Hill Women

by Cassie Chambers

  Life became harder for Granny after her father’s injury. She had to work longer hours in the field to make up for his absence. She had new chores to take on because he could no longer help on the farm. She and the rest of the family spent hours caring for him, changing his bandages, carrying him from room to room.

  About a year after the accident, he died from infection. Granny was blunt when she described it to me: “His feet just rotted off and killed him.” She said this calmly, matter-of-factly. Living in a community with no money, no healthcare, and few worker protections had taught her that accidents—even horrific ones—were a part of life.

  This wasn’t the first horrific accident she had seen. When she was young, Granny and her nine-year-old sister, Ruby, were standing near the fireplace that heated the drafty house. It was Christmas Day. Ruby was wearing long skirts, as she always did, because Granny’s mother didn’t believe that “girls had any place puttin’ on britches.” Ruby, young and a bit cold, stepped too close, and her skirts caught fire.

  “Somebody grab her!” the family shouted as they tried to wrap the screaming child in blankets to smother the fire. But Ruby, in a panic, broke free of their grasp and sprinted out the door. She ran down the hill, fire and smoke billowing behind her. When she reached the creek at the bottom of the hill, she paused. With one final scream, she jumped into the icy water. They pulled her limp body out of the creek, skin and garments in tatters. She died a short time later.

  The family went on after these deaths because they had to. They didn’t have the luxury of allowing their grief to consume their lives. There were still too many mouths to feed and not enough resources to feed them. So they threw themselves into farmwork, using busyness and exhaustion to bury their grief. But they never forgot the family members they lost so tragically. When Granny was seventy years old, her blue eyes would still well with tears if someone mentioned her sister Ruby. “She was such a beautiful girl,” she would say wistfully. Even though Granny accepted accidents, sickness, and death as a fact of life, her acceptance didn’t erase her sorrow.

  * * *

  —

  Caring for Papaw wasn’t easy for Granny, but she tackled the task with her characteristic strength. Ruth helped too, but she was largely preoccupied keeping the farm afloat. Most of Papaw’s caregiving fell to Granny, who fed him and bathed him and never once complained. But, even as a six-year-old, I could see that caring for him became harder for her over time. He needed constant attention, and it was increasingly difficult for her to leave him alone. One night at Cow Creek I woke up, sometime around three o’clock in the morning, and heard Granny pleading with Papaw from the front room. “Please, Willie,” she said. “You’re home. This is home. Please go back to sleep.”

  I’m sure Granny felt alone in these moments. She tried to put on a brave face, as she had always done, but there were cracks in her strong exterior. Occasionally I would wander into the kitchen and find her, one aged hand pressed against the kitchen table, the other squeezing the space at the top of her nose. Her eyes would have a vacant look, as though her mind were trying to escape itself, escape her body, for just a few minutes.

  Still, her eyes held nothing but joy on the day Granny told me they were going to get a bathroom in the house. One of the neighbors knew Papaw was sick, and figured that an indoor toilet and bathtub would make it easier for Granny to care for him. The neighbor paid out of his own pocket for the addition.

  At the time, I was just excited to have a toilet in the house. It was a clear, sunny day, and my cousins and I ran around the yard as the plumbers did their work. “No more outhouse, no more outhouse!” we shouted with the type of excitement that only children can muster about a bathroom. Every night we inspected the builders’ progress, wondering out loud whether tomorrow might be the day when the work was complete.

  Back then we didn’t realize the true impact of this gift—how extraordinary it was that the neighbor had given it to Granny. It’s only now that I see it in its full context, as another example of Owsley County residents taking care of one another. This neighbor knew Papaw, respected his work ethic and how he raised his family. He had experienced Granny’s hospitality and kind smile. He wanted to do what he could to make this terrible disease easier for them. He didn’t have much money himself, but people were more important than dollars in the bank. He had to trust that if he was ever in need, someone would do the same for him.

  And he had good reason to trust his community. The norm in Owsley County was to be generous with your neighbors. Most families were one unlucky occurrence away from being hungry. Generosity was both an insurance policy and a deeply held value.

  On the weekends, my mother and her siblings would do odd jobs at the stockyards to help make ends meet. Dale remembers working there, barefooted, when he was six years old. A community member felt bad for this child with muddy feet and too much responsibility, and gave him money to buy a pair of work boots. Six decades later, Dale’s eyes get wide and his jaw firms up when he tells this story. He wants people to understand how deeply that act of kindness impacted him.

  Even in their poverty Granny and Papaw taught the children to return the generosity that they so often benefited from. For Granny and Papaw, that took the form of growing an extra garden of food to give away to needy families in the community. This meant added work, and the children used to complain about spending more time in the hot sun. “Why do we have to pick all those green beans?” Wilma once asked. “We’ve got plenty to get us through the winter.”

  “There are hungry chil’ren ’round here,” Papaw told her, “and we’re going to help feed them.” Wilma and Papaw spent the rest of the day in the fields. Community was a thing to be worked for, nourished, valued.

  Some say that this sense of community has eroded over time—that it has crumbled under the feet of the current generation. There may be some truth in that. Technology, our modern world, has changed the way we build and define community. We don’t see one another in the same ways that we used to.

  But the mountains are still full of people, often women, taking on quiet leadership roles to move their communities forward. One woman I know runs a community garden, where anyone in need can gather food for their family. Another started a program that gives out seeds and fertilizer at the beginning of the growing season so people can grow their own food. This strategy works well in the mountains, since many people remain too proud to accept anything they perceive as charity.

  I talk sometimes with a friend who lives a few counties away from Owsley about community in Appalachia, about why individual people often take on the roles that government or nonprofits play in other communities. We muse that it’s in part because each person is known in a small mountain town. Each person’s suffering is personal, felt by others. It’s hard to stand by when you see struggle with your own two eyes. It’s also in part because institutions have failed to make things better. Over the years, many an outside organization has promised to improve life for people in the mountains. Some have delivered on their promises, but most have not. So people inside the communities take the resources they have and set to work.

  Sometimes outsiders come in and want to save Appalachia. It’s not a bad instinct—I can understand where it comes from. But outsiders who rush into the hills don’t always take the time to see that mountain people are a creative, resourceful lot. They don’t understand that Appalachians can be—should be—partners in the effort to make their lives better. They don’t grasp that, if given the right resources and opportunities, these communities are capable of saving themselves. If there’s one thing that women in these hills know how to do, it’s get things done.

  * * *

  —

  The change in Papaw’s health led to other changes at Cow Creek. Papaw and his children had always farmed tobacco. Most of the small farms grew tobacco in those days for reasons closely tied to geography and pol
itics. The rolling hills limited the size of most farms, and tobacco was one of the few crops a small farm could make enough money off of to survive.

  At that time, the federal government controlled tobacco production through a quota system. Under this system, a farmer was limited to growing a certain quantity of tobacco each year. If the farmer couldn’t sell his crop at market, the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association—a farmers’ co-op that received some government support—promised to buy that farmer’s tobacco at a set price. This, in effect, subsidized the tobacco grower and kept tobacco prices stable. Originally the goal of this system was efficiency: by guaranteeing tobacco farmers a high price, the government incentivized farmers to grow the much-demanded crop and provided security to small farmers.

  Growing tobacco is labor intensive. The first step is for the farmer to set the tobacco plants in the field. Once the plants reach near-maturity, he “tops” them: cutting off their tops to force them to grow out instead of up. This causes each plant to grow larger leaves, a benefit for commercial production. Usually topping is combined with spraying the plants with pesticides to protect them from insects.

  A few weeks after topping and spraying, the farmer cuts down the tobacco and places several plants on a single stake. He then hangs these stakes in a barn where the tobacco can dry and cure. Months later, when the humidity is just right, he will remove it. Finding the right moment is crucial; if the air is too dry, the leaves will crumble and fall apart. Papaw would often wake up at two A.M. to remove the tobacco, waiting for the perfect pre-dawn humidity. Next, the farmer tears the leaves from the sticks and places them in bundles. He then transports these bundles to the market, where he sells them. Papaw always tried to sell his tobacco in November so that he would have enough money to buy each of his children an apple and two sticks of candy for Christmas.

  Despite tobacco’s continued profitability in the 1990s, the many steps in the growing process meant that my family could no longer afford to farm it. As Papaw’s health got worse and the other siblings started families and lives of their own, it became harder for Aunt Ruth to find and pay for the help she needed. Eventually, she had to acknowledge defeat.

  I’m sure that wasn’t an easy thing for Ruth to do. She is a woman who gets things done, even when those things are difficult. She kept farming tobacco years after she should have because she believed that her willpower could hold the family together. But Ruth also has a pragmatic side, and one day, without tears or fanfare, she announced that she was done growing tobacco. She took a job working as a cashier at the Family Dollar in town, and the fields on Cow Creek sat empty.

  It wouldn’t be long before the rest of Eastern Kentucky would follow suit, but for different reasons. Over time, inefficiencies had entered the quota system. Each farmer had received his quota right as part of the 1930s New Deal reforms. Quota rights were handed down from generation to generation, and there was no mechanism for a new farmer to receive a quota of his own. Instead, if someone wished to start growing tobacco, he had to purchase land that already had a quota allotment or lease a quota from someone else.

  Cultural attitudes toward tobacco shifted around the 1990s, and the public soon grew wary of government involvement in the tobacco industry. The added barriers to entry for new farmers—many who wished to start large tobacco farms—made the quota system unpopular with powerful people in the agriculture industry. The federal government eliminated the quota system in 2004; the change took effect in 2005.

  The decision sent shock waves through the Eastern Kentucky mountains. Tobacco farms became larger, taking advantage of economies of scale and large farms’ ability to bear the risk that comes with no price support. The small farmers folded fast. There were 93,330 tobacco farms in the United States in 1997. This number dropped to 56,879 just five years later. By 2015, only 4,268 tobacco farms remained. Tobacco is no longer a reliable way for small farmers in Appalachia to make a living.

  Today Owsley County is full of vacant fields and desolate barns. Structures and places that used to be alive with sound, energy, and movement now rest idly in the mountain hollers. Nothing has come to fill the emptiness. Many programs across Kentucky have focused on providing new jobs and new skills to former tobacco farmers, but those programs have been unable to break into this particular place in the mountains.

  * * *

  —

  Coal, too, is on the decline. There’s not much coal in Owsley County—there never has been—but coal mining was prevalent in several nearby counties. Since 2011, the coal mining industry in Appalachia has lost 33,500 jobs. Even after Donald Trump carried coal country in the 2016 election by promising to put miners back to work, the number of coal jobs has continued to drop. And, unsurprisingly, a loss of mining jobs is associated with decreased incomes in many Appalachian counties.

  Coal has a long, complicated history in the mountains. In the early 1900s, smooth-talking salesmen from outside the state came and purchased rights to land in Appalachia. People dispute the reason they were able to do this. Some say it’s because many Appalachians didn’t realize the value of the resources they were selling—of the timber on the land and the minerals underneath it. Proponents of this view claim mountain people sold these rights for a fraction of their true value because, in a culture where one’s word is important, they assumed good intentions of the outsiders offering money.

  The other side disputes the characterization of mountain people as naïve. As one former government official told me, “People knew what they were doing. They were smart.” He pointed out that many Appalachians received multiple offers to buy their mineral rights, and they negotiated to ensure they received a fair price.

  Regardless of why and how these outsiders were able to purchase these rights, they eventually began to mine the land. Over time, they bought additional land from small regional mines doing the same. This created a system where much of the wealth of Appalachia was owned by people who didn’t live there. In the 1970s, Pike County, on the far eastern edge of Kentucky, had the highest concentration of millionaires in America. But few of these millionaires actually lived there. Instead, they listed the county as an address for business purposes.

  When people live outside the community, they have little incentive to invest back into it. They don’t send their children to the local schools, take their family to the local health clinic, or drive on the local roads. Without this connection, profit can become more important than people. As one person put it, “They build wood houses for folks to live in instead of brick.”

  Those who were powerful in the mining business found ways to have a powerful influence over local government. They lobbied for policies that kept taxes on coal low, which meant local communities received less revenue. They fought against increased worker protections. To compete with the lower price of coal mined elsewhere, mine owners decreased the wages they paid to their employees rather than cut into their own profits. The living conditions of the miners and their families suffered.

  The effects of this situation weren’t as obvious when coal was doing well—there were plenty of jobs and people could still make a comparably decent living mining. Yet, over time, coal production began to decline. There are a lot of complicated reasons why, but most economists agree it had to do with competition from natural gas, growth in solar and wind production, and new environmental regulations. Whereas coal provided half of the nation’s electricity in 2000, that number dropped to 30 percent by 2017.

  Many argue that even if coal does make a comeback, it won’t benefit Appalachia. Coal is more expensive to mine here. That’s because much of the coal that is easy to get to has already been mined, meaning that miners have to go deeper into the mountain to find a coal seam. In 2013, 68 percent of Kentucky coal came from underground mines and 32 percent came from surface mines. In 2018, the amount from underground mines rose to nearly 80 percent.

  Mines in Appalachia a
re smaller than they are in many places out west, and the average miner produces less coal per hour. Whereas an underground coal miner in Appalachia can produce three tons of coal per hour, a strip miner in Wyoming can produce close to twenty-eight. Appalachian coal mines employ 56 percent of the coal workers but produce only 24 percent of the coal.

  None of this is meant to minimize the hurt Appalachians feel over the decline of coal. Coal was tied to families, history, pride—and rightfully so. Even those who oppose the coal industry acknowledge the strength of its workers. For some families, coal mining was a way of life, a good-paying job passed down from generation to generation.

  A lot of people in the mountains feel that coal and tobacco went away because of forces outside of their communities. That somehow politicians and power structures far from these mountains are to blame for the emptiness that now pervades them. There is a sense that people are suffering, and that they themselves did not do anything to deserve it. And often, when people talk about the void left by coal, they don’t talk about what will come next to fill it.

  When I am in Owsley County, I like to drive to the once vibrant tobacco fields on Cow Creek. In them, I see the image of Aunt Ruth, of countless others, bathed in sun and sweat. I remember the feeling of being covered in earth and full of exhaustion. The economies of the past aren’t the way forward for Appalachia. Those are the jobs that injured Granny’s father, broke Papaw’s body, and stole a part of Ruth’s youth. They are the jobs that have killed many coal miners and given countless others black lung disease. These communities deserved—continue to deserve—better. But when I think about the care and the effort that went into this land, I am hopeful: I know that that same drive, energy, and determination still exist here. If only there were a different way to use them.