Hill Women

by Cassie Chambers

  Dale dropped out because he was tired of getting into fights. Some of the children teased him because he had only two shirts, which meant he wore the same thing several days in a row. Kids called him poor and dirty. Dale, feeling obligated to defend his family’s honor, would fight them. After years of this, he was tired of getting in trouble. It was exhausting.

  One by one, the first five children left school without a high school diploma. My mother and her siblings were not unique in this regard—most Owsley children didn’t graduate from high school during this time. Aunt Ruth estimates that, in the 1960s, only one out of every five of her classmates finished school.

  Even for those who did complete high school, attending college was virtually unheard of. Each year the valedictorian received a scholarship to enroll at Lees Junior College, a small campus one county over. Yet, inevitably, the student would return to Owsley County a few months later. “I missed my family,” they would say. “I’m back here and I’m staying here.”

  So it was surprising when Granny, an elementary school dropout herself, started telling Wilma that she should go to college. “Get your degree,” she said. “Make something of yourself.” College was not something Granny was familiar with—I’m not sure she ever set foot on a college campus. It’s strange that she decided she wanted to have a child who was a college graduate.

  She’d said similar things to her other children over the years, but none of them had listened. All her kids respected Granny, but her voice was not the loudest in their lives. Four of her first five children were boys, and they spent most of their time in the fields with Papaw—that’s what boys were expected to do. Ruth, who didn’t like being singled out as the only girl, also preferred to work alongside her father. He was the model they wanted to grow up to emulate. It was a model that didn’t call for extended education.

  But Wilma, the younger daughter, was Granny’s most reliable housework assistant. Wilma didn’t mind cooking and cleaning and house chores, so she spent more of her time inside with Granny—especially in the off-season when there was less farmwork. Hearing Granny’s repeated plea that she go to college stuck with Wilma. She began to think there was something to it.

  Wilma had always liked school, and she had always been good at it. When she was a young child she desperately wanted a kids’ encyclopedia set. Her parents couldn’t afford to buy her one, so she schemed up a way to get one herself. She knew that there was a call-in radio show that let people submit questions. If your question was selected, you got an encyclopedia set as the prize. Wilma spent weeks pondering the right question before she finally sent one in. When she heard them read her question on the air, she squealed. She cherished that encyclopedia set, carefully hiding it from her rowdy brothers.

  When Wilma was in middle school, she made friends with an older woman named Belle who lived at the top of the holler. Belle had noticed Wilma and her siblings walking up out of the holler each morning to wait for the school bus. Belle would lift the corner of her lace curtain and watch them jostle and joke with one another as they stood in the cold morning air. She invited the gaggle to wait inside. “You’ll catch your death of cold!” she told them as she ushered them in.

  Over time, a friendship developed. The children would fetch her eggs and sweep the house. Belle, in return, gave them jelly beans and helped out the family financially. Belle instinctively knew that Papaw was too proud to accept any offers of charity—he could take care of his own family, he said time and again. Instead, she paid him extra money to mow her lawn and gave the children hand-me-down shoes.

  Belle’s son, Bob, was a doctor. Most Owsley County residents didn’t know anyone who had “made a doctor of himself,” and they spoke of Dr. Bob with a sense of awe. After Dr. Bob graduated from medical school, he set up his practice in a larger town in Kentucky. But he would come back to Owsley County on the weekends to “doctor” to anyone who needed medical care, and he didn’t charge for his services. Even though a lot of children in the area qualified for government health insurance, many parents were too proud to utilize it. Papaw and Granny were among these proud residents, so they took their children to Dr. Bob for care.

  It was during one of these weekend visits that Dr. Bob met Wilma. “What makes a cut scab over?” she asked, her brows furrowed, as he disinfected her wound. He was impressed with her quick wit and insightful observations about the world. He knew immediately that someone should nurture her inborn ability. So he gave her books and helped her apply to summer camps for children from Appalachia. He encouraged her to be active in her local youth group, which planned occasional trips to other parts of the state.

  I often wonder how things would have been different for the other members of my family if they had been lucky enough to have someone nurture their intelligence. Granny was one of the smartest women I’ve ever known. She could disassemble any electronic device—a television, a radio—into hundreds of pieces and figure out how to make it work again. She could do math, mostly related to recipes and household expenses, in her head with surprising speed and accuracy. She would use the tiniest inconsistency in a story to deduce what the person was lying about and why. With her logic skills, people skills, and penchant for drama, she would’ve been an excellent lawyer.

  The same potential existed in Ruth. When Ruth was in her thirties, she worked doing odd jobs for a female preacher in a neighboring county. The preacher, after realizing Ruth hadn’t graduated from high school, helped her enroll in a GED program. Ruth studied for just two weeks before taking the exam—she couldn’t afford to spend any more time on it. Despite her limited formal education and short study time, Ruth scored in the seventieth percentile. To this day, she proudly displays her framed GED certificate on a wall in her house.

  But my mother was the one who got lucky.

  When Wilma told her family that she was going to apply to college, most of them didn’t say much. Likely, they had no frame of reference from which to draw questions. How do you ask about a concept you know nothing about?

  Only Ruth was encouraging. Even though Ruth was still young, she was already beginning to see the way that a life in the tobacco fields affected her body. She would have multiple skin cancers by her midthirties. She would cut them off herself with a pocketknife because she didn’t have health insurance. She developed arthritis early in life. She wanted better for her younger sister.

  She always had. Ruth had cared for Wilma from the time she was born. Granny was too busy to dote on every child, and Ruth—nine years older than Wilma—was often left in charge of her. When Wilma was a toddler, she developed a condition that made it hard for her to swallow. It was Ruth who made sure that she ate enough and took her medicine. “At first you was a fussy baby because you was sick,” Ruth tells Wilma, “but then you was fussy just because you was spoilt. And I’s the one that spoilt you.”

  One of Wilma’s earliest memories is of Ruth babysitting her and her siblings while Granny and Papaw were away for the night. After it got dark, someone began to rattle the front door, trying to break into the home. Burglary wasn’t unheard of in the hills, and there was a spot up the road from the farm where the local teens would hang out and “get up to no good,” as Granny would say. Wilma, terrified, began to cry. Ruth, still a teenager herself, grabbed a loaded shotgun and stuck it out the window next to the door. “Rattle it again,” she said, her voice deeper than normal. When the would-be intruder did, she fired the gun. She missed him, but nobody ever bothered the house after that.

  When Ruth was young, she sometimes missed school because she didn’t have sturdy enough shoes to walk the mile-plus out of the muddy holler. It seemed easier to stay at home than to show up with sore and dirt-covered feet. As a teenager, she remembered the embarrassment of those tattered, muddy shoes and vowed that things would be different for her younger siblings. So when it rained, Ruth would put Wilma and Charlie on a pony and lead them up to the top of
the ridge to wait for the bus. She didn’t want them to worry about their shoes while they were in school. She wanted them to be able to focus on learning.

  Unlike Ruth and Granny, Papaw hated the idea of Wilma leaving for college. “What would you want to go away an’ leave your family for?” he asked Wilma, genuinely not understanding her motivation. People in Owsley County stayed close to their families. Families took care of their children. Papaw couldn’t fathom why Wilma would forgo the comfort and security that home offered her. “Please, Wilma,” he begged, “just stay home and let me take care of you.” He didn’t seem to realize that if she stayed, she would be the one who would spend her life doing nothing but caring for others. He tried, time and again, to talk her out of going.

  I sometimes wonder why the women in my family valued education more than the men did. Granny and Ruth craved education with their whole beings. Even when they couldn’t have it for themselves, they wanted it for the other members—particularly the female members—of the family. But the men—Papaw, Vernon, even Dale—didn’t seem to value it in the same way.

  Maybe it’s because they, as men, already had access to the few opportunities available in Owsley County. There wasn’t much privilege to be had there, but where it existed it belonged to men. They could buy or rent a farm, be the heads of their families, participate in a more public life. Women, in contrast, were largely confined to the private sphere, to their homes. There weren’t a lot of ways for them to take charge of their destinies. Maybe they saw education as one way that they could.

  They weren’t the only Kentucky women who believed that. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some educational institutions—mostly in New England—began to open their doors to women. Many well-to-do Kentucky women, mostly from wealthy urban centers such as Lexington and Louisville, had the opportunity, for the first time, to go to college. Because education had been denied to them for so long, they understood that it had real power. They had fought, protested, argued, for the right to access higher education.

  As this door opened for them, they felt compelled to use the opportunity to help open doors for others. Some came back to Kentucky to found settlement schools, which provided a free education to some Appalachian students well before there were public schools in the area. In a world with few career choices for educated women, settlement schools were a way for Kentucky women to make a difference in the male-dominated world that surrounded them. I like to picture them, these women, making their way through the mountains toward unknown people and possibilities. Not every child, not even the majority of children, got to attend a settlement school. But some did, and that was progress.

  While Appalachian communities are often portrayed as patriarchal—and in many ways rightfully so—they also realized that the women running the settlement schools knew things that mountain people did not know, and that this new knowledge was important. By the 1930s, there were 200 settlement schools across the southern United States. Despite the prevalence of these institutions, Granny never had a chance to attend one. There wasn’t one in Owsley County, and even if there had been, her family couldn’t have spared her from the tobacco fields. Even in the communities that supported the settlement schools, there were certain realities that families had to contend with.

  If Granny and Papaw ever fought about education, about whether they would support Wilma applying for college, they kept it a secret from their children. Granny had grown up believing that a wife didn’t question her husband in front of his family. But I like to think that Granny, ever persistent, brought it up in the evenings, when the two of them had a few minutes of privacy in their own room. “She’s going to college, and that’s that,” Granny would say, her jaw set in the way that let Papaw know she meant business. “You might not like it, but you’s best keep yer mouth shut.” Papaw, recognizing the tone in her voice, would nod his acceptance.

  * * *

  —

  When Wilma began seriously considering college, she assumed that she would go to Lees Junior College like the few other students in Owsley County who made it on to higher education. She didn’t know any kids who had gone anywhere else. But Dr. Bob had other ideas. He knew that if Wilma went to Lees she would live at home and commute. She would stay in her same environment, where education wasn’t valued and other obligations were omnipresent. She would become another college dropout who ended up in debt and back on the farm.

  “If you apply to Lees,” Dr. Bob told Wilma, “I’ll deny your application. I’m on the board. I can do that.”

  “But that’s not fair!” Wilma cried. “I want to go to Lees.”

  “You’re going to Berea,” Dr. Bob replied. “It’s a school where you can make something of yourself. It’s where you need to be.” Dr. Bob had gone to Berea. It’s where he met his wife, and where his love of medicine was born. He had seen firsthand the power of the school to change lives. Wilma could tell by the tone of his voice that she wasn’t going to change his mind.

  Reluctantly, she agreed. She trusted Dr. Bob, and knew he had more knowledge about colleges than anyone else in her life. Plus, Wilma was a people pleaser by nature, and she didn’t want to disappoint this man who had invested so much in her future. So she applied.

  The day Wilma got her Berea acceptance letter, the family gathered around the kitchen table. Even though most of her older siblings, except Ruth, had moved out of the house, they still came back for dinners several nights a week. Granny was setting the corn bread on the table with a particularly proud look on her face. “Go ahead and tell them,” she said, her eyes sparkling with excitement.

  “I’m going to college,” Wilma said hesitantly. “Berea College.”

  Ruth offered words of praise and encouragement. “I’m proud of you, sis,” she said as she playfully punched her shoulder. But the others sat there, nodding a bit before moving on to the next topic of conversation. I wonder if my mother second-guessed herself in this moment. Did she worry that she would grow apart from her family? Be the only one not at the table for regular dinners? Leave the hard work to them, while she went to sit in a classroom?

  The night before she left for college Wilma was crying as she packed up her few things. “I don’t want to go,” she told Ruth. “I don’t know why I’m doing this.” She flung another T-shirt into a worn duffel bag. Ruth walked across the room and put both hands on Wilma’s shoulders. She looked her in the eye and firmly said, “You’re going, Wilma. You have to go. You’re going so you don’t stay here and work as hard as I do. Go on and make something of yourself.”

  “But I don’t even have any money for books.” Wilma sobbed. “I can’t go.” A few hours before, Papaw had come into Wilma’s room, his tall frame stooped with the weight of bad news. Money was tight, he said. The tobacco hadn’t done as well last year. He didn’t have any extra money to give her for books, one of the few things she needed money to purchase. Maybe the money shortage was real; maybe Papaw was trying desperately to stop his younger daughter from leaving home.

  Ruth didn’t hesitate. “I have your book money.” She walked into the next room to a beat-up dresser. She reached inside and pulled out a gray sock with a red toe. In that sock was the money Ruth had earned mowing lawns, working in neighbors’ tobacco fields, and doing other odd jobs around town. The small savings represented hours of back-breaking labor. She pulled out a handful of wrinkled bills and counted them quickly. She smoothed them once and handed them to Wilma. “I don’t want to hear no more about it.” She paused, then added with a half smile, “And if you don’t go I’ll beat the livin’ tar out of you.”

  Wilma knew better than to protest. You didn’t win arguments with Ruth. Wilma silently placed the well-worn bills—more than enough to cover the cost of books—into a zippered pocket of her bag. They both knew Ruth had just guaranteed her younger sister would have the future that Ruth had once wanted for herself.

 
Others helped Wilma as well. Dr. Bob and some neighbors gave her money to buy school supplies. Granny bought her a jumbo-sized bag of peanut M&M’s. The community came together to support one of their own venturing off on a journey they didn’t quite understand.

  The next morning Ruth loaded up Wilma’s belongings into their brother Vernon’s pickup truck. Granny and Papaw waved from the porch as Wilma climbed into the vehicle. Papaw went back inside before Vernon started the engine, too emotional to watch his daughter drive off. Right before they set off from Cow Creek, Ruth hugged Wilma close and whispered: “Go on and get out of here. And don’t be pinin’ after this place. There won’t be nothin’ waitin’ fer ya back here.” Wilma took one last look at the farm, then set her gaze ahead as they began to drive away.

  Shortly after I was born Papaw began to get confused frequently. He would forget where he was and why he was there. Dates got jumbled up in his mind. It didn’t take long for the doctor to diagnose him with Alzheimer’s disease.

  Granny insisted on caring for him at home. She was terrified of hospitals, convinced that they often killed patients. She had learned that fear from her mother when she was a child.

  Granny’s father worked part time at a sawmill. One day, he was walking his normal route through the mill when he saw some coal ash on the floor. Thinking nothing of it, he walked over it, not realizing that there were hot embers burning underneath. The heat melted his boots to his feet and left him with severe burns.

  “You just need to let it heal up,” the local doctor told him as he dressed the wounds. The doctor gave him some ointment and some bandages and taught his family how to tend to the burns. Granny’s mother believed she could give him all the care he needed at home, so he received no further treatment. She was distrustful of modern medicine, seeing it as something strange and incomprehensible, not a part of her traditional community.