Hill Women is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2020 by Cassie Chambers
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Pat Humphries for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Swimming to the Other Side” composed by Pat Humphries, © and ℗ 1992, published by Moving Forward Music. Reprinted by permission.
Hardback ISBN 9781984818911
Ebook ISBN 9781984818928
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Elizabeth Rendfleisch, adpated for ebook
Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover photograph: courtesy of the author
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Part I: Home
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part II: Away
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part III: Home, Again
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Selected Sources
About the Author
You don’t go to Owsley County, Kentucky, without a reason. You can’t take a wrong turn and accidentally end up there. It’s miles to the nearest interstate, and there’s no hotel in town. It doesn’t cater to outsiders.
A half dozen times each year, I drive to Owsley County, where my mom grew up, and where, in many ways, I did too. The roads to this tiny Appalachian community wind tightly through the mountains, snaking around corners and plunging into valleys. Even after all my years of making the journey, I still feel a bit nauseous on some of the curves.
On this drive, I’m talking to one of my legal clients on the phone. “Yes, I’ll meet you at the courthouse at eight A.M. Thursday,” I yell, as though increasing my volume will make up for the patchy cell service. “Yes, eight A.M.!”
This client has called me repeatedly over the past few days, and this isn’t the first time I’ve confirmed the time of her hearing. We are going to court to get a protective order to keep her safe from her physically abusive husband. I can tell she’s nervous.
I start to say something to comfort her, but I’m interrupted by three short beeps letting me know that I have—once again—lost service. CALL FAILED flashes across the screen, and I can’t help but feel as though this call isn’t the only thing failing in my legal practice these days. I decided to work as a legal services lawyer in rural Kentucky to make a difference—to represent women who couldn’t afford an attorney. Everything is harder than I’d anticipated. I sigh and switch on the radio.
Eventually the mountains give way to Booneville, the county seat and the only town for miles. From the top of the ridge I can see the town in its entirety, spanning just a few blocks, nestled in the holler below. I sigh again, this time with relief: It is always exactly how I remember it. There is comfort in that.
But once I’m driving in Booneville, surrounded by its smallness, there is a moment where the comfort resembles confinement. The town itself feels stagnant, silent, unchanging. Occasionally a pickup truck roars around the block and breaks the quiet. The stores are worn around the edges, with faintly painted signs and pitched awnings that flap against the gray sky. There is no trace of new business or development. The mega–chain stores so familiar to most Americans are nowhere to be found. Two dollar stores and two gas stations are the only franchises in town.
The local high school proclaims itself the “home of the Owsley County Owls.” And that is how Owsley County is pronounced: “Owl-sley County.” The order of the letters in the word doesn’t really matter. People give little thought to such formalities.
The 1970s-style courthouse occupies the center of the town square. I occasionally go there for my work as a lawyer. When I do, I chuckle as I pass the sign inside that reads NO TOBACCO USE ALLOWED IN COURTHOUSE. EXCEPT FOR THE OFFICE OF THE SHERIFF, COUNTY TREASURER, AND COUNTY CLERK. I used to think it was a joke, but a lawyer who works there assured me that it’s not. They banned smoking in the courthouse just a few years ago, and I’m told some officials refused to go outside to have their cigarettes.
A plaque in front of the courthouse proudly states Booneville’s claim to fame: Daniel Boone once spent the night in the town square. Owsley County has another claim to fame: It is one of the poorest counties in America. According to the 2010 census, it has the lowest median household income—$19,351—anywhere in the United States outside of Puerto Rico. More than 45 percent of the population lives in poverty. Only 38 percent participates in the labor force, and more than 20 percent has a disability. Even those numbers don’t accurately describe how deep the poverty runs here.
It’s not always visible, the poverty. Some parts of town are stacked with rows of neat brick ranches and freshly painted homes. One bright yellow house flies an American flag and has a beautiful birdbath in the front yard. Another has a border of flowering trees and well-manicured bushes. These parts of Booneville could be any small town in America.
But in some places the poverty is all that you can see: the places scattered with houses and trailers falling in on themselves, the structures so tilted and crooked it looks like a stiff wind might knock them over. The gaps in some of the wooden houses are visible from the road, and I’m told that at least a few of them still have dirt floors. At first glance, these places look abandoned. But a vehicle in the driveway is a marker that this sagging structure is someone’s home.
It’s hard for me to know which part of Owsley County I should show the rest of the world. Presenting the broken, falling-in places helps people understand the extent of the poverty. And I do want them to know how deep it goes. Maybe if they understand it, they can help fix it. But I also don’t want them to think that this poverty is all that exists in Appalachia—to see Eastern Kentucky as hopeless, broken, dirty. That’s not what I see when I look at this place that I love.
I round the square and continue driving. Along the way, some of the lawns are scattered with what appears to be junk: old car parts, refrigerators, children’s toys. But I know that, for some people, the piles of seemingly useless stuff serve a purpose, and an entrepreneurial one at that. People here make a living however they can: selling old car parts, repairing refrigerators, organizing yard sales. They collect anything of possible value because they never know what will come in handy. If nothing else, they can sell the junk in a nearby town for fifty dollars a truckload. They are always thinking of ways to earn money, help a neighbor, provide for their family. There is drive, creativity, effort in unexpected places.
Some people look at this image of poverty with a sense of disgust: they see unkempt humans living in unkempt homes. Others view it with a sense of pity: those poor people, trapped in such awful circumsta
nces. I try to look at it with a sense of respect: to remember how hard they are working to survive in the overlooked corner of the world they call home.
That last view of Owsley County feels the truest to me, even if the other views fit more easily into the categories outsiders want to create. For me, there is hope in the spirit of a people who find creative ways to exist in a community that has been systemically marginalized. In men and women who take care of each other even when the outside world does not take care of them. In people who broke their bodies in tobacco fields and coal mines to make a living in the only community they have ever known. We don’t take time to see it: the hope in the poverty, the spark against the dreary backdrop, the grit in the mountain women.
I’ve come to know that grit well—that fire that fuels so many women in rural Kentucky. I see it every day in my clients: women in the midst of a crisis, doing what it takes to keep themselves and their children safe. Once I recognized it, I saw its effects everywhere—the way it had shaped people, families, communities. The way it had shaped me.
Of course not everything in Owsley County is exceptional—exceptionally horrible, exceptionally virtuous, exceptionally whatever we want it to be. In many ways, it’s ordinary, full of normal people living normal lives. These lives take a different shape and arc than they do in some other places, but the basic themes are the same. People care about love, community, family.
About a mile outside of town is a narrow gravel road that drops dramatically over the side of the hill, plunging steeply into the holler below. The holler is called Cow Creek; it shares its name with the stream that cuts through it. A few hundred yards farther and I’m at the bottom of this valley—a small, flat space enclosed by rolling hills. On the top of one of these hills is a farmhouse looking out onto the fields below.
The house resembles an elderly woman, leaning into itself, folding itself around an ever-weakening structure. It is gray now, its wooden boards faded and worn, but there are hints of the white and green it once wore. There is a strength in its brokenness. It has withstood weather, time, families. It is vacant now, resting, watching, waiting as each new day cascades into Cow Creek.
This holler feels like home, and this house feels like family. There are women’s stories here, stories of resilience, love, and strength. This community knows them well, but their echo hasn’t reached far enough into the outside world. Instead, these tales have ricocheted within the mountains, growing more faint with time. I want to tell these stories because they matter, because I’m afraid that they will be forgotten, because they have the power to make this community visible. As I stop my vehicle and walk toward the house, the memories wash over me like the sunlight on the mountain hills.
The sun was directly over the Cow Creek holler, shining down onto the tobacco plants below. The summer heat was sticky, the type of heat that clings to your skin and makes your hair feel damp. I was standing in my grandparents’ tobacco field, trying to shield my eyes from the incessant sun while holding an armload of tobacco sticks.
My five-year-old body was tired. I had been up since before five A.M., when my aunt Ruth lightly shook me awake. “Time to get up, Cassie,” she’d said in a no-nonsense tone of voice. “There’s work to be done.”
That always seemed to be the case on the farm. So much work to be done.
Even at this young age, I knew I liked work—or at least that I was supposed to. Work was what kept the days full. What allowed me to bury my hands in the earth. What made me the same as my mother, my aunt Ruth, my Granny.
It didn’t hurt that my aunt Ruth gave me a dollar for each day I helped out on the farm. I’m sure I was more of a hindrance than a help, my clumsy child hands fumbling through tasks. But she was teaching me an important lesson, one that generations of mountain women have learned before me: There is value in work. Hard work pays off.
At the end of the week Aunt Ruth would take me to town. We would stop at yard sales along the main road, or perhaps wander into the Family Dollar store. I would spend my hard-earned money on a used doll or a bag of candy, or some other trinket. And, pushing my wadded-up bills across the counter, I would feel proud.
I released one tobacco stick onto the ground below and continued walking through the rows of plants, scattering the tobacco sticks as I went.
Up ahead I saw my aunt Ruth, bent over in the field. Aunt Ruth was the best tobacco worker in Owsley County. Even the men said so. She could cut more stalks per hour than the strongest man. She rarely stopped to rest.
Watching her move through the fields ahead of me, I was struck by her solidness, the strength of her body. Even then I could see that she mirrored the mountains rising up in the distance. I was also struck by her grace. The way she knew the land. The deftness and ease she carried to each task.
“How ya doin’ back there, Cassie?” she shouted from up ahead.
I was fine. I was content. I was at peace in this holler in the hills.
The sun sank toward the edge of the mountains, and our time in the fields drew to a close for the day. We made our way from the tobacco fields to the green-and-white farmhouse nestled on a nearby hill. We sat on the front porch to rest before beginning the evening chores. The porch’s tin roof was rusted, and the wooden floorboards sagged in places. The attached house looked tired, even then, edges and joints giving way. But pots of bright wildflowers sat along the front rail, their long stems woven into a net of green and color. They made the old house something alive, something beautiful. Aunt Ruth loves to plant wildflowers.
Aunt Ruth has not had an easy life. Born in 1958, she was the fourth of seven children and the firstborn girl. My mother would come along—years later. Ruth, like the rest of her siblings, began working in the tobacco fields at an early age. She liked working on the farm—liked working with the earth—and she made it a point to outwork her brothers.
She had once dreamed of something beyond the tobacco fields. She had wanted to graduate from high school—to be the first in her family to get an education. But when she was about sixteen she got rheumatic fever and had to stay home from school for a year. She had attended school sporadically before that, and, with no plan to keep current on her lessons, she felt like it would be impossible to ever catch up. She decided that she had been silly to dream of anything more.
So Ruth set out to achieve in the only way that she could: becoming the best worker in Owsley County. It was one of the few paths she had to gain recognition, to feel pride. Day after day, year after year, she worked on the farm. Cutting her hair short to keep it from matting against her neck. Wearing heavy jeans even in the summer heat. Breaking her body to contribute to her family.
Over the years her siblings moved off of the farm, got married, started families of their own in other parts of Owsley County. Ruth remained behind. She knew that her aging parents couldn’t manage the farm without her. She knew that she was the best worker in the family. She knew it was her job to keep the farm afloat.
That’s not an easy thing to do as a sharecropper. Our family didn’t own the land we worked—we never did. We rented the house, the barns, the fields, from the Reed family. At the end of each planting season, we gave half of the tobacco earnings to the Reeds for rent. If it was a good year, my family may have gotten to keep a little less than ten thousand dollars. The constant repairs to the house, need for new farm equipment, and other daily expenses depleted that money quickly. Aunt Ruth took on odd jobs—mowing lawns for neighbors and washing cars in town—to help make ends meet.
After we sat on the porch for a bit, Aunt Ruth stood up and told me it was time for chores. I scampered behind her to the barns, where we tended to the animals. More accurately, Aunt Ruth tended to the animals while I tried to track down the newest litter of barn kittens. One of the old barn cats had given birth earlier that week, and she kept moving her kittens from place to place, probably to keep them safe from my unwanted cooing
and petting.
I loved the smell of the barn. Even now I can smell it if I close my eyes, the scent of cool and earth and animal.
The sun had barely set when it was time to get ready for bed. There was no indoor plumbing, so I used well water to brush my teeth and wash my dirt-covered body the best I could. Every few days Aunt Ruth filled up a tin tub with hot water so I could take a bath.
Aunt Ruth walked with me to the outhouse and shone a flashlight inside the lopsided hut before I went in. The other day, Granny had said that the neighbors found a black snake in their outhouse. The thought of a snake—even a harmless black snake—lurking in the dark terrified me. Aunt Ruth put a big bucket in the house for us to use as a nighttime toilet so no one had to trek to the outhouse in the pitch dark.
That night I crawled into bed next to Aunt Ruth. She told me stories about the haunted holler, and our kinfolk, and the mountain people. Storytelling is an art in the mountains, a way of transmitting history, culture, and shared experience from generation to generation. She told me stories about my mother as a child, the ghosts in the woods, and quick-witted hill people. I listened raptly to her yarns until my eyes grew heavy and my lashes knitted together.
I would spend several more nights here, in Owsley County, that week. I would probably spend several nights the next week. Both my mother and father were students, young parents, struggling to build a better life for me. They couldn’t afford childcare, and there was nowhere I would rather be than this patch of earth in the mountains. I often came for a week at a time; my mother says that, as a young child, there were periods when I was here more than anywhere else. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t frequently running through the Cow Creek holler.
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