Hill Women

by Cassie Chambers

  Emma and Willie courted for two months before they got married. As was common in those days, they were supervised the entire time. The day Emma agreed to marry him, they had their very first unsupervised outing: to the courthouse to pick up the marriage license.

  “Willie, I’m just ’bout the happiest girl in the world,” she said as they walked into the courthouse to get the paperwork. Willie, never much of a talker, just smiled and held her hand a little tighter. They continued holding hands as they walked home, Emma’s chatter breaking the silence of the surrounding mountains.

  A few days later, the local preacher married them in Emma’s living room. Emma got her first store-bought, or “brought-in,” dress for the occasion. Years later, she smiled as she described the dress’s shade of blue. “Like the summer sky,” she said. She also told me she wore her house slippers that day. I’m not sure if that was because it was cold or because her only other shoes were work boots.

  I struggle with this branch of my family tree. How do I reconcile the grandmother and grandfather I saw have a happy marriage with the little girl and the grown man sitting on the porch that day? Emma was a fifteen-year-old child. In today’s world she wouldn’t be allowed to drive a car or see an R-rated movie. Willie could be jailed for having a relationship with Emma. He had experienced two decades more of life than she had. How could these two people fall in love? In genuine love that was based on consent, compatibility, informed decision-making? It makes my gut churn to think of this girl, who never had a childhood, married at such a young age to a man who was so much older.

  But I also saw this pair together in the later years of their life. Papaw would whisper sweet things to Granny that would make her blush like the young girl she was when they met. When Papaw’s Alzheimer’s disease advanced, Granny spent every minute caring for him with love and patience. Though he forgot everyone else, including his children and his siblings, he never forgot Emma, his mountain wildflower. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to satisfactorily square the gentleness, kindness, and love I saw between them with what I believe to be right and just.

  I wonder if Granny thought about Papaw on Ruth’s wedding day. I think she probably did. Granny was racked with grief after Papaw’s passing. So much so that she stopped eating and sleeping. She wore her grief wrapped tightly around herself for years. I’m sure that, on Ruth’s day of celebration, Granny was remembering the love and the family she and Papaw had built in Cow Creek.

  I was fourteen when my parents and I went to New York City. I had a track meet vaguely in that direction, and we decided that we should drive the rest of the way to spend a few days in the big city. We laughed and talked as the miles rolled past.

  But once we hit New York we fell silent. There were too many cars moving too quickly. My dad hunched over the wheel, shoulders about his ears, glancing every so often at the directions he had printed off before we left. I could tell my mother was afraid: her hand gripped the handle of the door until her knuckles turned white. They both flinched when the first of several cab drivers honked at us. We were going at least ten miles per hour slower than any of the other vehicles.

  The traffic was just the start—there were lots of things about New York that we found strange. The buildings were too tall and too close together. It felt like the sunlight could barely make it through to the street below. The people on the sidewalks didn’t say hello to each other. They looked straight ahead, focused on nothing in particular and certainly not on one another. They didn’t even smile as they passed.

  I consider this trip to New York our first real family vacation. Sure, we had taken trips together before—including several camping excursions and a visit to Florida to see my dad’s brother—but this time felt different. We had a hotel room in Manhattan. Yes, it had a bed that folded out of the wall, but it was a hotel in Manhattan nonetheless. We ate at restaurants, albeit affordable ones, every night. We weren’t staying with relatives, and we didn’t know a single person in the city. My parents’ efforts to get an education, it seemed, had paid off.

  My father, Orlando, had finished his doctorate in agricultural economics. After some time working as a postdoctoral assistant, he had landed a staff job at the University of Kentucky as an economist in the College of Agriculture. My father grew up on a farm, and he was interested in the ways that farming was changing in Kentucky. It had taken him a while to get to this place—having a wife and a child had slowed down the graduate-school process—but he had finally landed a secure position in an academic institution doing work that he loved.

  My mother, too, was growing professionally. She had stayed at home with me for years, working part-time jobs or providing childcare in her home so she could focus on being a mother. But as I entered my teenage years, she decided to launch a career. She went into sales, working for a company that provided insurance to educators. She was immediately successful at it. People trusted her, and rightfully so. She would tell them if the plans she offered weren’t right for them. “Well, I understand if you want to go with the other company,” she would say. “I honestly think that’s probably a better fit for you.” She asked a lot of questions, both about people’s insurance needs and about their lives. My father teased that her office was “one of the best places to socialize in town.”

  Beginning a career relit a spark inside my mother, the same spark that Berea College had kindled in her years before. Insurance agents take a series of tests to be able to sell securities and other financial products. The tests are difficult, and it’s not uncommon for people to fail them several times. My mother decided that not only was she going to pass the tests, but she was going to ace them. She spent all summer studying on our back porch in the evenings. She and I would sit side by side in lawn chairs, scanning our books until the sky turned pink and the sun set. “I missed three questions on that last one,” she said with disappointment one night after passing one of the tests. “I’ll do better on the next one.” We returned to studying in comfortable silence. She would go on to pass every test on her first try.

  * * *

  —

  I’m sure we stood out terribly in New York—this family from the foothills of the Appalachians. It was summertime, and we wore bright T-shirts and jean shorts, in stark contrast to the sea of dark suits and neutral-toned dresses. I’m almost certain my mother wore a fanny pack—she had on almost all of our other family getaways. My mother’s accent had grown fainter over the years, but you could still hear its lilt when she was nervous. And she was nervous most of the time we were in New York. “Do you think this neighborhood is safe?” she asked my father every time we went somewhere new. She kept checking her pockets to make sure nobody had stolen anything.

  A few months ago, I was in New York for a friend’s engagement party. Standing in line to buy a ticket for the subway, I remembered my parents standing in that same line at that same station years before. A man behind my father yelled angrily into his flip phone about “fucking tourists” as my father struggled to figure out how the ticket machine worked. My father’s face turned a shade of red that matched his hair. I had never heard anyone say the word fuck in person before. It felt scary, but also a little exciting.

  Once we were on the train we looked around at all of the other passengers. I’ve since learned that there is a code on the subway: Don’t look directly at anyone. In a city with little physical privacy, anonymity is important. But, back then, I stared long and hard at each person I saw. My heart broke when a homeless man got on. I gave him one of the few dollars in my pocket as he passed by.

  I thought about this family trip as I sat on the subway years later, looking at nothing and no one. Maybe it sounds cliché, but that first trip to New York has stuck with me. Not necessarily because of how uncomfortable I felt, but because of the current of possibility running underneath the discomfort. There was something invigorating about surviving three days in this strange and vibrant place
—about seeing in person the things I had seen only in movies. It was challenging and endlessly interesting. To put it in terms my teenage brain probably thought in at the time, it felt very cool.

  I had always loved adventure—seeing new places, doing new things. I think this started when I was a child on the farm. Granny, Aunt Ruth, my mother—they all allowed me to explore whatever environment I found myself in. I could roam the farm at will, climbing any tree, darting into any animal pen. They didn’t hover or worry that I would hurt myself. They expected that I probably would hurt myself at some point, but they knew that whatever lesson I learned along the way would be worth the pain. They didn’t want me to be scared of the world around me.

  My cousin Melissa had started off the same way, but she was different by the time the New York trip came along. When we were younger, she would sometimes come up to Berea to stay a week with us. Even though Berea is a small town—with a population of around 15,000 people today—to her, Berea felt like a city vacation. We would go to the city pool and get Happy Meals from the McDonald’s drive-through. These were things not available to Melissa in Owsley County, and it was obvious that she relished them. She would call her parents every night and recount the details of each day, down to what we ate for dinner. She was particularly excited to report the night when my father had cooked. She hadn’t seen a man prepare an entire meal for his family before. She still says that baked chicken was the best meal she’s ever eaten.

  But as Melissa got older, it was harder for her to stay away from home. Not because it was actually harder; we still invited her every summer and she still lived less than fifty miles away. But for some reason it felt harder to her. She didn’t want to leave her home. She didn’t want to be away from her parents. Her connection to Owsley County became stronger, and she wasn’t interested in making connections anywhere else.

  I’m not sure why this happened, but I suspect it might have something to do with fear. There’s a narrative that people in Owsley County tell one another: The world is different outside of the mountains, and scary things happen there. To this day, Aunt Ruth still asks me about every shooting that happens in the city I live in. “Did you know that man that got shot?” she will inquire, and I will explain, once again, that there are hundreds of thousands of people where I live. But to her, it is all the outside, and it is all unnerving. I think that, as Melissa got older, she began to believe this narrative. Once she did, the excitement of adventure didn’t outweigh the potential consequences.

  But for me, at that time, adventure was still in fashion, and my trip to New York only reinforced my interest in exploring. The thought of New York, of what it stood for, stayed with me long after we got back to Berea. I suddenly saw Berea’s location at the foothills of the Appalachians as symbolic: I was positioned at the edge of the mountains. I was at the gateway to the rest of the world.

  * * *

  —

  It wasn’t just that we had money to take a trip to New York. In everyday life, we could go to the movies and occasionally eat out at a sit-down restaurant. We went to the Olive Garden for special occasions like birthdays or my parents’ anniversary. My mother took me back-to-school shopping at a mall in a nearby city. Over time, these things became a part of our new normal.

  One of the first decisions my parents made with their new economic stability was to purchase a home. Up to that point, we had lived in various rentals: apartments, trailers, small houses. Once, my parents moved twice in the same week because my mother was afraid of the crowd hanging around the new apartment complex. The other tenants made too much noise and stayed up too late drinking. The landlord kept coming to check on my mother when she was home alone in a way that made her nervous about his intentions. My parents loaded up and moved on to the next place.

  For years my parents had been searching for a house of their own. I think they probably began looking well before it was realistic to buy one. On Sundays, we would drive around Berea looking to find FOR SALE signs in the neighborhoods we liked. It was a fun game to play: What would it be like to live in that house? How great would my bedroom be if we lived in that neighborhood? Would I finally be able to get a dog if we moved to that place?

  When I was ten, we found the brick ranch that would become our home. We all fell in love with it as soon as we saw it. My father walked through the house exclaiming “Wow!” each time he opened a door. The house wasn’t large—around 1,700 square feet—but it was new. It was well built, and it had a backyard big enough for a dog pen. It had three bedrooms, and it was in a quiet neighborhood. My mother was giddy at the prospect of living in such a place.

  My parents hemmed and hawed over whether they could afford it. The mortgage payment would be more per month than our entire family income when I was first born. Just like so many families who have struggled, they felt they couldn’t entirely trust their newfound stability. They changed their minds several times over the course of the weekend. Finally, they decided to make an offer. The owner accepted it, and we moved in.

  At the time, I didn’t realize what a big deal it was, homeownership. But study after study shows the ways that homeownership positively impacts families. In 2013, the average net worth of a family who owned a home was $195,400, compared to $5,400 for those who rented. Net worth matters because it’s a good snapshot of a person’s financial situation.

  Homeownership is associated with social benefits too. All other things being equal, children of homeowners do better in school, are more civically engaged, and are less likely to do drugs. That’s not to say that homeownership is some magic fix to social problems. But it is to say that when my parents bought that house, they probably provided me with advantages beyond simply a bigger space to play in.

  We celebrated my mother’s thirty-first birthday shortly after we moved in. My father and I got an ice-cream cake and bought paper party hats. I got to bring my recently acquired puppy inside for the occasion. We had a lot to celebrate that year: new jobs, new house, new way of life.

  What strikes me about this scene is the way it feels slightly backward. The way the events feel out of order, like a calendar that has the pages shuffled. There is a desired sequence to the major moments in life, a step-by-step process that we are told to follow: start a career, get married, buy a house, have a baby. My parents jumbled the order: get married, have a child, start a career, buy a house.

  Their sequence of events certainly presented many challenges for them. Maybe it even presented challenges for me. But as I look back on my childhood, I realize that it also gave me the opportunity to watch my parents grow up. To see that special mix of pride and worry when the realtor told my parents the house was theirs; to watch my mother start a job and work hard to turn it into a career; to see my father finally be able to support his family in the way he had hoped to.

  Not every couple who gets married so young and so poor finds their way to a happy ending. Couples who marry as teenagers, as my mother was on her wedding day, have a much higher rate of divorce. And college students with dependent children drop out of school at a higher rate than those without dependent children; only a third obtain a degree or certificate within six years. The odds were stacked against my parents. But through a mixture of support, hard work, and a little bit of luck, they were able to beat these odds.

  Nowadays I tease my parents about getting married so young. “What were you all thinking?” I’ll exclaim from time to time. “You had no business getting married and having a child! You were children yourselves!”

  Inevitably, they will look first at each other, then at me, and smile. “But we were in love. And you turned out okay.” Part of me is annoyed by their naïveté. I’m not sure they understand how different their lives could have, maybe even should have, been. But another part of me admires their unshakable positivity. I sometimes wonder if their sunshiny outlook is a whitewash, purposely bleaching away memories of darker, more trying
times.

  * * *

  —

  Around this time, Granny began to get sick. A few years before, a local doctor had seen what he thought was a spot on her lungs during a scan. Granny had been a heavy smoker for most of her life. Some of my earliest memories are of her sitting on the front porch at Cow Creek, her wrinkled hands holding a cigarette as she laughed. She quit smoking when I was four or five years old, after my mother threatened to stop letting me spend so much time in Owsley County if Granny didn’t give it up. Granny stopped cold turkey.

  Nobody was terribly surprised when they first heard news of the scan and its ominous spot. We all knew the health dangers associated with smoking—Granny did as well. It seemed almost predictable that she would suffer some sort of health consequences for her decisions. We knew the pattern of events.

  Then something strange happened. Granny went to see a specialist at a rural hospital for a follow-up. That doctor did another set of scans and came back with wonderful news: The suspicious spot was gone. Granny was healed.

  At the time, we all celebrated it as an answered prayer. News travels fast in Owsley County, and the whole community had been praying for Granny. Everyone took this as evidence that God himself had reached down to erase the spot on her lungs. I remember my Sunday-school teacher, a family friend who knew of Granny’s illness, telling me how lucky I was that God had given my family this miracle. I said an extra set of prayers that night.

  Now, though, I wonder if it really was a miracle or if the doctor had simply missed the cancer growing inside her. A few years later the cancer was back. And it was back in a way that looked as though it had never left—like it had been growing and spreading inside of her while we all celebrated her health.