A love song to Appalachia
Appalachia, if you didn’t know, is its own thing and very different from being “southern.” It represents self-sufficiency and minding your own damn business. It means a total lack of toleration people thinking that they are better than other people. It means very little money but so much ingenuity and a work ethic that will not quit. It’s majestic land and quiet nights and music and magic. It will let you be so fucking weird and claim you as kin anyway; and while blood relations are sacred, they don’t mean dick when it comes to who is your actual family. It is humble, but it is so damn proud – for better or for worse. These days it also means a lot of other things that are hateful and awful and just “not who we are.” The opioid crisis has killed a lot of us and left so many of those left behind susceptible to conspiracy theory and downright hatefulness. Because there comes a time when you are so ashamed of yourself and what you have become that you will look for any opportunity to point out the speck in your brother’s eye with no regard for the plank in theirs. When I want people to know about my homeplace I ask them to listen to the music of Tyler Childers, honorary poet laureate of Kentucky, and to read the work of Silas House, an openly gay man and environmental rights activist who is the actual Poet Laureate of Kentucky. I ask them to listen to our boy, Andy, and hear what a real Governor sounds like. I beg them to get their hands on anything by bell hooks who’s every word on race, class, gender, art, and most importantly, love is pure gold. She was also a Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College – a liberal arts school in Kentucky founded in 1855 as the first non-segregated coeducational college in the south, where to this day all students receive full tuition scholarships and work on campus. Its motto is “God has made one blood all peoples of the earth” and when I tell you their programs and graduates are absolutely top notch, you don’t have to believe me you can look it up for yourself. Their museums has a section on quilts and believe me when I say they are fucking Rembrandts. I want people to taste sunwarm tomatoes and cooked to death half-runner beans, and soup beans, and strawberry rhubarb pie that they will spend the rest of their lives trying to emulate. I want them to look at working people’s hands and barefoot babies and my Pappy’s pocketknife and an old twist of dried tobacco from the family farm. I want you to know that it is all precious and worth saving. But damned if I am going to be the one to do it. It hurts my heart too bad. But I am on the side of the strikers, for what it’s worth. I will feed them and sing about them and pray for them. The ones who have declared that the working conditions of the state, the region, the world, are unacceptable. They are right. And they deserve a better contract. It will be a cold day in hell before I cross a picket line.
