Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner's Daughter

by Loretta Lynn;George Vecsey

  I said, “I’m freezing to death!” But I know it was nerves. His mother had bought me a nightgown. I had never worn any kind of gown because we always used to sleep in our underclothes. So he said, “Go ahead, get your gown and go in the bathroom.”

  I took out this gown; it was white with raised white flowers and leaves on it, thinner than flannel, and to me it was beautiful because I never saw anything like it. It was long and straight and I thought you wore it over everything. I was in bad shape—scared to death, I suppose. So I put the gown over my clothes and came back out.

  Doo said, “Hey, you ain’t supposed to wear clothes under your nightgown.”

  Well, I went back and took off my dress and left all my underclothes on. He sent me back again. By this time it was three o’clock in the morning. It was getting late, I guess you’d say. So I took off my slip and went back. I guess he didn’t think that was too smart. He really had a time with this little girl he married. He finally more or less had to rip off my panties. The rest of it was kind of a blur. I guess I went into a fit and didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t tell me nothing, so I just lay there.

  The next day we were getting hungry and Doo said we should go to this little restaurant next door. But I said I couldn’t go to the restaurant and face all these people who would know what we were doing in the cabin. So for three days I stayed inside while Doo brought me the food. I didn’t know nothing. I could tell you things but they probably couldn’t be printed. I was just so young.

  I still think about it every time we go back to Johnson County and we pass that old motel. It’s changed its name but last summer they gave me and Doolittle the key to our old room. Everybody thought that was funny but I said they better be careful or we just might show up some time and use the room. Things might be better this time around.

  They couldn’t be much worse. Looking back, I’d say that sex didn’t mean that much to me for a long time. I think I picked up the old woman’s attitude that sex was fun for men—but not for women. Doo even got some sex books for me to read, but it wasn’t until I was older that I started to enjoy it a little more. I didn’t even know that much about my body—having a climax and stuff. It was all a mystery for a long time. When I was in my late twenties, this doctor told me about having a climax—how you could help yourself. I didn’t even know women could do that. But it would be better if men knew more about what pleases women. Being patient, being gentle … I’d have welcomed that.

  I can’t say I recommend getting married at thirteen or fourteen. Most of the girls from Kentucky didn’t get married until they were eighteen or nineteen. But today you see younger kids getting married—or just living together. I used to tell people it was “just plain wrong” for kids to sleep together before they got married. But nowadays I don’t want to go telling other people how to live their lives. Maybe living together is a better idea than getting married when you’re so young. It seems like some people don’t start having fights until they get married. Marriage puts pressure on you sometimes, knowing it’s a lifetime deal.

  It also helps to know the facts of life when you do get married. I was only married four months when I started getting sick in the morning. I didn’t know what was wrong, so I went down to Doc Turner and told him my symptoms. Doc told me to get undressed and he put this big sheet over me. But I was so embarrassed, I just pulled the sheet over my head, like an ostrich. When he was done, Doc told me I could get dressed again. After that, he put his arm around my waist and he said, “Honey, your trouble is, you’re pregnant.”

  “What’s that?” I asked. ’Cause I didn’t know what the word meant.

  “You’re gonna have a baby,” Doc said.

  “Oh, my gosh!” I said. “I can’t have no babies yet.”

  And Doc said: “Well, you’re married, aren’t you? And you sleep with your man, don’t you? So you’re pregnant.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Here I used to tell Mommy I didn’t want to rock her babies no more, and now I was gonna have one of my own. All I could think about was Doolittle telling me I was gonna have my own doll by next Christmas.

  9

  Doo Kicks Me Out

  I’m tired of asking you where you’ve been,

  Tired of all this misery I’m in,

  Two steps forward and six steps back again.…

  —“Two Steps Forward,” by Loretta Lynn

  It was bad enough being fourteen and pregnant. But it was even worse when Doolittle kicked me out. When I was about two months’ pregnant, Doo told me to go home to my parents. What else could I do when I was only fourteen? I went home.

  When we were doing this book, my writer asked, “Mooney, how could you kick her out when she was so young?”

  And Doo kind of hid his face and said, “Aw, her and my sister used to sit around yapping when I came home from work.” Actually, Doo knows it was a bad thing to do—now. But then it didn’t seem so bad to him.

  Sometimes Doo says he kicked me out because of my cooking, but I know better. He met this girl named Pearl who lived in one of the coal camps. He insists he never touched her, just talking on the street and stuff. But he was leading up to it. Plus, there was this other woman who had been with every man in Johnson County just about. Doo had been with her before we got married, and he went back to her again.

  I can see where having such a young wife would give a man ideas about straying. But still, at the time, it hurt me bad. I could tell Doo wasn’t happy with me. I didn’t know what sex was all about. I think even if I had been handled real gentle, it might not have made any difference. I was too young to be living with a man. It’s that simple.

  There were other problems, too. They say the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Well, I didn’t get to Doo’s heart that way, either.

  I never had been too good in the kitchen because my Mommy was so good at it. When I got married, all I knew was beans and potatoes and corn bread, while Doolittle was used to pot roast and stuff like that.

  He knew right away he was in for bad cooking when he asked me to make pancakes and I didn’t know how. I never did get it right. We were living with his family for a while until we got our own little shack, and Angie showed me a few things. But after we moved into the camp in Van Lear, I still couldn’t cook. Every night Doo would come home from the mines and, if he didn’t like what I cooked, he’d just throw it over the porch. We had a dog named Drive who was getting fat eating all the stuff Doo throwed out. But sometimes Drive wasn’t hungry and Doo would point to the mess of food and say, “You see? Even the dog won’t eat your cooking.”

  One time I had two of my girl friends do the cooking, and they were pretty good cooks. But when Doo got home, he didn’t know who cooked it, and out of habit he just dumped it over the porch. He said I couldn’t cook and he told his brother to take me home.

  Doo was starting to visit this Pearl after I went back to Mommy and Daddy. I was feeling really low, being fourteen and pregnant and getting kicked out already. My brothers started to tease me, and I’d fight with ’em, chasing Junior or Herman through the cornfields, slapping ’em if I could catch ’em.

  Mommy, the practical one, suggested I should start getting out with my friends again. She told me to take the bus to Paintsville to see a picture show. The movie was called I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now?—which was a pretty good title for my situation. Doolittle saw me downtown and kept cracking funny little jokes to flirt with me, but I wouldn’t talk to him. I was mad at him for the way he treated me.

  After the movies, when I was walking up Butcher Holler, Doolittle was following me. I had these new shoes that were giving me blisters and he said, “Hey, you’re walking funny. Take off your shoes.” I still didn’t talk to him, but I took off my shoes. Finally, he said he wanted to talk to me about ordering clothes for the baby. So I let him talk to me, and we decided to get together again. Later I found that Doo’s Uncle Jake told him: “That’s a real good girl you got there. You ought to m
ake up with her.”

  When I moved back, I found that Doolittle’s girl friend was still writing letters to him. I’m not supposed to be able to read and write too good—but I managed to make my point in a little letter I wrote to her. I said she better get it straight that Doolittle Lynn is married to me. And I mailed it.

  On Saturday morning I went down to the Paintsville post office and watched that hussy pick up her mail. When she came out, you could tell she was furious. Just then, along comes Doolittle, walking down the street. I could see her jaws a-moving, telling him to give back her picture, which he still had. Then she took off down the street, still mad. I don’t think Doolittle ever heard from her again—and good riddance.

  Now the reason I’m telling the story is this: we’ve been married for a long time, in a business with a lot of traveling involved. I’m not the backward little country girl I was then. I was just learning that there’s a lot of women who like to move in on other women’s husbands, and I don’t go for it. I made my point in “Fist City,” which is a song about a real woman in Tennessee who was making eyes at Doolittle while I was asinging on the stage.

  I let her know she was gonna get a mouthful of knuckles if she kept it up. And I’d have done it. I’ve always had a bad temper when it came to seeing women making eyes at my man. Let ’em go get their own if they’re so good.

  It wasn’t until much later that men started making moves on me—I’ll get into that later. But here I was, fourteen years old and learning the facts of life the hard way. Sure, I’ve heard people say men are bound to run around a little bit. It’s their nature. Well, shoot, I don’t believe in double standards, where men can get away with things that women can’t. In God’s eyes, there’s no double standard. That’s one of the things I’ve been trying to say in my songs. Lots of country songs are about people trying to get along—falling in love, quarreling, having affairs, messing up their lives. That’s life, and we’ve got to face it.

  But life works both ways. There’s plenty of songs about how women should stand by their men and give them plenty of loving when they walk through the door, and that’s fine. But what about the man’s responsibility? A man is supposed to give his wife a good time, too. Let him be tender with her once in a while, too. And it’s even more important for two people to respect each other—you don’t save a marriage just by putting on some sexy nightgown when your old man comes home from the factory. But maybe the old man could save the marriage by asking his wife, “What do you think we should do about this situation?” No woman likes to be told, “Here’s the deal.”

  I’m not a big fan of Women’s Liberation, but maybe it will help women stand up for the respect they’re due. And maybe they won’t be cutting each other up so much. I don’t like seeing women act so jealous about other women. You hear it backstage at the Opry, you hear it when women get together for coffee. They should talk about the things they have in common—families, cooking, jobs, whatever. If they can’t talk to their husbands, because their husbands don’t care what they think, well, at least they should talk with other women. But it don’t work out that way. Women are too jealous. I know women who get upset if they see me hug their husbands and tell ’em I love ’em. I’ve gotten in trouble just for being friendly with people. The men get the wrong idea and so do their wives.

  Anyway, I think it’s about time people were more respectful of each other. I know how I wanted to be treated when I got married.

  10

  Two Thousand Miles From Home

  But here in Topeka, the rain is a-fallin’,

  The faucet is a-drippin’ and the kids are a-bawlin’

  One of ’em’s a-toddlin’ and one is a-crawlin’,

  And … one’s on the way….

  —“One’s on the Way,” by Shel Silverstein

  One of the reasons we were able to talk my parents into letting me get married was because Doo promised not to take me far from home. But a year after we got married, I found myself two thousand miles from home.

  It was probably a good idea anyway. When a young couple gets married, they should move away from their families so they can’t run home every minute. This way, we were either going to get along, or not. And there wasn’t going to be any family to interfere.

  The move started when Doo had troubles at the mine. He never really liked mining that much, but he figured he should give it a try since his Daddy was a boss for so long. But it was bad work—underground, dangerous, not a great future. Doo was the boss of a five-man crew for Consolidated. He’d supervise them mining the coal, then he’d drive the coal over to the tipple, where it would be weighed. They were rough days in mining; if the guy at the tipple didn’t like you, he could really hurt you.

  One day the man wrote up a slip that said Doo had dirty coal. Doo got out of the cab and argued that the coal didn’t have no slate, no dirt, no red dog. But the man must have had it in for Doo, because they went around on it for a while. Doo didn’t want to drive around trying to sell the coal somewhere else, so he got back into the cab and dumped the coal on the loading platform. Then he drove off, with the guy cussing him.

  It didn’t end there. They sent the sheriff after Doo and put him in the county jail for a few hours until it got straightened out. But Doo knew he was done at the tipple and done as a boss. He didn’t care much anyway. Coal was going downhill; the union was telling miners their medical cards were no good, ruining everything they had worked for all their lives. Doo could see it was getting worse and worse. He wasn’t middle-aged like my Daddy; he had seen other parts of the country and knew he could make a living at something else. So he talked my oldest brother, Junior, into hitching out to Washington State with him, and the next thing I knew, I was back living with my family again, with that little baby kicking inside of me.

  It was only a month before I got word from Doo. He had gotten hired by these two farmers, Bob and Clyde Green, and they gave him enough money for me to ride the train all the way to Washington. I had never been outside the mountains before, never rode a train. Daddy didn’t want me to go. He tried to scare me, telling me how sometimes those trains crash. But we bought the ticket because I wanted to be with Doo. I was still only fourteen, but I was a married woman and my place was with my husband.

  Mommy fixed me up a basket of food, a big brown paper sack of chicken, moon pies, biscuits, and hog meat. I didn’t know they had a dining room on the train, but I couldn’t afford it anyway. And besides, I was too bashful to go in there, even if I could. Fortunately, Junior’s wife, Bonnie, was making the trip with me.

  We went down the next day to meet the train, with Daddy crying. It was at the old Van Lear Junction that ain’t there anymore. But back in those days you’d have a passenger train stopping at least once a day. It was a real swinging time for the railroads. I remember me and Daddy weighing ourselves on the scale in the depot—me seven months’ pregnant, but both of us weighing the same, 117 pounds.

  I was scared to death. Mommy wrote a note to the conductor in her beautiful handwriting, asking him to take care of me. She was afraid I’d get sick and have the baby right on the train. I wish I knew the name of that conductor because he was one of the finest men I have met in my life. I was so bashful, I didn’t want anybody to know I was pregnant, so I sat by the bathroom with my raincoat wrapped around me. But this conductor would give me a pillow every night, and he would turn the coach seat around and let me lie down. Then he would get me fresh food from the dining car—cold milk and fresh fruit and stuff—and never made me pay.

  That man sat and talked to me for three days, knowing I was nervous about getting to Washington. After two days I heard him yell “WASHINGTON!” the way conductors yell. I got all excited and started jumping up and down, and he said, “Honey, you’re still a long way from Custer—Washington’s a big state.” He said it was another day on the train before Bellingham, which is up near the Canadian border.

  Finally, he told us we could get off. I looked around for Doo, but
I couldn’t find him. Then I saw Junior with another man, who turned out to be Clyde Green. They said Doo was out hunting for our supper. We drove out to the Green ranch near Custer, a little town of around 325 people, and there was Doolittle. He had shot a duck and wanted me to taste it for the first time. Doo has always been real good about providing for his family.

  We were living in the Green’s farmhouse—Doolittle working on the ranch and me scrubbing clothes and ironing and cleaning and cooking, seven days a week. Bob and Clyde were real good to me, treated me like a sister. They would include us in their Christmas dinner. And after their mother died, their aunt, Blanche Smith, came to live with ’em. And that’s where I learned to cook.

  Blanche Smith was an old, old lady but she was what Doolittle calls an “expensive” cook—she didn’t mind spending money on good meat and vegetables. Bob and Clyde used to drive Doo crazy by killing a cow and then grinding it all down into hamburger. See, they were just bachelors and didn’t care about fancy cooking. But one day Doo asked the butcher to save him just one good steak. That night, he fried it up with potatoes and put it down in front of ’em and said, “See, that’s the way you can eat if you don’t grind it down into hamburger.”

  After that, Blanche gave Doo a shopping order and the bill came to sixty-eight dollars, but it was fresh food and things they never had in the house before. They liked it better than anybody. After that, we ate good even when I cooked, because Blanche taught me how.

  After I got settled, it was time to have the baby. I knew how to change ’em but I didn’t know how to have ’em. I was afraid I’d have the baby in the middle of the night and wouldn’t know it, and the baby would smother to death.

  I went into labor at 11:30 at night and went to the hospital an hour later. But it was a total of twenty-seven hours before I had the baby. There was no way I could have had it without knowing. When I started delivering, I thought I’d die. I was just too small in my bones to deliver a nine-month baby, and I had to take time to stretch. Finally, they put this mask over my head and it was like falling down a well. I didn’t know what happened until I heard the crying. But even then, I didn’t know what it was.