Coal Miner's Daughter

by Coal Miner's Daughter (Expanded

  I’ve always tried to help the Indians. My friends, the three Johnson sisters, are part Indian, just like me. In 1968 we got a campaign going for the Red Cloud Indian School at Pine Ridge, South Dakota. We took up six truckloads of clothing and school supplies and stuff. Then me and my band went up for a benefit show. They just about had to tie me down to keep me from taking an armful of those kids back home with me. I’d’ve done it, too.

  At Christmastime, we still send candy and stuff up to the kids. They put my picture next to John F. Kennedy on the wall. The only thing that made me feel bad was when they had that uprising at Pine Ridge, because I didn’t think that would help the people none. Still, the Indians have been treated bad—just about as bad as the blacks, really.

  Nothing makes me madder than to hear people put Indians down. And if I hear some Indian complaining, I tell him to get smart and be proud of himself, because I am. In fact, I’m waiting for us to straighten this country out. Get everybody living in little tribes and fix his own medicine. We’d be a lot better off.

  Mommy learned to doctor her whole family when she was still a baby. Her family got the fever during World War I. They were all lying around the cabin, talking out of their heads, and she was no more than five years old. Somehow she didn’t get the fever, so she spent weeks fetching water and helping to cool them off.

  Her daddy taught her how to put salve on the bad sores on her mother’s legs, from blood vessels breaking. Her mother had twelve babies, but only five girls and a boy lived.

  When Mommy was six, her mother died from the fever, and after that, she was on her own a lot. She’d go from one family to another. If somebody was having a baby, she would take care of the other kids. When she was staying with a family, Mommy would eat regularly. But other times she’d have to pick berries and sell ’em to get enough to eat. She also did washing and stuff like that, anything to help.

  After Mommy got married, she used her Indian ways to raise us. She had her first seven kids at home, with an old midwife coming in to help. The last one, she went down to Paintsville Hospital to have. She figured she earned that. After Mommy had me, she was out setting onions on the hill only three days later. Mommy did everything the way they do it now—more natural. They get you up on your feet the first day now, and they let you go home after three days. Mommy was just ahead of her time. All eight children are alive today—so she must have been doing something right.

  Whatever went wrong up on our holler, Mommy would take care of it. For burns, she’d make a salve of castor oil, flour, and sulphur. She’d cook it all together, then rub it on the wound and it would heal real fast. When you got a cold, Mommy would make a poultice from mustard seeds and rub it on your chest. It would take the cold right out of you. But it was so hot and smelly us kids would swear we’d rather have the cold than the poultice.

  One time my brother Herman was cutting some weeds with a big scythe and he hit his foot, cutting an artery. That blood was pumping swoosh-swoosh-swoosh. Mommy just ripped off her petticoat and twisted it around his leg in a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.

  Mommy saved my life, too, when I was little. My dress caught fire when I was sitting too close to the fireplace. Mommy was supposed to be peeling potatoes for dinner but she decided to sit by the fire to get warm. She saw my dress on fire and she just pulled me off the floor and ripped that dress off my back. Then she beat out the fire with her bare hands. I didn’t get burned at all, just a bloody nose from bumping against a chair. Mommy’s hands were blistered for a week, even though she put them in cold water right away the way the Indians did.

  Mommy had a special tea for every occasion. She’d make her teas out of roots and herbs, but she had to be real careful or they could kill you. Like one time she made a tea from the mayapple root, but instead of using the female mayapple she used the male. It gave one of the kids a stomachache for days. Mommy also made sassafras tea. Daddy drank that for his high blood pressure.

  When I was little, I had a real bad case of black measles. I had ’em for nine days, but they wouldn’t break out, and I was getting worse. Mommy told me she was gonna make a special tea out of sheep manure that was supposed to make the measles break out. Lordy, I watched her making that tea and I knew I was gonna die if I had to drink it. All of a sudden those measles started popping out all over me, and I was better in about two days. I never touched a drop of that tea. Maybe that was the way it really worked.

  We also had a tea made from a weed called “life everlasting.” It was good for colds and shivering. Sometimes we’d dry it out and smoke it a little. Some people think life everlasting is the same thing as marijuana, which also grows easily in the mountains, but I’m not sure about that. We never knew about marijuana when I was growing up, and I still haven’t tried it to this day. I never did like smoking much, and I haven’t touched tobacco since I was a girl.

  Mommy smoked and she drank coffee, but she wouldn’t let none of us kids do it. And we wouldn’t complain about it, or she’d fix us good. One time we had company, and they asked me if I drank coffee. I was around eleven or so and I said, kind of smart, “No, Mommy won’t let me drink coffee.” Well, do you know that she made me drink a whole pot of coffee, just to teach me not to smart off? I was so sick my stomach was foundering for a day—that’s a Kentucky word for “upset.”

  But I didn’t learn my lesson about smarting off. We used to eat only two meals a day: breakfast and supper; we’d kind of snack on leftovers in between because we didn’t have enough food. (Mommy even had to grind up an old plate during the winter to feed the chickens. Seemed like they must have liked it ’cause they gobbled it up real fast.) Anyway, Mommy would put sweet potatoes, apples, turnips, and cabbage heads in a hole under the floor and they’d keep all winter, wrapped in straw. She’d let us eat one sweet potato for supper and then another just before going to bed. Well, another time we had company, and they saw our leftover potatoes being warmed on the wood stove. The guest said, “Didn’t you eat all your supper?” And I answered kind of smart, “No, my mommy only lets me have one sweet potato.” Well, you guessed it. She made me eat every sweet potato in that pan. And this time I was so sick I thought I was really gonna die. That finally taught me a lesson about smarting off.

  In spite of that, I still got into my share of trouble with Mommy. I hated to wash dishes, and I’d do anything to get out of it. I even hid the dirty dishes under the kitchen cabinet, and one time Mommy found out and cracked me over the head with a broomstick. Daddy saw this and said to her, “No wonder she don’t have no sense!” At the time I thought, “Good old Daddy, always sticking up for his little girl.” You won’t believe this, but it wasn’t until after I was married that I figured out Daddy wasn’t exactly praising his little girl.

  Mommy is still healing people. She now lives in Wabash, Indiana, where she married Daddy’s first cousin, Tommy Butcher, and she works in a home for handicapped children. Her job is to make sure the kids get their medicines. She doesn’t make the medicines herself—they’re prescribed by a doctor—but she swears the medicines are the same as she made when she was raising us.

  The home where she works is a beautiful place called Vernon Manor. You think of homes for handicapped people and you think of those big ugly buildings that the government puts up. But this is a private deal, and that’s why it’s so nice. It’s laid out in a big H shape, all on the ground floor, and all the rooms are bright and sunny. The kids are from infants to nineteen years old, and most of ’em have physical problems, too.

  They’ve got doctors and nurses, but I think Mommy knows just as much about curing them. She makes a salve out of soap and some other stuff and rubs it on those little children’s sores. Her bosses say nobody can heal a child better than she can. They’re always after her to teach them before she retires. Mommy says she’s not much for writing things down; she’s got a few secrets written down in a family Bible somewhere. I’d say that someday, that’s gonna be valuable to medical science.

&n
bsp; Her bosses call her “The Squaw,” because she’s got special powers. She can read the grounds in a coffee cup and tell your future. We’ve got some kind of extrasensory perception in our family, too. Me and Mommy are on the same wavelength—I can always tell when she’s sick. I’ll call her up and say, “Mommy, what’s wrong?” and she’ll tell me she’s got the virus. I’m the same way with my oldest daughter, Betty Sue. I think it has something to do with being Indian.

  4

  Family Style

  Hungry little baby on a cold hard floor,

  Crying for milk but there ain’t no more.

  Can’t get credit at the grocery store,

  But that’s how it is when you’re poor…

  —“When You’re Poor,” by Tracey Lee

  I never asked Mommy and Daddy whether they wanted such a big family, but I do remember Mommy saying that as long as she was nursing, she couldn’t have another baby. That’s about the only kind of birth control they had in the mountains in those days. And the truth is that’s the only method I knew until after I had my first four.

  I remember Mommy nursing Jackie—we call him Jay Lee now—until he was four years old. When company came, he’d go behind the door and motion for Mommy to nurse him. He hates for me to remind him about that, but I do it just for meanness.

  Mommy says I was always mischievous, fighting with my brothers all the time. She says I liked to draw attention to myself that way but that the kids never stayed mad at me for long.

  I was the second child, right after Melvin—everybody calls him Junior. Herman came after me, followed by Jay Lee, then Peggy Sue, then Betty Ruth. Next was Donald Ray and finally Brenda. The oldest and the youngest were around fifteen years apart, so Mommy’s nursing must have helped her with birth control just a little. Brenda was born after I got married. I told her to change her professional name to Crystal Gayle when she started her own singing career because we didn’t want her to get confused with Brenda Lee. I didn’t know Brenda too closely while she was growing up, but Peggy Sue was my first sister, and I claimed her right away. When she was born, I ran up and down Butcher Holler shouting, “I got a baby sister; I got the prettiest baby sister in the whole world!”

  We were kind of isolated up on Butcher Holler. Sometimes I’d go down and help out my aunt, Nory Butcher, who had twelve kids of her own. She’s always been there for me—giving me little knickknacks whenever I visit her. But lots of times in the winter, when the snows came, we’d go two or three weeks without seeing a soul. You got pretty close to your family that way. Everybody had their jobs to do. Mommy would never let me iron because I’ve got no patience for it. I’m like a bull in a china shop. I’m an Aries, wanting to ram my way through, and you can’t do that with an old-fashioned iron on a wood stove.

  They tried me at pouring coffee, but I wasn’t even good at that. Daddy would say, “Here comes that heifer with the coffee,” and I’d be going bump-bump-bump, spilling hot coffee over everybody. Oh, it was a mess. I tried being a waitress one time, and I was terrible. I’m just plain clumsy.

  Mommy was the one who would spank us in the family. One time they made me sleep in the press—remember, that’s our word for “closet.” It was a dark place under the stairs, and I screamed and hollered because I was afraid of the dark. Even today, I never go to sleep without a light on in the bathroom.

  I slept on the floor on a pallet until I was around nine years old. Then Mommy figured I shouldn’t be sleeping with all my brothers, so they bought me a regular bed and put it in their room. Daddy was gone most of the night at the mine, so I slept in their room until I got married and moved out.

  It was rough times back then. I can remember winters when all we ate for weeks was bread dipped in gravy made of brown flour and water, and that was supper. God only knows how we survived. Every now and then we’d have “coal miner’s steak”—baloney.

  We never had ice cream. We’d get snow in the winter and put milk and sugar on it. That was the closest we got. But we usually had good vegetables from the garden in the summer, plus all the greens Mommy would gather from the hillside. With her Indian ways, she could walk that ridge and come back with a potful of greens that she’d cook up. To this day, I prefer vegetables to meat.

  Our main meat was from the hog. I never had beef until after I got married and was eating at Doolittle’s place. I never saw red meat like that. I was afraid to eat it, but I got used to it. We also had chickens. Really, we’d eat whatever we could. Sometimes at night, while Daddy was at the mines, Mommy and Junior would go possum hunting. They’d hold a flashlight and draw the possum. Then the dog would chase the possum up a tree. Junior would climb the tree and shake the possum to the ground again and that dog would hold it, not tearing him up or nothing, until we put it in a sack. Possum meat has a real good taste. Squirrels, too. That was a real treat—squirrel meat with gravy and biscuits. Nowadays you don’t hardly see a squirrel in the Appalachian Mountains. I think we ate ’em all during the Depression.

  We never wasted anything in our household. When we had a chicken, Mommy would cut off the toenails and cut up the feet for the dumplings. The kids would fight over the head because the brains tasted good. The same thing for a hog. We’d cook the intestines, the feet—everything.

  When we finished eating, Daddy would take part of the entrails and mix ’em with a can of lye and cook it all in a great pan on the outdoors fire. He’d make lye soap that way; it was the only soap we had. Mommy would take it and do the wash outdoors all day on Monday and hang our clothes on washlines strung across the holler.

  The Depression wasn’t our only problem. We also had to be careful about the big copperheads that live in the mountains. Whenever I go back to Butcher Holler, everybody’s got their own story about going to the outhouse and stepping right on some big old copperhead. It was a fact of life.

  I remember one time I was coming home from Aunt Tillie’s after dark. Mommy used to borrow a Western book from her every night. I saw this thing on the porch, and I thought it was a broom that you sweep off the porch and garden with. I wondered why Mommy left it on the porch.

  My brother Herman stepped over it, but I bent down to look at it. Copperheads have these diamond-shaped blocks, but it was so dark I couldn’t see it. I yelled to Herman, “I don’t know what it is, but it sure smells like cucumbers.” At that, Mommy gave out a big yell from the other side of the house. I just fell backward. She came running out with a double-bladed ax and started whacking. Daddy came out with a light. She cut that copperhead into six or seven pieces. The head was about eight inches long—and it jumped for fifteen minutes. Daddy was so upset he kept yelling, “Get away from that head—it could still bite you.”

  But Daddy had his own pet—a black snake that used to crawl up from the cracks in the floor. Every time we had dinner, Daddy would feed it. When Jay Lee was born, that black snake crawled right into the crib and curled up with Jay Lee. Daddy said that black snakes are harmless, which they are, but when he went to the mines, Mommy killed it with an ax because she just couldn’t stand the idea of a snake being in bed with Jay Lee. Daddy was mighty mad ’cause he missed his black snake.

  We didn’t have much to celebrate during the Depression, but we tried: Thanksgiving, Easter, Christmas. One of the biggest holidays for mountain people is called “May Meeting,” which is really “Decoration Day” at the end of May, when everybody comes back to honor the dead. Today, with people moved up north to work in the factories, you get terrible traffic jams on “Hillbilly Highway”—Interstate 75—before Decoration Day. In those days, poor and with no cars or nothing, we’d get fifteen or twenty families in Butcher Holler to the little graveyard on the hill.

  We would spend days fixing up the grounds, cutting the grass, cleaning the markers, putting in spring flowers. We’re kind of sentimental about graveyards. We put them in high places, facing the eastern sun. Whenever I go back to Butcher Holler, Doolittle drives me up the steep hill to Daddy’s grave. Usually, I bri
ng plastic yellow flowers, because Daddy was color-blind and yellow was the only color he could tell. The plastic is so Daddy will have something nice that won’t fade too fast.

  The holidays were special times. Most of the time we just tried to stay alive and take care of the babies. That was my main job. I’d sit on the porch swing and rock them babies and sing at the top of my voice.

  Daddy would say, “If you don’t shut up, everyone in the holler will hear you.” But I’d keep right on. I’d sing the old hymns like “Amazing Grace” or “This Little Light of Mine” and stuff like that, as loud as could be. I didn’t care. And I’m still like that. I love to get up and sing at the top of my lungs. Just a show-off, I suppose.

  That’s how I got my first audience—singing on the porch. Daddy had two cousins who made moonshine up on the ridge, Willie Webb and Lee Dollarhyde. Sometimes they got in trouble with the law and got themselves sent away, but they always went back to moonshining again. I remember one time they were hiding out, living in our attic. That’s when Mommy was about to have another baby. They heard the commotion and came down to see the new baby. When they saw it was a boy, they insisted we name it Willie Lee, one name for each of ’em. (He’s the one we call Jay Lee nowadays.) He was just a little booger, around three pounds and four ounces, and he probably should have gone into one of those incubators down at the hospital. But Daddy made a tiny crib and rocking chair out of wood and Mommy nursed that baby until it survived. When he got bigger, I used to rock him on the porch and sing to him until Daddy said, “You’re gonna ruin his ears if you sing so loud.” But I didn’t care.