Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

People love to believe in danger, as long as it’s you in harm’s way, and them saying bless your heart.

If you’re standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.

It hit me pretty hard, how there’s no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning. People will keep on wanting what they want, and you’re on your own.

Sunday school stories are just another type of superhero comic. Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal.

Battle of Blair Mountain, that turned into the biggest war in America ever, other than the civil one. Twenty thousand guys from all over these mountains, fighting in regiments. They wore red bandannas on their necks to show they were all on the same side, working men. Mr. Armstrong said people calling us rednecks, that goes back to the red bandannas. Redneck is badass.

Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There’s no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.

He said half of him was sorry over it, and the other half wasn’t, so now he would stay cut in two forever.

Mountain people, country and farm people, we are nowhere the hell. It’s a situation, being invisible. You can get to a point of needing to make the loudest possible noise just to see if you are still alive.

“Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn’t been totaled or repossessed.”