Appalachia.

I received a letter from a dear high school classmate during my sophomore year at UNC that surprised me.

We had been friends for six years and had grown particularly close as seniors. And yet, in the end, he had found me to be unknowable.

“There always was more to know about you than you ever wanted those around you to think there was,” Ryan wrote in his typically atypical vernacular. “More than meets the eye, and you like it like that. Being underestimated. Running from behind. Keeping all of your guns behind your back, all the time knowing like the devil that they’re loaded.”

I felt stripped naked by his words, words he meant as a compliment. I was still so young, a primordial glob of goo lacking definition and self-awareness—and, of course, so was Ryan, who had also left our West Virginia hometown to attend a large university in another state. The person he described—the calculating underdog, the secret striver—seemed pretty worldly and clever, two things I sometimes wish I had been but was not. And yet, his letter seemed to hold a twig of truth.

What was that truth? I had no idea. But I turned his words over and over in my head like a long string of backflips searching for a place to land. For weeks, backflips. For months, backflips. I never spotted the ground.

Two years ago, I discovered Ryan’s letter in a dusty box of correspondence as I wrote through my disownment. I still knew it by heart. But that heart had since been dislocated, changed; I could finally find the beat beneath his letter more clearly.

I came from a mother who was afraid to be known, in a place where being known—recognizing each other’s inherent humanity—was our default wealth, our capital, the empowerment that mattered most. Being known and being a part of our communities mattered in West Virginia because, beyond our borders, the negative stereotypes loomed large. We were in this life together. We knew each other best.

But being known required us to accept the length and breadth of our challenges as a state, to share in them, to see ourselves in the hearts of others, to support policies and programs that would improve lives. How else can you adequately care for one another?

Our family did not.

Why was I unknowable back then? Because I learned from my mother that being known might reveal a lack of worth, a problem that followed me into too many other arenas as the years passed. You might say I am overcorrecting now, sharing too much of myself here. It’s a fair criticism.

But I’ll keep going.

Because it matters that we try to know each other. It always has. I was disowned in part because my family of origin refused to recognize the inherent humanity of one of my children, because my mother dismissed their identity as a plea for attention. She allowed her fear to guide her into hate, the kind of baseless fear you see played out in the most abominable political ads airing right now, less than one week before the election. I know that an embarrassing percentage of people in my home state agrees with her. In doing so, they dishonor the gorgeous place in which they live and the kind and caring souls I once knew there.

“We Were,” the piece that follows about growing up contrary in West Virginia, isn’t representative of the families of my friends or my extended family who live there. It isn’t representative of Appalachia, any more than J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is (and it is certainly not).

But when I read it now, two years after I began to write it, the lesson I see is that we will all be known in the end, and it is up to us to decide how. Will we be known for our smallness, our fear, our shame? Or for our hearts, our generosity, our humanity?

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We Were …

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Summer in Nicholas County, 2018 (author photo)

We were many versions of West Virginia when I was young.

We were Nicholas County on the weekends, the rural outpost two hours south of our home, where burning leaf piles and verdant vegetable gardens exhaled around abandoned outhouses, where gravel roads were swallowed whole by overgrown bushes. We were the fiddle-twang accents of my grandmother, aunts, and uncles who lived there, clanging and cackling out of kitchen windows, and we were the buttery scent of fried lightbread sizzling in its pool of golden oil in a pan. We booted red kickballs over black rooftops into a blue sky and we ate silky cones from the custard stand and we stretched our short, rubbery arms around our older cousins’ steady torsos on the back of a blazing orange dirt bike. We inhaled movies at the drive-in under the clear country skies, Hollywood stars crackling from a rinky-dink speaker hooked over our car window. We drove home on Highway 19 listening to Mac Davis’ “It’s Hard to be Humble” on the 8-track.

During the week, we were something else entirely. We were the huffing-angry, smoking, steel infrastructure along the Kanawha River, where the putrid refuge of wild science burned into the gray skies from Union Carbide, the plant where my dad dressed in a suit and tie and helped maintain the hulking IBM mainframes that powered West Virginia’s Chemical Valley. We were the people of Bhopal, India, one December day, when we discovered that the Carbide chemical that stole the breath of 4,000 lives there was manufactured in only one other place on the planet.

Our place.

We were all of these things, the foul smoke and the sweet custard and the stolen lives half a world away. We were the gorgeous alchemy of our ancestors and the terrible wounding of our industries. We were not ignorant; we could hear the stars mocking us from the rinky-dink speaker on the car window.

We could hear it all. You are less than… it crackled.

We were my hometown of St. Albans, the Charleston suburb forgotten by the interstate, the location of my family’s corner-lot house. On certain afternoons here, I was 4-foot-9 inches of muscle and power and underdog energy wrapped in a leotard. I stood at one end of our long hallway with my fists balled up tightly and my eyes focused on the imaginary vault that lay in front of our lone bathroom at the other end. I waved and smiled brightly at the judges to let them know I was ready for takeoff.

And then I flew.

I flew so fast and so high in my mind, and I heard the announcers say, “Yes! She’s done the impossible! A full-twisting Tsukahara! That’s a 10! Mary Lou Retton of Fairmont, West Virginia, has just won the Olympic gold medal!” I received a parade and the keys to a red Corvette, and I proved to the world that I was more than just a mousy-haired kid with coal in her heart and toxic chemicals in her lungs.

“What she doesn’t know about me,” I told the reporter from Sports Illustrated about the Romanian I had vanquished, “is that I’m tougher than she is.”

We were foul smoke and sweet custard and stolen lives and crackling stars who burned to be heard in the night. We were flying girls with smiles full of straight white teeth, trying to vault away, waving brightly as we went. We were not to be underestimated.

In our pretending hearts, we mattered.

My sister and I were the girls whose mother taught them this: Growing up where we grew up meant the outside world placed us at the back of the line and branded us with low expectations. We believed her. For we also inhaled an exhaust emitted from beyond our state borders, a rancid cloud of compounds that could choke a person’s dreams. You are less than, it hissed. It settled into the spongy pads on our yellow kitchen chairs and formed a fine dust on our black rotary telephone. It became one with the frosted hair on my mother’s head. You could smell it on your skin even if you cleansed yourself raw and articulated your vowels with bland propriety and learned to sit still and quiet and pretty.

It was always in pursuit.

“I cannot believe you are from West Virginia,” my college job supervisor, who was from Gary, Indiana, would tell me one day as I articulated my vowels with bland propriety while answering phones. “You are such an anomaly.”

We were the girls who knew what was coming for us, who knew that was coming for us: The ha-ha jabs about satellite dishes as state flowers and the Deliverance theme song hummed in our presence. We had to believe that we were better than the world thought. We had to become so much better that, sometimes, in our family, we pretended to be less West Virginian than we were.

We loved where we were from.

But we told ourselves we were not of where we were from.

Down some of these gravel roads, near where our relatives lived, were the people national news outlets sought when they were dispatched to talk about our coal or our wild science or our outhouses or our poverty. We knew how to respond to the television when an outsider pulled out a resident wearing overalls splotched with grease and smiling beneath a head of uncombed hair, the guy who did not articulate his vowels blandly.

You are less than, the crackling box hissed at us.

“Oh, here we go again,” one of us would say, indignant, eyes rolling, monitoring for our mother’s approval. “Everyone from West Virginia is always toothless and shoeless and dirty and dumb.”

“They always find That Guy,” the other would say.

We were all of these things: The foul smoke and the sweet custard and the stolen lives. We were the flying girls of pretend bravado.

We loved where we were from. But we retained the right to pick and choose our history.

We were the people who wrote to the head of NBC Entertainment — I was that 12-year-old, encouraged by my mother — to scold the network for portraying a threadbare homeless couple on the sitcom “Night Court” as West Virginians. We didn’t object to the callous humanity that had left these characters impoverished. We objected to the mirror the couple held to our faces. We objected to our alignment with people who were less than, people who lived all around us, people who reminded us that we were not as shiny as we hoped, people who could be us, people who came from people who broke the mountains so we could make a life.

People who did the impossible and did not get a parade, a red Corvette, their image on a Wheaties box.

We were the foul smoke and the stolen humanity and the mocking voices—those voices were ours. We were shallow dust gathering within collapsing clouds, and we yearned to burst forth as hot stars, to join even one bright galaxy.

But we could not. So my parents invented their own galaxy, instead.

They were defiantly Republican in what was then a solidly Democratic state. They were anti-union despite our coal-mining heritage, anti-feminist despite three out of four of us having ovaries, and anti-social services even though we routinely gathered for Christmas celebrations at the home of a beloved aunt whose refrigerator once contained an enormous block of “government cheese.”

“We are different from These Others,” was the mostly unspoken slogan my parents embraced. They were real Americans, they said, because they did not take handouts. That they did not need assistance was beside the point. That they needed to keep others down so that they could keep up—this was the point.

We were, I suppose, shakily middle class. Our house was small, our savings uninspiring. But my dad’s brain, our sole income, was a marvelous mystery machine, a tool so shiny and tortured with mathematics that he became an engineer without a college degree. IBM hired him out of the Navy, footed the bill for additional training, and promised stocks and a pension. The value of that would have been unimaginable in 1983 when West Virginia’s unemployment rate was 20 percent.

Contrariness could feel like agency to someone from West Virginia. If you shared nothing with others — not religion, not ideology, not even your true self … whoever that was — if you belonged to no one else’s club, you could never be rejected. You could be your own gatekeeper. You could be exceptional, just as my mother needed to be.

But we were not exceptional. We were not sweet custard and would-be stars crackling into the night. We were ignorant.

We were.

Not That Guy, and not These Others.

Us.

Because when I felt my dreams most deeply, I was sitting on porches where the horizon before me was spread lushly with mountains or peering through car windows as the shale and limestone layers of blasted rock zoomed past, these curtains for the hollers, these workspaces of the gritty and unwashed men and women I was supposed to be better than. All my creativity and craft came rushing down from those unassuming mountains and the expanse they opened in my soul. They did not press me into a mold, they did not tell me who to become.

They said, here is your space to find out.

author photo

I was and am inseparable from the clay I was given to shape myself. And so is my family.

Because the truth is, we were That Guy and These Others, too; we were all made from the same clay and sediment, the same essence. And for a long time, we were the girls who learned to disparage half the source material of our souls. We were not just the descendants of the country doctor, that great-grandparent that my mother spoke of with pride. We came from miners and mechanics with Black Lung in their medical charts and poetry and resilience under their fingernails. Our histories traveled through the hollers wearing raggedy overalls, too. The man who rode a car deep into the earth to find coal was also a man who carved works of art from gnarled wood to find meaning. He was our uncle. The woman who scrubbed clothes on a washboard was a woman who understood the tender ways of growing violets, the wondrous chemistry of bread-making, the delicate creation of lace. She was our grandmother.

We were all of it and all of them—the grime and the sustenance and the art—until the day we up and left when I was 16 years old. And then we were nothing, neither beautiful nor toothless. We belonged nowhere, and we were nothing at all. ♣

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THIS FRIDAY: I won’t be posting next week. Instead, on Friday, I’ll share a story about the family that remains in my life and the reminders they carry about the crucial decision this country faces on Tuesday.

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