In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

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.

There’s a quality some people see in the vulnerable, a marker that’s recognized only by the kind of people who want to prey on them.

But the kind of men who will hurt women—especially women who have been deprived of love—are everywhere, and they look like everyone. In some ways, it’s disappointing to know that bad men aren’t just the ones who look like my father—raised in a holler, shooting guns, and making moonshine or dropping out of high school. For the longest time, that made it much more difficult to figure out who was safe. It’s more complicated, too, knowing that people who call themselves feminists and social-rights activists might turn their backs on the ones who need them: Women who are desperate to be loved, so they sleep with too many men. Men who are snorting pills or shooting up heroin or some mysterious opiate concoction, because being alive hurts so much, it is worth it to risk overdose and disease and losing everything you have, everyone who loves you, to escape the hell inside you, even for just a few hours. Poor people without the wherewithal to stop smoking or stop burning their trash by the creek, who would rather die in a coal mine than get free health care. How do you love people who look like this, who live like this? People like me, like my father, my brother, and my mother.

And I cannot say what kind of hate is in anyone else’s heart, but I know it is easy to turn a man to hate if you can convince him that the outsider is the cause of his problems.