The Matter Is You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About
There are two places in
Southeastern Kentucky I think of as my true homes: the small community of Lily, in the foothills of Laurel
County, and, fifty miles east, Rockhouse Creek, in the lush mountains of Leslie
County. I will focus on Rockhouse
here, mainly because it is the dark, lovely topography of my collective memory,
but also because it is the epitome of Central Appalachia, the kind of place
that journalists-who-don’t-know-what-they’re-talking-about always zoom in on
with their statistics and opinions. In fact, Rockhouse is located just a few
miles from the communities that were recently the focus of a piece called
“What’s The Matter With Eastern Kentucky?” by Annie Lowrey in The New York Times that referred to Appalachia and the Deep South
as “the smudge of the country.”
Well,
I am that smudge. My people are
that smudge. My homeland is that
smudge. And we are much, much more than that. In fact, we would fight for that smudge. Many of us have. Many of us have lain down to be
arrested for it (Beverly May, for one), have even risked violence (The Widow Combs,
for one) and death (Hazel King, for one) for it.
I
will be the first to admit that that article possessed statistics that cannot
be denied. But what good are
statistics if the reporter using them does not acknowledge or use or even know the history surrounding them? Statistics are only as good as their
context. I cannot imagine going
into a country I do not know and having the audacity to write about it without
knowing my facts, without having worked hard to understand the history of the
place and its people, without having the ability to give the joys and sorrows
of an entire culture historical context.
That is the matter with
“What’s The Matter With Eastern Kentucky.”
I went down home last night for a
funeral. I live less than an hour
north of my home county in a wonderful town, but it’s not down home. Down Home
is where I’m from. Down Home is my
people. Down Home is where my
accent doesn’t announce me as an outsider, where gas stations offer soup beans
and corn bread for sale, where folks sit in a circle in plastic lawn chairs to
watch the cool of the day roll in after a long day of work. It’s the place where coal trucks
control the roads, where coal companies hand out coloring books to elementary students, where doctors push pills on people in pain, where high schools refuse
to allow students to have gay-straight alliances or Young Democrats Clubs,
where a small town passes a fairness ordinance to protect all people from
discrimination, where most folks have the dry county blues, where hundreds of
people work quietly for change.
Down Home is a contradiction
and a secret and a history waiting to be read.
Down Home is a wound and a
joy and a poem, a knot of complication that scholars and reporters have the
audacity to assume they know with a little bit of research.
But you cannot know a place
without loving it and hating it and feeling everything in between. You cannot
understand a complex people by only looking at data—something inside you has to
crack to let in the light so your eyes and brain and heart can adjust properly.
So I went back home, alone,
on a summer’s evening cooled by a hurricane sliding up the Eastern
seaboard. I drove the parkway with
my windows down and the mouth-watering smell of kudzu grapes trembling on the
air. There was also the scent of
coal (it’s inescapable: scattered
along the side of the road from the constant coal trucks, dripping from the
cliffs lining the highway, seeping its aroma out onto this world from so many
hidden caves and graves and the air itself) and of grills in front yards,
loaded down with pork chops or burgers, of the sandy creek-banks touched by
cold water washing out of the mountains.
I get terribly sad when I go
to Rockhouse, mostly because it’s a place of the past for me since nearly all
of my family has had to leave there to find work in the next county over, or
even farther away. But a great
deal of my grief is about the things the statistics reflect: poverty, educational opportunity,
health. It would be irresponsible
of me to deny that there are true problems in the region.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjhXj06mep3PMq89lXRrsDDaBBpzwouIgAxN3g03y-YEFU0BJERWGYny85APfV94imtk6bh69tGYdF4Ory5zSiNx8CqtbHIhZGbGAhKkuTQRpspyjsKcgrPWPT6j9YHERg7GHTu4Xuvgk/s1600/friends_of_coal_infant_tshirt.jpg)
I’ll use myself as an example here. Because of my outspokenness on the
problems created by Big Coal I’ve been called a traitor to my own people. I am proud to be from a coal mining
family, but that pride comes from the hard work done by the miners, not an
allegiance to the companies that became rich on their backs. Nothing makes me sadder than when I see
my own people being fiercely loyal to the corporations that have hurt us over
and over. In short, we’ve been
convinced to vote against our own interests, but the reasons are not as simple
as being brainwashed. Once again,
history matters here.
The rise of the Tea Party has
made the religious hold on the way people vote even more complex. On my drive down home I heard radio ads
talking about Obama’s War on Coal (read:
don’t vote for any progressives) and how “the liberal Kentucky agenda” wants
to promote gay marriage and abortion (read: don’t vote for any progressives). Still, we cannot blame everything on coal and politicians
and history. We must claim some of
the responsibilities for the problems in Eastern Kentucky while also acknowledging
that we were put in this position by a long history of chronic poverty,
control, and underinvestment.
Mostly
I get sad because once there I see how the media portrayals of my people have
led to life being worse for us. If you tell people they are worthless long
enough, some part of them begins to believe it. Calling a place “a smudge” certainly doesn’t help. And that sadness is always countered by
an overwhelming pride when I witness the dignity and defiance of the Appalachian
people. We’ve had 200 years of
history against us, but we keep going, we keep fighting back, we keep trying
our best. Not all of us, of
course. That would be a
generalization as bad as saying we are all lazy. But I can honestly say that most of the Appalachians I know
try their best. They work, they
love, they fight, they have joys and sorrows and everything in between. Because they’re people, just like
everyone else. They are not dots
or checkboxes or digits in a statistics report. Yes, some of us don’t try or
care hard enough. Some of us are
backward and ignorant and violent.
Because we’re human beings and some human beings turn out that way.
At
that wake, I thought a whole lot about us being called “a smudge”. The woman being mourned came from a
family who had had it rough their whole lives, but she and her siblings had
done their best to rise up out of that hard country and make good lives for
themselves. All of them
worked. Worked hard. As waitresses and factory employees, as
cashiers and lunch-room ladies and mechanics and coal miners. It is tempting to gather some
statistics about this reporter’s socio-economic background and then use that to
judge her point of view, but that wouldn’t be classy—and it wouldn’t be
accurate, since we’d also need to factor in historical and cultural
context. Yet that is what members
of the media sometimes do to the people of Appalachia, base their theories on
statistics while not taking history and culture into account. As an economics reporter for The New York Times, Lowrey needs to understand that great economic
reporting should be about more than statistics. Much more, like history and culture. Especially when reporting on a region
like Appalachia that has historically been a sacrificial ground for the rest of
the nation. Especially when
reporting on a place that has given up its land, timber, natural gas, coal,
young people, and many other natural resources throughout the history of this
country.
A reporter like Lowrey should know that Appalachia has been pushed down again and again throughout our
nation’s history. During the
period after the Civil War, many mountain counties in Southern Appalachian
states were punished because of their lack of loyalty to the Confederacy. This resulted in politicians not providing
those mountain counties with funding for bridges, roads, and schools until
extractive industry demanded those things.
Once that happened, the roads were
still not maintained properly and Appalachian taxpayers had to pay for the
constant damage done by the heavy trucks of huge companies. The lack of educational opportunity
caused many great minds in the region to be held back.
Appalachia became a place controlled
by big out-of-state (or even out-of-the-country) companies and the local elite
(who were controlled by the big companies). Once a place is identified as a source for great natural
resources it is in the interest of the corporations and the government to keep
the people under their thumbs.
People are the overburden in the way of extracting those resources, as Beverly May once pointed out. And one way to control the people is to
have a deliberate lack of investment in the region, consciously keeping out
other forms of economic opportunity.
Neglecting the infrastructure of roads, bridges, schools, and health
facilities is another convenient way to keep the people in check.
This probably sounds like conspiracy
theories to those unfamiliar with Appalachian history. But for those of us who
have lived here all our lives and have devoted our lives to studying the
region, we know that there is historical context to chronic poverty and other
factors that make this place easy to identify as the hardest place to live in
the nation.
The
thing is, it is hard to live in
Appalachia, especially in Southeastern Kentucky. The statistics exhibit some proof of that. The economy is not good. The environment is being devastated. Many places throughout the region are food deserts. There’s a reason I had to move an hour away, after all. The problem with “What's the Matter With
Eastern Kentucky” is that the reporter thinks of the people and the place she
is writing about as “a smudge.”
Not as a place where the history and culture matter. And that’s what’s the matter with the
article.
This
isn’t the first time Lowrey has written about the region although
earlier pieces did not receive the same amount of attention. On the whole her writing is respectful
of the region. There is no malice
or even prejudice present (except for calling the region “a smudge”—come on
now, that’s just rude and sniffs of
classism). There is not evidence
of her relying on stereotypes.
Always in her reporting she relies on the hard facts. If anything, reading many of her pieces
reveals that she has a formula for reporting, delivered in well-constructed and
unexciting sentences. None of my
words are meant as an attack on this young reporter. Yes, I was insulted by a couple of her phrases, but overall
I am responding simply because so often people need to be educated about this
region. I do not mean to imply
that Lowrey is bad or mean, but simply uninformed. So often that is the problem with most things.
I’ve heard many people citing the
problem with the article being that once again The New York Times and the media elite has shown its bias against
rural America. Well, that’s just
simplifying the matter. The Times consistently publishes writers
from the region who talk about the problems here in a complex way. Just
recently they’ve featured great editorials from important Appalachian voices
like Amy Clark, Amy Greene, Jason Howard, Maurice Manning and many others. In
fact, sometimes The New York Times
reports on the issues in the region when our own newspapers will not; they have
certainly covered environmental issues of the region more thoroughly. Many of
the editors at the Times are
Appalachian or Southern themselves and work hard to make sure that the paper
looks at the region in a complex way.
In the case of this article, someone should have used a keener eye.
My point here
is, once again, that to properly examine quality of life in the region, one
needs to do more than look at data.
I do not mean that only Appalachians can write about Appalachia. But I do mean that anyone who is
attempting to write about it must become immersed in a special kind of
way. Appalachia is the kind of
place everyone thinks they understand
but very few actually do, and that’s mostly because they haven’t taken the time
to educate themselves properly.
One must go to a place like
Rockhouse, to drive these winding roads.
One must sit and jaw for awhile with folks on their front porches, to
attend weddings and high school graduations. One must study the history of the
place and come to understand it, must sit at a wake and look at the lines on
the faces of the people, the calluses on their hands, understand the
gestational and generational complexities of poverty and pride and culture. One must stand for awhile outside the
funeral home and smell the air, study the gravestones out back that await the
inscriptions of names belonging to people, not statistics.
Otherwise,
you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Notes:
This essay and photographs are ©2014, Silas House.
Comments
All best
Kerry Madden
I find Ms. Lowery's article and so many others like it to be especially frustrating b/c these are educated people and they should know better. They are all so good at identifying what the problems and challenges are, but they hardly ever take the next logical step and connect the dots. The issues facing east Kentucky and other extractive communities did not just materialize over night. Ms. Lowery and others like her would do well to ask the most obvious question -- how is it possible for a region with so much wealth (timber, coal, etc) to also be home to the very real statistical challenges that she identifies? If we lived in a different world, communities like those in southeast KY, WV, and western Pennsylvania would look more like Kuwait or the United Arab Emirates. It's not a perfect comparison, but the point is that much of the wealth generated by the natural resources extracted from those countries stays in those countries and benefits a greater portion of those societies than have ever benefited in east KY. In a better world, our communities would control those resources, and the labor and lives sacrificed to extract them would create a level of wealth and ownership that benefited more than a handful of individuals who have no real presence or investment in those communities. I know that it's more complicated, that there are other factors and issues, but until we can have an honest conversation about power, wealth, and ownership, until we are ready to admit to the role those play (not just in Appalachia, but in the whole world), I'm afraid we'll continue to have articles like the one Ms. Lowery has written.
I agree with Al Cross. This is a masterpiece.
Also I will follow his lead and make sure it gets attention in my social media world.
Don McNay
I hate reading articles filled with blanket statistics, but little anecdotal evidence. It hurts my heart. This one helped. I'm looking so forward to going "home" in just a few weeks. For now, in my home in Oxford, England, I will close my eyes and imagine the smell of coal, a smell so ingrained in my conscious that I can't forget it. Thank you so much for writing this and for being so spot on.
My biggest pet peeve is when outsiders talk about "fixing" Appalachia. While I of course want the best for us, I dont want to lose any of the things that make eastern Kentucky such a special place. There is a balance to be struck here, and whatever compromise is made it should darn well be a decision of the people who live there.
When I read the NYTimes article, I knew the opposition would be strong...though your view is the best I have seen in response. But what I see is that the statistics are, sadly very true...it hurts us because it shows us in a light unfiltered by history and culture. As Jack Webb said...Just the facts.
And the facts are not good. Your point that sometimes the best solution is to leave hurts, but in many cases it is correct.
In my life, I have fought against the reality that there is no PLAN B for eastern Kentucky...I keep feeling that the "Coal Keeps the Lights On" bumpersticker industry is the most successful in the area. And a Plan B is elusive because those who can make decisions are too entrenched in keeping the status quo, albeit a ever shrinking status quo.
But all we can do is try. Try to move those decision makers to a world where energy corporations do not fog their decision making.
Keep up the effort...it is voices like yours that might just make the difference.
It seems that people think of Appalachia as a place of black and white. Either it's poor, dirty, and backwards, or it's written about in an equally one sided idealistic manner.
Because the truth is there are big problems. That's why I doubt I will ever live in Beattyville again. But everytime I go back home I am reminded why I'm proud to be from there and it has a special place in my heart.
I was born in Grundy, Virginia, just across the line from Pike County, Kentucky. Though I spent much of my growing up time in Floyd County, I have lived in Ohio and I graduated from high school in New Jersey. I, too, come from a coal mining family. We migrated to NJ when there was no work for Dad, but Southeastern Kentucky will always be home.
You have said what has been on my mind and in my heart for some time now. If I had written this piece, only Rock Fork and Floyd County would be substituted for Rockhouse Creek and Leslie County. I wish that I had written it; that I had been able to find the words (and the courage) to express such sentiments.
What you have written has power to evoke sadness and longing as to move one to tears. Such a sense of loss of time and place is there, it makes one want to weep in mourning. Some might find your words embarrassing and perhaps resent that you have drawn attention these things at such length. In my mind there is no doubt. This absolutely needed to be said; and you said it very well, indeed.
The uninformed and, it must be said, the ignorant, may view it as a "smudge." But it is our culture and our history. This is our home and these are our people. It is where we are from; it is who we are. If we love our home and our people as much as we proclaim so often, then, at minimum, we should acknowledge if not accept it as well -- all of it.
I will do my part and share this with others. Not everyone will like it, but it is important that they all read it.
Again, thank you.
Aren't there certain economic facts of life that we have to recognize? If there aren't sufficient resources in an area to support the number of people who live there, why is the responsibility of the rest of us to subsidize your (admittedly cherished) way of life? Why is it OK to condemn generation after generation to crushing poverty because you're simply unwilling to move? If you're so dead set on living where there's no economic opportunity and none on the horizon, don't you forfeit the right to complain about your lot in life?
When my family moved to Virginia I was first introduced to coal. Until the use of coal is phased out my guess is that nothing much is going to improve. Pity that it is so plentiful.
I knew nothing of the area before arriving but was welcomed by most, despite not sounding as though I was born there.
My travels only included the southeastern part of the state, but I did see a lot of poverty. Still, I saw a proud people who were making do as best as they could under the circumstances.
I met quite a few people there and fondly remember them and the beauty of the area.
SEO services pakistan
Save House From Foreclosure
the country. We are quickly becoming a central online hub for all things real estate in the country.In Residential
Property we have houses for sale in lahore and in Commercial property we have plots for sale in lahore .For More Infor please contact us .
Please visit once. I leave my blog address below
야설
중국야동넷
sublimation blank products
sublimation printing machnine
best free website builder
digital business card
best news and blog website
sublimation blanks products
best tech news by techloz
top news websites