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And this land is heaven on earth, pulsing with life and beauty. But there is darkness in this unyielding, incomparable landscape that is saturated with tears and blood and forgotten roots that lie beneath the ground, now soft, now decayed. Whether we are bound to some bright tomorrow or the failures of yesterday is yet to be seen.
What is history anyway? A story: The last man standing holds the pen. A sense of place: I am on this path that is hardly comprehensible. A birthright: I may be from, but I am not of that world.
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.
There is no creek to keep me company, us running wild together behind the house and wandering through the holler. No hills to hike up so I can check on the spring and get a good drink. No trees to hide me. All the things I loved, I had to leave.
What does no mean? What do we accomplish when we speak it? It is a refusal: I do not accept this dubious gift. Self-protection: You will not violate my sovereignty. Denial: I am not these things that you name me.
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.
I had to unlearn the most important lesson I had learned as a child, the most important rule of survival—to be quiet.
At some point, I stopped trusting myself to know the difference between what made sense and what did not. I learned that when things looked wrong, felt wrong, there had to be something I didn’t understand. I learned I should trust the man telling me to trust him, to accept whatever he was doing, no matter what my own good sense had to say. I learned to ignore my own judgment, and for a good long time, I had no idea that I could trust myself.
In a landscape littered with disappointment, immediate gratification seems to make sense.
You keep stubbornly trying, waiting for dictators to become benevolent kings.
Like so many women before me and since, I learned that you go back, you stick it out, you love the man until he is saved by your sacrifice. It’s the kind of thing you can always see going so badly in someone else’s life, but not in your own.
I discovered that flocks of birds flew in perfect synchrony with one another and in time with heartbeats. That the wind loved the trees and that the forest floor loved the leaves, that the heat and the cold and the sun and its setting were all singing a love song. That the wordless joy of the forest was not lost in my past. And I felt hope.
How do we define a self? As the differentiator: I can’t understand you people. As the reference point: I didn’t see anything. The victim: Why did this happen to me? The perpetrator: I didn’t mean to . . . The self, of course, is the main character of each of our stories—the hero, the martyr, the one whose suffering really matters and whose goodness is remarkable, whose shortcomings are both comprehensible and forgivable. The Bible tells us that the body is a temple, a sanctuary for the soul, a home for the I of every thought. In my house, there are many mansions.
For most of us, there is no flash of understanding when we turn eighteen, no sudden self-awareness that transforms our child selves into responsible, world-savvy adults. We fight the demons that embedded themselves into the fabric of our consciousness, not knowing why we always feel like we’re in a fight. We walk through the world as if we are part of it, but our anguish constantly reminds us that the world neither loves nor wants things that are broken.
How can so many lonely people be in one place together? Each of us reaching out, over and over, slapped away or left behind, hungry in a way that always seems to be our very own.
Granny had the only kind of power a woman in that time and place could have—the power to transmute pain into comfort, absorbing untold sorrow and giving her family a safe haven. It was alchemy.
Perhaps we all, to some extent, carry these infinitesimal burdens with us always, lifetimes upon lifetimes of history and pain and triumph embedded into invisible and weightless, incomprehensible miracles of creation or chance that drive us, blindly, into passion.
Pain is a place, a substance, a state of being: I am in pain.
I grew up loving my family but knowing they didn’t know me. We are all strangers. I can tell stories about them—they named me at birth, marked me, defined me. They determined my words and my meanings, bequeathed me their lexicon. But they also sent me running into the forest and into the pages of other worlds, where the chains of little slut and whore disappeared into a vast, infinitely variable realm of language.
It turns out that putting someone back together is much more difficult than keeping them whole in the first place.
I saw that every word I had to speak was the honoring of my history, the history of everyone I had ever loved, and the landscapes in which I had sought refuge, time and time again: first, the streams and forests of Kentucky, and then, every book I could get my hands on.
When people ask, What’s wrong with eastern Kentucky? all I know is it’s the same thing that’s wrong with all of us.
I can’t save any other men, either, no matter how lovable I see they are, and how I know they would be okay if they could feel the depth of my love for just one moment.
I feel the magic of childhood and the whispering strength of forests waiting for us. I see miracles incarnate. I hear the stories I tell my children, the stories of their births and how their lives are gifts to us all. I see myself and my parents, grandparents, generations I never knew but whose love and loss are bound into each thread of my being. I see the holler I was born to, as much as I was born to any person—a place and a symbol filled with power and knowledge, comfort and paradox.
