* * *
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I had other small victories after Jeanette’s Law. I was part of a team that appealed a rural judge who wouldn’t waive the filing fee for expungement cases—the way to remove a criminal charge or conviction from a person’s record. The filing fee for an expungement ranged between $100 and $500. Very few low-income Kentuckians are able to afford that, so, effectively, wealthier, often white, people convicted of crimes can get expungements, while poorer, often black, people cannot. This disparity and its racial connotation were particularly worrisome because Kentucky is one of two states that permanently ban felons from voting. As a result, Kentucky is number one in the nation for disproportionate disenfranchisement of people of color: 26 percent of African Americans in Kentucky cannot vote. The way the courts were applying the expungement law was only adding to this horrific disparity. When the reviewing circuit court agreed with us and ordered the district judge to waive the expungement filing fees for low-income Kentuckians, I danced around my tiny office.
These wins are small. There is a lot more work to be done in rural courts in Kentucky and, I imagine, in rural courts throughout Appalachia. There is never enough time, energy, or money to help everyone in need. I once met a woman who was married to a man she hadn’t seen in seventeen years because she couldn’t figure out how to get a divorce and couldn’t afford an attorney to help her. Legal service agencies do the best they can. But the demand for services is great, and, when attorneys have to cover large geographic areas, it is impossible to help every person who qualifies.
But each small win is just that: a win. And each win is a reminder that things can change. These wins are also a reminder that people who have been victimized—be it by a spouse or by an unjust system—are nonetheless powerful. Some people portray survivors of domestic violence as weak; some people portray the women in Appalachia the same way. I think Jeanette’s story illustrates the opposite. When given the right tools, support, and environment, these women are capable of changing the world.
The Kentucky Democratic Party headquarters is an interesting bit of architecture. It’s supposed to look like the state of Kentucky when you drive past it on the interstate. To me, it has always looked like the 1970s, with some strange angles and jarring peaks.
But, on this particular day, the building looked intimidating. I had been to Democratic headquarters only a few times in my life. I had always been a Democrat—minus a brief stint in my midtwenties when I thought I might be a Libertarian—but a Democrat of the casual variety. The kind who pays attention to the presidential elections every four years and likes to debate taxes and social programs over dinner.
And yet, here I was to interview as vice chair of the state party.
I hadn’t become politically activated overnight. For a while, I thought the work I was doing as a Legal Aid attorney was enough to make a difference. I was going to save the world one person at a time, one family at a time, by providing legal services to those who needed them. I was going to help the people in front of me in the ways that were available to me.
Then November 2016 happened. I went to bed early on the night of the presidential election. I had been excited to vote for a woman earlier that day—the type of genuine excitement I had never felt about an election before. I called my mom as I drove in to work and told her, “Today’s the day I get to vote for a female president of the United States—isn’t that cool?”
I was watching the returns at home that evening—I wasn’t engaged enough to know where to find an election party—and talking to Bryan on the phone. It was just after our first trip together, and we were still in that foggy, new-relationship glow. I didn’t really pay attention to the returns until after we got off the phone. When I first noticed that Donald Trump was pulling ahead, I figured it was just a fluke. One of those weird results you see based on whatever smattering of states is in at the time. I started to tense up, and I decided there was no point in stressing over things unnecessarily. I went to sleep and figured that everything would be okay in the morning. I fell asleep with the TV on.
I woke up the next morning to the sound of shocked newscasters reading surprising headlines. Donald Trump had been elected president. I was immediately worried. Many of my relatives depended on the Affordable Care Act for health insurance coverage. Donald Trump had campaigned on platforms that would harm people I cared about. I went on my morning run without the usual news playing through my headphones.
The Appalachian counties in Kentucky voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. He won 84 percent of the vote in Owsley County. Hillary Clinton carried only two of Kentucky’s 120 counties: the ones with the two largest cities in the state.
After November 2016, I realized in a whole new way that elections mattered. It wasn’t enough to save the world one family at a time. Elections are the way you make society into whatever vision of it you have. Winning elections is how things get better. I started to get more involved in politics.
When, two years later, the position of vice chair for the state Democratic Party opened, I never dreamed that I was qualified for it. I wasn’t a party insider. I didn’t know the latest political gossip. I had barely any political relationships. Yes, I knocked on doors for candidates and showed up at local Democratic club meetings, but I didn’t even think about throwing my hat into the ring for the role. The vice chair was voted on by representatives throughout the state of Kentucky. Even though it was unpaid, a volunteer job, it seemed like a big deal.
Then a woman from Emerge Kentucky, an organization that trains women to run for office, sent me a message. “Why not apply?” she said. “Of course you’re qualified. You should give it a try.” I decided it couldn’t hurt, and I filled out the application.
When I became a member of Emerge, Kentucky ranked forty-second in the nation for the number of females holding elected office. Of the 138 seats in the Kentucky state legislature, women held only 26. In 2018, Kentucky was ranked the sixth most sexist state in America. I’m not sure if sexism results in fewer elected women in Kentucky or vice versa—I’m sure they’re related.
It’s not that women lose when they run for elected office. In fact, the opposite is true. In 2016, the year Donald Trump was elected and Democrats took a beating in elections across the nation, Emerge Kentucky alumnae won 61 percent of their races. In the 2018 midterms, Kentucky elected ten new Democratic women to the state house. When women run, women win.
The problem is that women, particularly those from rural areas, don’t run often enough. If no one had asked me, I certainly wouldn’t have—at least not as early as I did. Getting involved in politics seemed intimidating, like something I needed far more experience to do—like there was a specialized language I didn’t yet know. I was at the interview for vice chair that day only because someone had asked me to be. Someone had told me that I was qualified, that my voice was legitimate, valuable, and welcome. I ended up being elected vice chair of the state party.
A lot of people changed the way they looked at me after they found out I was “one of those political people.” Some admired me for engaging—it turned out that people I never expected had the same viewpoints I did. For others, my involvement made them distrust me—a lot of people assume the worst of anyone in politics. And a few friendships withered away in today’s polarized environment—several Republican friends became more guarded around me, and I wasn’t sure how to get back to our days of careless political banter, even though I tried to. I began to see what people were talking about when they claimed that our nation was becoming more divided.
I didn’t always feel welcome at political events. The fact that I was a young woman made some people look past me. I was referred to as “that little girl” more times than I can count. There was still a sense in some places that politics is a blood sport, one that is better played by men. No one said that to me directly, but I heard it each time someo
ne looked at me and said, “It must be so stressful for you to do all of this traveling. Does your husband mind you being away so much?”
But it was empowering to claim space for myself—to show up and say that my ideas mattered. When I spoke to groups, I talked about my roots in Eastern Kentucky and how the values I learned there shaped me. After one speech in a rural part of the state, a man brought his seven-year-old daughter up to talk to me. “Can I go to Harvard too?” the young girl asked me.
I told her, “There is nothing that’s impossible for you to do.” I wanted her to believe that as much as I did at her age.
As I traveled more and more, I realized that I wasn’t the only woman doing this type of political work. In the mountains, I found a host of women engaged in politics in surprising and interesting ways. They weren’t doing this work for the power or the ego. For them, politics was a tool to better their communities.
There was Sister Mary, a Catholic nun who was active in her Democratic Woman’s Club. She had decided that one of her life missions was to win more voters in her county over to the Democratic Party, because she believed that Democratic policies would provide opportunities for the struggling members of her community. In the evenings, she would go to her Trump-voting neighbors’ houses and invite herself to sit on the porch and chat a spell. When she asked her neighbors why they weren’t Democrats, they often responded with something about abortion. Sister Mary made it clear then and there that “there is a difference between being pro-life and pro-birth. You can’t call yourself pro-life if you want to cut children’s health insurance and make it harder for working families to get by.” She chuckled as she told me this, adding that she had great success in winning folks back to the Democratic tent. I’m guessing some of them just wanted this stubborn, fiery woman to get off of their porches.
Another woman, Victoria, was new to the mountains. She had moved there from a more urban area because she loved the beauty and the intimacy of a small town—she wanted to raise her family there. She believed that Democratic values were the best way for her community, in Estill County, to progress, but she had been told, “There are no Democrats in Estill County.” She felt lonely and isolated after the 2016 election. She assumed that everyone around her was a Trump voter. Never one to accept information without questioning it, Victoria went and looked up the voter registration totals in her county. When she realized there were more than 4,000 registered Democrats nearby, she placed an ad in the local newspaper asking Democrats to come and join her new club.
At first, people were hesitant. Business leaders worried that people wouldn’t come to their businesses; parents worried that other parents wouldn’t let their kids play with their children. I’ve heard that some rural churches tell their members that if they vote Democrat, they’re going to hell. In small towns that lean heavily Republican, people worry they will face tangible repercussions for their Democratic affiliation.
Victoria grew the membership of her club astronomically. I went to one event where she had 250 people at a cookout on a Friday night. She had created a community. But this community was not isolated unto itself; Victoria formed meaningful and productive relationships with Republicans in the area. She told me, “In small towns you have to get along with your neighbors. Doesn’t matter if they’re a Democrat or a Republican, you still have to get your kids off the same school bus.” On the last election night, members of both parties watched the results together.
I met Latoya, a young black woman running for office in a rural district in Western Kentucky, through Emerge. She was tall and stylish. She looked like she belonged on a runway in New York rather than in a small town in Kentucky. She grew up poor and black in a town that was mostly middle-class and white.
One day, at an event, Latoya came up to me and asked for advice. She was thinking about quitting her campaign. She was showing up at events in her area and felt like people weren’t interested in meeting her—like they didn’t want to give her a chance to tell them who she was. She told me about one evening when a group of white men physically turned their backs on her to block her out of their conversations. She was afraid to knock on doors in some of the rural areas of her district without a white friend with her. “I’m not going to be a news story,” she told me, “at least not that type of news story.” She was exhausted from trying so hard and getting so little benefit in return.
As soon as she explained her frustrations to me, though, she was over it. In pretty much the next breath she told me, and herself, why she would keep doing the work she was doing. “I never had any role models that looked like me growing up. I didn’t even have a black teacher. I’m doing this so some girl out there doesn’t have to say the same thing one day.”
There is intolerance—racism, sexism, homophobia—in the mountains. I once confronted Ruth’s husband, Sonny, when he used a racial slur at a family dinner. He wasn’t the only one. These things make me ashamed, of both my family and the communities that let them grow up with these beliefs. I know these actions are rooted in ignorance, but I also know ignorance is no excuse.
And I also remind myself that there are tolerant, accepting people in the mountains. I’m lucky to have known more people in rural Kentucky who are welcoming than who are not, although I recognize that for some the opposite is true. In 2018, the Democratic Woman’s Club of Kentucky elected my friend Joanne, a transgender woman from rural Kentucky, first vice president—the holder of this title usually goes on to become president of the club the next year. And Aunt Ruth recently told me about two married women who moved into a holler nearby. When I asked her what she thought about that, she replied, “Well, Lord, honey—they ain’t a-hurtin’ nobody,” and looked at me as if my question was one of the stupidest things she’d heard that month.
On one visit to Owsley County, Aunt Ruth and I went for a morning walk in the cemetery. “Do you think it’s okay to walk here?” I asked her. I had once mistakenly cut through a cemetery in Louisville during one of my runs and been almost immediately chased out by a caretaker.
“Why, Lord yes,” Aunt Ruth responded. “I bet they appreciate the company.” As we walked along the path she pointed out a mound of dirt in the back corner. “That right there’s an old slave cemetery. I started mowin’ it a couple years ago. It didn’t used to have no tombstones on it. But some of the women in town found a way to get money to put tombstones on it. I think it looks right pretty now.”
It’s certainly not enough—not any of it. Eastern Kentucky—and America—has a long way to go to be as tolerant as it should. But there are good people with good values in the mountains. And I think that’s a start.
* * *
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Not too long after Donald Trump’s election, I asked Aunt Ruth why so many people in Owsley County liked him. I had gotten that question a lot, and it seemed like she was better suited to answer it than I was.
“People are flat-out crazy for Trump,” she told me.
Sonny chimed in too. “People are plumb crazy for him. I ain’t never seen anything like it.”
“I think it’s that people like that he talks like them,” Aunt Ruth continued. “The way he talks makes it seem like he’s for workin’ folks.”
Eastern Kentuckians used to think that the Democratic Party—the party that supported labor unions and social policies—stood for working people. That’s why Democratic registration still outnumbers Republican registration in many Eastern Kentucky counties. In Breathitt County, which shares a border with Owsley, 88 percent of registered voters are Democrats.
But these counties have voted increasingly in favor of Republicans over time. In 2016, 70 percent of voters in Breathitt County voted Republican. Maybe that’s because voters thought the Democratic Party didn’t deliver on its promises to make working people’s lives better. Maybe it’s because, in past years, the Democratic Party knew that it could win more votes in urban areas and didn’
t bother spending as much time in the mountains.
The new Democratic Party chair and I tried to do things differently. We believed in showing up and competing everywhere in the state, not just in the urban areas that are reliably blue. But Eastern Kentuckians are a proud people, and many hadn’t forgotten the times they felt the Democratic Party hadn’t shown up in the past.
And it goes without saying that some people are angry. Many people in Owsley County sit in front of their televisions night after night watching images of a world that feels foreign to them. They watch shows about the ultra-rich and ultra-famous, knowing that their lives will never look like those they see on their screens. People of both political parties have made a lot of promises to them over the years, yet other parts of America seem farther away from the mountains than ever before. They’re not sure who to blame for the ways their lives aren’t what they wish they were. It’s easy to see why they were attracted to a political candidate like Donald Trump, who wanted to burn everything down.
But don’t mistake this anger for unsophistication. On my last trip to Owsley County, Sonny spent ten minutes explaining to me why Donald Trump’s trade policies had lowered the price you could get selling a load of junk in a nearby town. By the time he finished explaining steel and aluminum tariffs, my head was spinning.
I spent the most recent primary election day in Owsley County with Aunt Ruth. I had been in a nearby county for a meeting with Eula Hall—founder of the Mud Creek Clinic—who was hesitant to get together with me that Tuesday. “But it’s Election Day,” she said as though I should understand that all other work should come to a stop. Finally, she agreed to meet with me after I reassured her that I would show up late enough to give her plenty of time to cast her ballot in the morning.
Election Day, even in primary elections, is a big deal in Owsley County. After I’d finished meeting with Eula, Aunt Ruth and I went to the one sit-down restaurant in Booneville. The restaurant was packed with people interested in discussing politics, including the town’s ninety-something-year-old mayor, who has been in office since 1959. I spoke with the mayor for a few minutes, and he told me all about the new grant for sidewalks that the city had won. We were interrupted by people throughout our brief conversation. One person wanted to congratulate him on the grant, another wanted to complain about something, still another wanted his thoughts on the elections. When I asked Aunt Ruth if the mayor was a Democrat or a Republican, she wasn’t sure. Nobody nearby knew either.
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