In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir
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Life was different in our holler, I came to learn. And we were definitely living in a holler, not a hollow like you might read about in the dictionary or see on a fancy map. Merriam-Webster’s will tell you it’s a small valley or basin. The dictionary can also tell you it’s a depressed or low part of a surface; an unfilled space. But what it can’t tell you is what that means, where the depression becomes visible in the land, what is inhabiting all that unfilled space. Only people who were raised in hollers can do that. A holler is a place where you very likely grew up in spitting distance of a ...more
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But the holler is more than that, too. The holler is quintessential Appalachia—the perfect symbol for this complex physical and cultural landscape. Here, the word is everything—it is saturated and dripping with history and sorrow and, still, beauty—a living paradox of place wrapping its arms around you in verdant honeysuckle vines that hold you close, that never let go.
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Home—can anyone define that? For some, it’s simple: Where the heart is. Cross-stitch that and hang it on a wall. For the rest of us, it’s a negation: Where I’ve never been. Perhaps it is, after all, that one place to which we can never return. I left my home and grew up, carrying my child self everywhere I went, full of longing and fear and memory. I couldn’t stay there and survive, but now Granny is gone, and I can’t drive to her house and eat the best chicken and dumplings you ever had.
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I waited for moments to pass, for the confusion to subside, for the adults around me to say, Everything is okay. No one ever did. Words were weapons, just another form of violence that I hid from. I hid myself deep so that on the surface, people would see quiet and good girl. I thought I could control their understanding of me, keep my inner torment a secret—it seemed like another sin to be so angry—but I did not realize how much my sense of self was controlled by all that hiding.
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For the first time, I was struck with the understanding that as hard as I had tried to make sense of the whole mess, it was time to give that up.
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I didn’t understand what happened to keep that job from lasting long, but next he got a job at a sawmill in Carter County, which took about forty-five minutes to get to each day.
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There was the story about the sheriff of Carter County, who tried to find my great-grandfather and his moonshine still one too many times and ended up shot and dead at the end of my great-grandfather’s gun.