That’s “Hill-William” To You, Sir!

Ask anybody in southeastern Greenup County (KY) where Red Hot is, and you may first receive the typical, “You ain’t from ‘round here, are ya boy?”, but then you’ll promptly receive specific traveling directions to this destination.  Understand, though, that these directions likely won’t involve numerical distances.  Mr. Lost Traveler is likely to have to trust the accuracy of ‘yonder’, ‘out there a ways’, and ‘go on a stretch’.  Road names though, that’ll help, right?  Very little.  When Greenup County installed an E-911 service, the good folks in charge failed to inquire of the locals as to exactly what road the lived on, so names were seemingly drawn out of a hat.  “Ol’Shea holler” became “Quarry road”, and “Red Hot” became “Speeden’s crossing”, although no one who lives out that way knows who the hell ‘Speeden’ is or what he did that was so great.  But, Mr. Lost Traveler, if you happen to traverse these pot-holed back roads, cross those not-too-sturdy bridges, and find yourself Out the End of Red Hot, you’ll find the place that left a lasting impression on this author, and has influenced so much my view of that quirky, backwards little part of the world referred to as Appalachia.

            Some of my earliest memories of my childhood involved a little 105-acre farm Out the End of Red Hot.  I remember the rolls of hay laid out along the cemetery fence, how me and my cousins would chase each other on those rolls, bounding from one to the next.  I remember picking blackberries on the hill with my grandmother, Pauline, impervious we were to the thorns and briars.  I always look back in amazement, and I’m sure many share the sentiment that it is a miracle that any of us make it out of childhood alive.  I think of those thorns though, and the ancient rope swings into Tygarts creek, which made up the southern edge of the property.  I think of catching skittish little crawdads down on the creekbed, clueless about what other dangers lay below those slow, muddy waters.  I think of those humid afternoons either working or playing (or playing when we should have been working) on those barn tiers, some thirty feet off the ground.  I recall the countless tumbles we took off of the rusted tobacco setter, so focused on our work that we didn’t have time to brace ourselves for the jolt the tractor had just received from some unseen hole in the ground.   For me, it’s especially awe-inspiring that any wandering youngin’ of these hills made it to puberty.

            Pauline Harlow was born in 1933 in a small coal-mining town town in Bartley, West Virginia.  When she was but six years old, those mountains made their first mark on her when an explosion in the No.1 mine killed her father, my great-grandfather; along with 90 other miners.  Perhaps it’s a matter of perspective on whether this was a good thing or bad, that Pauline Harlow (eventually Tussey) never left these prehistoric landforms that we collectively refer to as ‘Appalachia’.  A true child of the mountains though, that lady knows better than most how to live off the land.  Today a formal education is compulsory, across America all elementary school children learn the same historical events, the same spellings, the same arithmetic, and so on.  As a child though I receieved a second, much more informal education.  I was receiving the same education that had been passed down for decades through my family and many others like it.  My ‘other’ education was rural living; and my classrooms were the hills, the bottoms, the creeks, the deer trails and tractor roads, as well as everything in between.  To say that I was only a mere pupil though would be inaccurate.  In a family in which I had 7 aunts and uncles, who begat a plethora of cousins, both to learn from and teach, there was never a lack of ‘lesson plans’.  In that atmosphere, I learned what it is truly like to be part of a family.  Not unlike an old metal chain, rusted yet dependable, we as links in that chain were all interconnected and depended on the others to stand firm and hold true.  And the lock to that chain, though not all shiny and new, could be counted on to hold the rest of us together.  The lock to that chain, the keeper of our family, was Pauline Tussey.

            To say though that I was only a small cog in a bigger wheel, to imply that any of us were interchangeable, would be misleading.  We each had our specific quirks, roles, duties; and to subtract or substitute any one of us would allow that chain to fall apart.  Honesty, patience, pragmatism, these were some of the traits that I gleaned from Pauline, and these traits determined my place in the family.  I was one part architect, one part game tracker, three parts arbitrator, and two parts ‘back-porch psychiatrist’.  I remember several times throughout my childhood, cousins both younger and older, coming to me for advice in their personal lives.  I remember having to settle countless disputes, both intra-family and also involving neighbors.  One such dispute arose over a felled deer, both sides disagreeing on which side of the fence it fell on.  When our neighbor stubbornly refused to admit that he had dragged the deer over to his property, I politely reminded him that he needed our hay fields for his cattle to graze and that we could turn off that faucet any time we liked.  I recall one cold November night, extremities numb and teeth chattering, helping a cousin look for a whitetail buck that he had shot hours before.  The big hand on the clock rested halfway past eleven when we found the buck, which in its dying moments (apparently there were plenty) managed to circumscribe almost the entire property in blood droplets.  I would do these things without thought, because I knew if I had a problem, who would be there for me.  In that dynamic, Out the End of Red Hot, we all leaned on each other.  A diaspora of cousins, aunts, uncles; carried like dandelion seeds on the winds of modern commerce, carried away by jobs, careers, families.  But to those involved, there was one and only one “Out Home”, that quaint,  little one-story home and the land surrounding it Out the End of Red Hot. 

            When one sits down and reads various essays about this little corner of the world that we call ‘Appalachia’, one tries to glean from these essays what the author feels about the region.  To quote J.A. Williams, “From this standpoint, it is possible to see Appalachia as a zone of interaction among the diverse peoples who have lived in or acted upon it, as it is also their interactions with the region’s complex environment”.  All in all, I think this is a nothing-if-not impartial assessment of Appalachia.  I think this to probably be the best way to express the notion of Appalachia in black-and-white, because the shades of gray in between are far too numerous even to ponder.  It is my belief though that Mr. Casual Reader can dissect Williams’ definition, cut off a piece with yonder knife there, chew on it for awhile, and can fit each part of this definition to their own Appalachian experiences.  Here, I’ll show you how:  Let’s take the first part of this interpretation of Appalachia, “a zone of interaction among the diverse peoples”.  To apply this to my own extended family now: Yes, we were all indeed from the same gene pool, but even in a closely related, ethnically homogenic family, amazing diversity can be found.  Some cousins were fat, some athletic, some incredibly bright, some a little inept, hell, the margin between highest and lowest family income among our parents was still six figures.  So not only was there tremendous genetic diversity, but economic diversity as well.  I believe that the case of my family can be easily extrapolated to fit some basic patterns of Appalachia.  We all have acquaintances that, although having also grown up in Appalachia and sharing many of the same experiences, are on completely opposite ends of the spectrum in many ways.  In both cases however, and again I think this true both for my own family and for most (if not all) native Appalachians; no matter how different we seem to be on the outside, deep down inside we know that we are all connected, both to each other as well as these mountains, these valleys, these cricks, these fields, and this land.  So when Williams tells us that Appalachia is a zone of interaction among the diverse peoples and their interactions with the region’s environment, we have to look beyond the objectiveness of this definition.  We have to allow ourselves to get lost on those old gravel backroads, overgrown with kudzu.  We have to let ourselves examine those old-timers, the salt of the Earth, and let them reveal to us their life experiences.  We have to go out in the sticks, find that lone black family that has lived and thrived in these achromatic mountain communities, and ask them what it is to be Appalachian.  And after you have logged all of these miles, talked to all shades and hues, sipped Bordeaux with the elites and swigged a Mason jar of moonshine with the poor white trash; you will find that no matter what mask a person may wear, they cannot drive Appalachia from their soul.  The ‘Appalachian culture’, for us, is innate.  Before I wrap this up I want to evaluate that word, “culture”.  If you want the textbook, academic definition of the word culture, then you can look it up, because that definition means nothing outside of the classroom.  Culture, to me, is the life-blood that courses through the warm, arterial channels of our humanity.  Culture defines humanity. Culture is, most simply, Where You Come From.  A loss of culture results in death in three respects: A loss of that ‘life-blood’ leaves us cold and hollow, if we lose that humanity then we are no different than the basest of creatures, and if we forget Where We Come From then we are destined to wander aimlessly, with no direction, listless and confused.  Without culture, we are nothing.