Going Home Again (Part Two)

 I wrote previously about my experience of returning Back East and the realization that no matter how far I spread my branches, my roots will never budge. I am now preparing to take the trip once again. This time the Hubby and all three of the children will be joining me.  This is the “Part Two,” the part that I have struggled to type. It is difficult to write because I have not yet formulated my thoughts concisely. I have been mulling this over since my trip in October, and I will soon be returning with the same questions still unanswered.

My roots   are buried deep in the rich fertile soil of the Appalachian foothills. For generations, my family has toiled along the river and in the hollers, carving lives out of those coal-rich, money-poor hills. I lived along the Ohio River in Eastern Kentucky until I was 12 years old, when my father was transferred to the Midwest by the steel mill that employed most of the town.

My memories of Appalachian life are filled with hard work, long days, meager earnings, and time spent with family. As a child, I remember dewy summer mornings collecting strawberries from the garden for breakfast, and long afternoons sitting on the porch swing, peach juice mixed with mud dripping off my elbows, while my grandfather rocked in his chair, swatted at flies, and complained about the starlings.

I remember sweet tea, brine-soaked cucumbers, and days working in the blackberry briars rewarded by a warm cobbler-filled belly in the evenings. I remember dancing on the lawn with my cousins in spontaneous celebration of the first thunderstorm after a long drought, and I remember the anticipation of watching the first snowflakes landing on the autumn leaves. I remember weekly trips to visit my grandparents in the city; the tiny house overflowing with people, cigarette smoke, coffee, and laughter. I remember hushed voices and murmured phone calls, and I remember assuming that if someone didn’t show up to a party, they must be in the hospital. I remember the long trek up a steep and winding road to bury my maternal grandfather, who had been incapacitated by stroke years before I was born.  I remember pain and tears, and I remember the lovingly handmade “Care Bear” and “Cabbage Patch Doll” I unwrapped at Christmas.


I remember that I never once considered how much money my friends in school had because none of us had much. We all survived and that was enough reason to be glad. My elementary school gave boys leave during tobacco harvest, so they could work alongside their fathers in the fields, and tradition commanded that fifth-grade girls dressed up in their church clothes to serve the sixth-grade boys their elementary graduation breakfast. Tradition was the custom, and the oral tradition was deep and rich. Storytelling was an art form, and music was the natural manifestation of stories told animatedly on the front porch.

And now, I return. I am so fortunate to have the opportunity to drive along that winding gravel road to the head of the holler to hug my grandparents once again. I sit on the porch swing, watching my cousins’ children play ball in the yard with my own.  Yet, when I drive into town, I now see the poverty that I didn’t see as a child. I see sorrow and pain. I see the manifestations of a decade of torment caused by a culture destroyed by substance abuse. I see pain clinics and once proudly maintained trailers buckling from years of neglect. I see children orphaned by addiction.

Appalachia has a long history of hard work with little reward. Short lives punctuated by injury and illness have, in the past, been a way of life that drew families closer and created a sense of communal responsibility for the welfare of one another. Yet today, I see industry chewing up and spitting out the Appalachian people, feeding upon their pain and their desire for something better.
 
Much like the company store of the past, big pharma and “pain clinics” have targeted the downtrodden Appalachian people as a captive market, wrapping them up in the endless cycle of addiction and need. The proud struggle of the past has become a desperate and angry poverty today. People once toiled in their gardens after long days in the mill to provide food for their families. Today, whether I will be able to speak with a cousin on the phone will depend on whether the copper wires supplying communication have once again been stolen to feed an addict’s Oxycontin habit. 

Do the Appalachian people have pain? Without a doubt. They have always had pain, but no one took notice until there was a profit to be made. The solution offered is hence market-driven, and the true needs of the Appalachian people are ignored while children are orphaned and the murmurs and whispers are now of death by overdose rather than early natural illness brought on by years of hard labor.

It pains me to see this transformation. It hurts to hear of the brutal abuse of my brothers’ best friend’s corpse by other addicts after his overdose. It hurts to watch loved ones enter prison or be injured in acts of drug-fueled domestic violence, but I remember. I remember hot sticky days filled with dirt and sweet fruit juice dripping down my chin. I remember laughter and strength in the face of insurmountable challenges. I know the spirit of the Appalachian people, and I understand that spirit still remains under all the pain and brutality visible on every street corner. I remember, but my children don’t.

How do I frame their experience of Appalachia in a way that they can understand their roots? Their roots are as deeply entrenched in that soil and that soul as are mine, yet all they understand are the whispers and murmurs that so-and-so is in prison or so-and-so overdosed. All they understand is that their cousins didn’t get Christmas presents this year because their mother spent all the money their grandparents sent for them. They don’t know why yet, but soon enough they will understand what drugs are and what they can do to an individual and a community. How do I tell them to be proud of a culture that seems so ugly today? How do I tell them to be proud to be second generation urban Appalachian, when I can no longer lay claim to the culture I see there? How do I make sense of this transformation as an outsider looking in, and how do I show my children the beauty masked by torment?

This must be why they say, “You can’t go home again.” I know where my roots lie, but they are buried in so much grime that it is difficult to navigate the way back. I can’t forget my past, though, and I can’t let that grime distance my children from their heritage. For me, the way home is in my bones, but how will I show them the way?  I still don’t have the answers, but I can only hope I will when they are finally old enough to ask the questions.