Instead, I asked her what she thinks the word hillbilly means. She looked at me and tilted her head, as if she’d never thought about this particular question.
“I suppose hill people,” she said slowly. “People that live in the mountains and cling to the old ways.”
“What are the old ways?” I asked.
“You know, people that don’t like real modern stuff. Like Junior Barrett. He don’t want no bathroom in his house. Says the Good Lord didn’t intend for that kind of business to be taking place inside the home.” She chuckled at Junior’s biblical sensibilities.
“But people don’t have to cling to the old ways that much to be a hillbilly,” she continued. “Sometimes people just like things done the old way. The way it used to be. Them people are hillbillies. There ain’t nothing wrong with clinging to the old ways.”
I wondered whether doing things the “old way” was always a choice or whether circumstances sometimes left it as the only option. Modernity sometimes chooses to stop short of this holler in the mountains. The NO SERVICE that appears on my cellphone the moment I cross the county line is a reminder of that boundary.
Once, a male colleague asked me, “If life in the mountains is so hard, why don’t we just pay people to go somewhere else?”
I believe that the mountains are worth saving. People here work hard, care about their families, are surrounded by natural beauty. They are connected to the land and to one another in a deep and meaningful way. There are unique values and strengths in mountain communities.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t provide opportunities for those who wish to go elsewhere to do so—we should ensure that those in the mountains have the same mobility as those anywhere else. But we should also invest the resources to make sure that those who wish to stay can live meaningful, productive lives. Young people are the biggest export of the mountains. Many leave not because they want to, but because there are no opportunities in the communities they grew up in.
“Are you a hillbilly?” I continued my conversation with Aunt Ruth.
“I suppose. In some ways.” I don’t disagree with her. Even today, Aunt Ruth doesn’t have a cellphone or an email address. She’s never logged on to Facebook and hasn’t heard of Instagram. I’m not sure she’s ever even used a computer. Her existence is very much removed from the tech-heavy hustle-bustle of the world today.
“Am I a hillbilly?” I inquired.
She tilted her head as she pondered the question. “You used to be,” she said. “You’re not anymore.”
I was torn by her answer. There is a part of me that wants nothing more than to be connected to my family’s history, to the way of life that they lived in the mountains. As a young child, I felt this connection. But over time I’ve come to feel more like a grateful visitor than a true resident, like a child coming home from college for the holiday break.
“But,” she continued, “you still got a piece of hillbilly in your heart.”
I felt myself swell with pride.
I met Jeanette at the courthouse. I had a busy day that day, with multiple cases in front of multiple judges. I had told her to stop by sometime between nine and eleven A.M. and to look for the short strawberry blonde running frantically between courtrooms. When I arrived at the courthouse at eight A.M., she was already waiting for me. She was eager to get on with her life.
Jeanette had short brown hair and big brown eyes. She held her hands clasped in front of her as though she was ready to push away the world if she needed to. She smiled a lot, but her smile was tight with tension, as if someone were pulling up the corners of her mouth with an invisible string. She didn’t smile with her eyes.
The bailiffs in the courthouse knew me, and they unlocked the small conference room just outside the courtroom so we could meet in private. Seated under the faintly humming fluorescent lights, Jeanette began to tell me her story.
Jeanette’s husband, Mike, had always been a mean drunk. Sometimes, after he’d had a few drinks, he would come home and push Jeanette around. A couple of times, he hit her. Jeanette told me that he was always sorry after the violence, that he always promised to do better. I had seen that cycle play out many times before.
The final straw came one day in the summer of 2016. Mike came home drunk after an evening out with friends. Jeanette was lying on the couch, resting after a long day at work. She was half asleep when he began insisting that she make him dinner. Jeanette refused. She was too tired to be bossed around, and she told Mike that he was perfectly capable of making his own dinner.
Mike dragged Jeanette from the couch in a drunken rage. His face was red and his eyes were wild. Mike took her to the bathroom and began to beat her, hitting her head and face. At one point he wrapped a towel around her neck and began to choke her. Their son, Josh, heard the noise and came into the bathroom. He tried to pull Mike off Jeanette, and Mike flung him to the ground.
While Josh ran to get the phone to call 911, Mike pushed Jeanette into the shower and turned on the cold water. She told me that as she lay there on the shower floor, she knew she was going to die. She looked up at Mike and saw that he had a gun. He raised it, pointed it at her, and fired. Jeanette heard the explosion of the shot echo throughout the bathroom.
The bullet missed her.
The shot cut through Jeanette’s clothes and embedded itself in the wall. Even today, Jeanette’s clothes are still in police custody to preserve the bullet hole from that night.
There must’ve been something about firing the gun that snapped Mike out of his rage. Maybe Jeanette screamed. Maybe he had surprised himself with how far he had let his anger take him. Maybe he was worried that the police were on their way. The reason he stopped his assault isn’t the important thing; the important thing is that he stopped.
Mike fled. He hopped into his vehicle and tore out of the driveway, minutes before first responders arrived. He must’ve been trying to make a run for it: He cleared out the couple’s bank account, leaving Jeanette with no money and no way of getting any. It was several days before police apprehended him in a nearby county.
It was hard for me to look at the pictures of Jeanette’s injuries. She had brought them with her that day to the courthouse, and she pushed them across the table toward me with little fanfare. I had gotten good at maintaining a neutral face when talking to clients, but these pictures made me flinch. They showed inch by inch the damage that Mike had inflicted upon her body—a horrific collage of dark purple, bright red, and faded yellow.
When Jeanette told me “I want to divorce him,” I wasn’t sure I believed her. Not because of anything about her, but because of my experience working with other clients. The assault had happened very recently, and I wondered if she was truly committed to leaving for good this time. I had known many women who started the divorce process after an assault and later changed their minds. It was the part of the cycle of violence that broke my heart the most: watching women I cared about go back into situations that I believed were unsafe. But I had learned some time ago that my job was not to make decisions about my clients’ lives. Many of them had few choices in their lives as it was; it wasn’t up to me to further diminish the options available to them.
But I should have believed Jeanette that day—I should’ve seen her determination. Her gaze was solid and unwavering as she told me each detail of her story. Some women cry when they tell me they are ready to finally end their marriage. There were no tears in Jeanette’s eyes. All I saw there was a calm, steady resolve. And perhaps a bit of impatience. She was ready to get on with things.
We filled out her divorce paperwork that day, and I told her that we would have a court hearing on some procedural things in a couple of weeks. “You don’t need to be there,” I explained. “It’s just going to be about some technical legal stuff.” Most of my clients are grateful when they don’t have to come to court. Jeanette let m
e know that she would attend that hearing, and every other hearing. She wanted to be there just in case Mike was there. She wanted him to see her, sitting in the courtroom.
The first time Jeanette had to see Mike was at her protective order hearing. Mike was being held in jail for criminal charges related to the assault, but I wanted to get her a civil protective order to further limit his ability to contact her. I stood in between Mike and Jeanette at the hearing. I was struck by how normal he looked. I had been representing domestic violence survivors for a while at that point, and I had seen many perpetrators of violence. Part of me still expected them to look different, to show some outward sign that they were capable of the violence they had rained down. Mike didn’t look violent standing there in his orange jumpsuit. They rarely do.
I was also struck by how calm Jeanette was, as she stood a few feet away from him. She looked straight ahead at the judge the entire time. She didn’t glance over toward Mike once. After the hearing was over, she and I went out into the hallway to talk. She exhaled deeply, and her body deflated. She had braced herself during the hearing.
The court granted Jeanette’s request for a protective order, and her case continued to progress. The next step was for the court to appoint an attorney to represent Mike, who remained in jail on criminal charges. Many people believe that you have a right to representation in all court cases. Most of us have seen enough legal shows to memorize the portion of the Miranda warnings that says, “You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you free of charge.” What most people don’t realize, though, is that this safeguard applies only to criminal cases—there is no blanket guarantee of an attorney in civil cases. That is true even though civil law impacts some of the most important interests in society, including our children and our families.
There are, however, a few types of cases where the right to a civil law attorney is guaranteed. One such case in Kentucky is when a person is incarcerated. If someone is in jail, the court must appoint that person an attorney before it can enter any kind of judgment—including a judgment of divorce—against him or her. This law is based on the idea that prisoners are wards of the state and deserve extra protection to make sure their rights are not violated while the state has custody of them. Public defenders aren’t an option for these cases, since they usually take only criminal cases. That means the court must appoint a private attorney to represent the incarcerated spouse.
When I first explained all of this to Jeanette, she looked surprised. “You mean to tell me that he gets a lawyer? Even though I can’t afford a lawyer myself?” The irony of it was not lost on me. There is no Kentucky law that guarantees survivors of domestic violence a lawyer to represent them in a divorce. By and large, if the survivor cannot pay for private representation, she (the survivors I work with are most often women) must navigate the court system on her own. I am always embarrassed to have to explain this to clients, even though I’m just the messenger.
Jeanette’s astonishment only grew when I explained to her that not only did Mike get an attorney, but she would have to pay for it. Kentucky law requires the state to cover the cost of civil law attorneys only in rare circumstances, and in Jeanette’s situation there was no provision for the courts to cover or waive this requirement. Whatever the bill for Mike’s private lawyer turned out to be, Jeanette would be on the hook for it.
At first, I think, Jeanette didn’t believe it could be true that she would actually have to pay for Mike’s attorney. I look young for my age, and she probably thought I was confused about the law. Then the bill arrived, and she moved from denial to anger. Anger at the system that made her feel as though Mike was once again in control. Anger toward this law that seemed to value Mike’s rights more than hers. Anger that, with everything going on in her life, she had to spend her time and money on Mike.
Jeanette was far from the only woman this law revictimized. I’d represented several women who had similar experiences. Often their husbands were in jail for violent crimes, drug charges, or crimes against a child. In order to divorce their husbands, these women had to come up with large sums of money to pay for guardians ad litem to represent their incarcerated spouses. This was true even though they could not afford private lawyers for themselves—the fact that I was representing them through Legal Aid was proof of that. I had heard tales from other parts of the state as well. One attorney who works in Owsley County knew a woman who couldn’t get the judge to finalize her divorce until she paid thousands of dollars to cover her husband’s guardian ad litem bill.
Eventually, Jeanette’s divorce was finalized. She hugged me three times once the hearing was over. She and I had developed a good relationship; we weren’t that far apart in age, and our conversations always flowed easily. I admired her tenacity. I was glad that she was moving on, but I was going to miss working with her.
The only matter remaining was to pay the guardian ad litem bill. I wanted Jeanette to have the freedom not to worry about it, so I found a litigation fund that was willing to help her cover the debt. These funds are limited, and not every woman in need can utilize them. But I don’t know that Jeanette could have paid that bill without the assistance.
I had thought I would be able to move on from Jeanette’s case—there were always new clients, and I was always hearing about horrific situations. But something about Jeanette’s story stuck with me. It seemed so patently unfair—that our system of justice could perpetrate such injustice.
I met Jeanette at the same courthouse to sign the closing paperwork in her case. It had been several months since her divorce was finalized, and I was glad to hear all of the ways her life had improved. She had met a man who treated her and her son with kindness. She was working in a hospital. She seemed happy, relaxed. She smiled with her eyes.
I asked Jeanette if she would mind if I shared her story. “Names and details changed, of course,” I told her. “I’ll make sure nobody knows that it’s you.” She immediately said yes. She told me that if her story could make a difference for one woman, she was happy for me to share it in its entirety. Every client I’ve asked this question gives me the same answer: If my suffering can help someone else, I want to do what I can.
In 2018, I wrote an op-ed for a local paper. I told Jeanette’s story—under a different name—and explained why the guardian ad litem system was so unfair in her case. We shouldn’t live in a world where survivors of domestic violence have to pay for the attorneys of their incarcerated spouses. We shouldn’t make women give money and advantages to the men who beat them.
I didn’t expect much to happen after the article was published. I had written another op-ed a few months before, raging against the domestic relations commissioner fees and the ways they hurt poor people in rural Kentucky. A few of my attorney friends had mentioned the article over drinks, and commiserated with me about how unfair the system was, but that was it. I expected something similar from this article as well. I was losing faith that the system would ever change.
I was surprised when people began paying attention. The day the article was published, a local state legislator shared it on social media and announced that he would introduce legislation to remedy the situation. His name was Morgan McGarvey, and he called me the next day to brainstorm how we could make sure Jeanette’s story didn’t become a script that played out time and again in Kentucky courts. After we hung up, I called Jeanette to let her know about the development.
“You don’t have to be involved,” I told her, “and everyone will understand if you choose not to be.” I didn’t want Jeanette to feel pressure to come forward if she wasn’t comfortable. She lived in a small town in rural Kentucky, and I understood why she might not want everyone knowing the details of her divorce.
“But I wanted to let you know that you are more than welcome to be a part of this process if you would like to,” I continued. At the end of the day, the st
ory I was telling belonged to Jeanette. There was no more powerful voice to tell it with than her own.
“I want to be a part of it,” she declared.
Jeanette took it from there. People were interested in her story, and she was contacted by a variety of media outlets who wanted to learn more. Jeanette said yes to each and every request. She said yes to being interviewed by the local newspapers about her experience. She said yes to testifying before legislative committees. She said yes to going on television and showing the world pictures of her bruises from the night Mike had beaten her. Even when Mike’s family and friends started putting pressure on her to keep quiet, she kept telling her story.
That legislative session was a particularly disheartening one in Kentucky. Republicans controlled the governorship, the state house, and the state senate. Very few Democratic bills were getting through, and Morgan McGarvey is a Democrat. At several points it seemed as though the bill might stall. I was worried that all of Jeanette’s effort was going to be for naught.
But Jeanette’s story was so powerful that there was no stopping the bill that now bore her name. People had seen her face, had come to associate it with the injustice she had endured. It passed both chambers of the state legislature, and the governor signed Jeanette’s Law into being.
My experience with Jeanette was a powerful reminder about the importance of telling women’s stories. Her voice led to tangible changes in the state law. Because of her bravery, other women’s lives will be better.
It was also a reminder that things can get better. By the time I wrote that op-ed for the local newspaper, I was disheartened with the court system. I felt like I had failed so many clients: Peggy, Patsy, Roy, others. I had been raging into the abyss, screaming about injustice and unfairness and hearing nothing back but the echo of my own voice. It seemed like somebody, somewhere, had finally heard the shouts.
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