Hill Women

by Cassie Chambers

  When I was a child, my mother spent a few days helping Aunt Ruth in the tobacco fields. As Wilma moved through the rows topping the tobacco, Aunt Ruth came the other way, spraying it. My mother didn’t wear any protective gear that day because the family didn’t own any and nobody had ever told her she needed it. She inhaled pesticides throughout the day, and, a few days later, she developed raised knots all over her legs. She went to the doctor, but he couldn’t figure out what had caused the reaction. She was eventually diagnosed with a condition that roughly translates to “large red knots.” The knots remained for several weeks before suddenly disappearing.

  I’m not sure exactly what contaminated our well water when I was a child at Cow Creek. It could’ve been pesticides from the nearby tobacco fields, or an unknown contaminant from a nearby farm. All I know is that every so often the well water would get cloudy and smell funny. Granny would dump a gallon of bleach into the well, tilting the blue-and-white bottle until it was empty. We would wait a day or so to drink the water, allowing the bleach plenty of time to clear out whatever was infecting the well. If the water was clear the next day, we would resume drinking it.

  Even today, many in Appalachia still struggle to access clean water. Some rural homes rely on well water because other water systems are either unavailable or unreliable. There are no federal regulations that apply to these private wells, so testing for contaminants falls on the individual property owners—many of whom don’t know how to test or what to test for. Even if they did test for contaminants, their options for alternative sources of water are limited.

  Those who do have access to water systems face other challenges. Martin County, Kentucky, made national headlines in 2018 when residents started posting photographs of the brown water that came out of their aging pipes. Sometimes the water tasted like Gatorade. Other times it smelled like diesel fuel. The water quality there has been poor for years; one seventeen-year-old girl has never picked up a glass, filled it with water from the tap, and drunk it. Many residents remain convinced that the town’s increased cancer rates are related to contaminants in the water.

  I recently had dinner with a young woman who had to cancel her trip to see her father on Christmas because of problems with the water system. “Prolly best y’all don’t come down,” her father said. “The water’s been out for a few days and I’m not sure we’ll have enough for all y’all to shower and flush the toilets.” She told me that trips back to Martin County were never a sure thing given the unpredictability of the water.

  Although the county is working to fix the problems with the aging water system, it’s hard to find the money for a massive overhaul. The same is true across many small towns dotting the mountains. Homes are spread out, and infrastructure to connect them is expensive. Many areas don’t have the resources to repair decaying roads and aging pipes. Across Central Appalachia, people collect rainwater or fill up jugs at natural springs to make sure they have the water they need.

  In a world with limited resources, it can be hard to muster the political will to use tax dollars from other parts of the state or nation to fix the infrastructure in a county far away. These infrastructure problems aren’t confined just to Appalachia; the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, proves that communities across America face similar challenges.

  I’m sure everyone in my family has been exposed to environmental toxins over the years, be it from contaminated water, pesticides, or other unknown hazards. That’s pretty much par for the course growing up in Owsley County. I’m less sure how this exposure affected us—the ways in which it harmed and changed our bodies. I worry about what I was exposed to as a child, and how it might affect my health down the road. I believe that Aunt Ruth’s bilateral breast cancer was somehow tied to the environment she grew up in. I believe the same is true for the rare autoimmune condition my mother developed later in life.

  There is something about the hills of Appalachia that makes the communities nestled in the hollows of them feel safe, protected, discrete. But sometimes I look at the mountains and am reminded that there are drawbacks to their power. As much as they can protect, they can also trap. They can make it harder for change, new infrastructure, new ways of life to get in. The beautiful mountains can, sometimes, be just one more barrier for people in these hills.

  It was 12:06 P.M., three minutes past when the mailman usually arrived. Over the past couple of weeks I had become an expert at tracking the movements of the mail throughout our neighborhood. Based on my calculations, the truck should be rounding the bend to our house at any second.

  I went back to typing on my borrowed laptop to distract myself. I was a junior in high school, and I was taking two classes at Berea College that semester. The college had loaned me a laptop, as they did all students. It was one of the many ways Berea College worked to combat the structural disadvantages students from low-income backgrounds faced. I was grateful that I didn’t have to go to a computer lab to do my homework.

  It hadn’t been easy to get permission to take two college classes that semester. I had thought it would be simple, since the college itself had no problem with it—I had taken a class there the previous semester and done well. It was a language class, and my mother had gotten up at six every morning to quiz me with vocabulary flash cards. I earned the top grade.

  Instead, my high school took issue with the situation. “We don’t want our high school girls up there with those college boys all the time,” the school principal told my mother when she asked why the school had denied my request. My mother pointed out that the semester before, the school had granted two boys permission to do the same thing. The high school remained firm in its position: Girls should not spend that much time around college men. The situation—it was unclear who in the situation—couldn’t be trusted. Plus, it just didn’t look right.

  My mother was irate. Her temper flared and her eyes widened. “I’m going to give you fifteen seconds to come up with another reason”—she stood up and looked down at the principal—“before I call a lawyer and a newspaper and tell them what you just said.” Faced with the fury of this very short, very angry woman, the principal quickly changed his mind. My mother let him know that she was satisfied with their agreement but that she would not hesitate to visit him again if she needed to.

  It seemed like there was always some sort of battle going on between my mother and the high school: the school nominated a teacher’s niece for a scholarship to a summer camp even though other students were more qualified; the school wouldn’t let me take the advanced math class I wanted because that “just wasn’t how things were done”; a teacher sent me to the principal’s office for being assertive in class while equally assertive boys faced no consequences. My mother jokes that the principal would hide in his office when he saw her coming. I think there is more than a kernel of truth in that.

  My mother knew how to fight for educational opportunities, and she had learned that from Granny. When Wilma was in high school, one of the teachers started flirting with her. His advances made my mother uncomfortable, and Granny filed a complaint with the school board. Never one to sit quietly by and wait for things to happen, she also rallied other students and families behind her daughter’s cause. She let it be known that this teacher was behaving inappropriately, and that he simply had to go. The school scheduled a hearing to determine whether to fire the teacher. Everyone in town was buzzing with the gossip.

  During the week leading up to the school board hearing, Granny was at a laundromat in town. It was too cold to do her laundry in her yard with a hand washer as she usually did, and she was eager to finish her chores and get back home. Granny saw the teacher walking down the street, and tried to ignore him as he passed the large window at the front of the store. But the teacher gave Granny a smug smile and a suggestive wink as he walked past.

  Granny leaped up with surprising speed and ran out of the laundromat. She didn’t know what she was
going to do with the teacher when she caught him, but she knew that she was going to hunt him down. As she ran, she grabbed a large pipe that was lying nearby. With a loud yell, she chased him through the streets of Booneville. She didn’t stop until she was satisfied that she had, indeed, run him out of town. People in town laughed for weeks about the terrified look on his face as he fled the crazed woman wielding a rusty pipe. “I believe she meaned to kill him,” Aunt Ruth said.

  The school board eventually voted to fire the teacher. In some places that might have been seen as punishment enough. Not so in the hills of Eastern Kentucky. This wasn’t the first time the teacher had flirted with a young student, and in the mountains, anyone who hurts a child is a fair target for vigilante justice.

  Granny once told me about a man accused of molesting a child. A jury acquitted him on a technicality, but the entire town remained convinced of his guilt. Shortly after he left the courthouse, reveling in his freedom, another man shot him dead. The shooter didn’t know the accused man; he had never met him before in his life. But, he said, “someone had to get justice for those chil’ren.” The shooter drove to the sheriff’s office afterward and turned himself in.

  The fate of the teacher was not quite so harsh, but the community punished him nevertheless. The next semester the teacher approached a group of high school students on a school bus and tried to make conversation with them. He figured the whole incident had blown over, and he was ready to rebuild his reputation. Getting back into the good graces of the students seemed like the place to start.

  The students were having no such thing. At first they ignored the teacher as he stood beside the school bus and spoke to them through the windows. But they soon realized that the teacher wasn’t going away, and, even more irritating, he was starting to whine about them ignoring him.

  It started off with one male student unzipping his pants. A few others quickly joined in. It took the teacher a few moments to realize what was happening. By the time he figured out that the students were peeing on him, he was already damp. When the teacher tried to file a complaint against the boys with the principal, the principal said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Those boys would never do that. Don’t be lyin’ on those young uns,” and he sent the teacher away.

  * * *

  —

  I loved the college classes I took at Berea. They were challenging, forcing me to think about different things in different ways. I took a job at a small used-book store near campus, and I chatted with the students who would drop by in between classes. In between customers, I read books about philosophy, art, and politics. The owner of the bookstore, a retired professor, talked to me about things like the size of the universe and the relativity of time.

  Berea High School seemed lackluster in comparison. There were some outstanding teachers—like Ms. Carpenter, the science instructor who stayed late a day each week to let me spend extra time in the lab, and Ms. Moran, who nurtured my love of writing. But some of the teachers had little interest in actually teaching students. One instructor spent class time telling students how to make pot brownies. Another turned on the television every day and said that watching the news was “education enough.” Still another spent the first few minutes of class trading makeup tips with her favorite students. It wasn’t surprising to me that the high school performed poorly on state-level assessments.

  Berea High School was small, the kind of small where everyone knows everything you do. I once skipped the period after lunch to hang out with my friends at the Burger King in town. My mom knew about it before I got home that evening. And, while there was comfort in being friends with the same group of girls I had been friends with since first grade, I was tired of retelling the same stories we had told for a decade. There was a set order to our lives and our relationships with one another.

  I always tried to look like someone who had it all together. I played several sports, got good grades, and had enough friends. But as I entered high school, my carefully constructed façade began to crack under the small-town pressure. In hindsight it all seems petty: My boyfriend broke up with me and began to date my best friend. I signed up for too many activities and was only mediocre at all of them. All of my friends were in the homecoming court except me. One of my dance instructors poked my stomach and noted that I was “getting a little soft.” For someone who tried to convince the world that she was perfect, who expected herself to be perfect, it suddenly seemed like a lot to bear.

  I wonder if my need for perfection came from my mother. From watching her obsess over her grades and performance. From seeing her work late into the night preparing three types of dessert for Christmas when one dessert would have done. From the way everything she did was just a little more elaborate than it needed to be. In some ways I am grateful that I inherited this drive; it propelled me toward success. But it took me years to rein it in—to understand that it would never be satisfied.

  Faced with the feeling that my perfect world, my perfect self, was falling apart, I started to think about ways to get out of Berea. I wanted to go somewhere new, where nobody knew my teenage failures and high school humiliations. My parents had made it clear from the time I was young that I was going to college, and I figured that would be a good opportunity to start afresh.

  The school was little help. There was a guidance counselor who was supposed to assist us with college selection starting our junior year, but I remember only one meeting with her. I showed her a list of colleges I wanted to go to, including Yale, Harvard, and Wellesley. She sort of giggled when she looked at the list and said, “Well, whatever. You have a good GPA. Give it a shot.” She didn’t elaborate much on what “giving it a shot” entailed, or what steps I needed to take to apply. She left it to me to figure out these application processes. I’m sure she assumed that I’d get in to some school somewhere. Maybe not the Ivy League, but, after all, what kid from Berea had ever gotten in to an Ivy?

  I remember the day the brochure for the United World College arrived in my mailbox. Instead of a college, this brochure was for a high school. And not just a high school, but a boarding school, set far away in the mountains of New Mexico, that lasted for the senior year of high school and one additional year. I had never been to New Mexico, and I was fascinated by the image of the mountains rising up out of the desert.

  UWC had around two hundred students, representing approximately eighty different countries. The school’s mission was to explore and celebrate diversity—it believed that you create world peace by building connections between people from different parts of the globe. Each student had a roommate from a different continent. The school’s curriculum was based around understanding the diversity of the students on campus.

  Even better, the school was free for every American student it accepted. I had already started worrying about the cost of college, wondering how I was going to be able to afford the $40,000-plus-a-year price tag at many of the schools I was interested in. This free education seemed too good to be true. Things seemed even better when I learned that graduates of UWC automatically qualified for significant scholarships to pay for college.

  As soon as I read the brochure, I decided to apply.

  At first, my mother wasn’t a fan of the idea. She kept saying “We’ll see” and changing the subject each time I brought it up. She had just left her job in insurance sales—as good as she was at it, she didn’t really enjoy it and the hours were long. “I wouldn’t change places with you for the world,” Ruth told her, “havin’ to work all of those hours. Your job will always be there, Wilma; your family won’t.” Plus, Granny was getting sicker, and my mother was increasingly in charge of caring for her. And, as I felt my constructed exterior shatter, I was beginning to rebel—staying out too late and hanging around people I knew I shouldn’t be with. My mother decided that it made sense for her to spend a few months at home. She wasn’t ready for me to leave the house as soon
as she began to spend more time in it.

  Still, my mother never told me not to apply. I give her—and my equally supportive father—a lot of credit for this. She had never told me not to do anything. Anytime I wanted to take on an activity, she was encouraging. When I asked her to drive me to audition for a community theater production, she didn’t once point out that I had no experience acting or singing. She wasn’t about to start restricting what I thought I could do. Aunt Ruth was also supportive. “That sounds like a real adventure!” she told me. “It’s sure a long way from home, but you’ll be all right.”

  Granny, on the other hand, was worried. She had never traveled much. I’m pretty sure the only time she left Kentucky was a few years after Papaw died, when she decided she wanted to see the beach at least once and went to Virginia with a friend. Although Granny was proud of me for wanting to get an education, she didn’t understand why I had to travel quite so far from home to do it. It didn’t help that her geography was a bit confused. No matter how many times I explained to her that I was going to school in New Mexico, she kept asking me about my application to the school in Mexico. She seemed concerned that I wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone there since I didn’t speak Spanish.

  In my conversations with her, I heard echoes of Papaw’s pleas to Wilma years before. “Please, child, don’t leave your home. Don’t leave your family. This is where you belong.” I could feel the same tug-of-war that my mother must’ve felt: the weight of the mountains anchoring me where I stood. I wanted desperately to break free, to shatter that sense of familiarity that was holding me back. At the same time, the mountains were my foundation, my context. I wasn’t sure who I would be outside of them.