In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

for survival. I grew up thinking there was a difference between the way guns are used in cities and how people in the country think of them. My papaw Conn hunted squirrels, and there was always talk of hunting for deer. My dad sometimes shot copperheads in the front yard and, as they came out of the Daniel Boone, he fired bird shot toward hikers he suspected of hunting ginseng. But mostly, the guns were there to protect him from the nameless enemies he talked about when he was high and telling us seamless, endless stories of what he had seen and done. He never went hunting. Maybe he was more like the city folk than he thought.

If you can survive the weight of bills you can’t pay and the emotional demand of children who you know deserve to be loved better than you know how to love, and if you can endure the loneliness and the panic that takes your breath away when you imagine what would happen to your children if you died or someone took them from you, then you just might make it, eventually.

My mother had lost her words, her ability to define herself to herself or anyone else, for so long. Like many in abusive relationships, she had paired with the person who was happiest to exploit her vulnerability. And with each cruelty, with each torturous moment, her voice was quieted.

I realized that the people who were supposed to love me, who were supposed to protect me, would actually sacrifice me and send me to a witness chair to be cross-examined by a man who didn’t know me and whose job was to reveal me as a liar.

we never really forget—we just tuck things away, and they quietly creep into each of our actions, our thoughts, our words, our principles, and our fears.

Even though she didn’t go to church, my mother would occasionally refer to God as if that was something she believed in, so I thought she might have been concerned about me living in sin. Or maybe with what everyone else would think about me living in sin.

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.

I thought that all poor people were the same—that we all feared our fathers and knew how to take a serious whipping without making a sound. I thought we all grew up afraid of hunger and accidentally drinking the snake venom in the fridge. But again, I found I was from a different world, and despite all of us falling below a certain financial threshold—at least on paper—I didn’t understand these people.

And it suddenly seemed that the world they envisioned, a world with clean streams and free health care, with protections for workers and women and children, wasn’t a place for our kind of people—people who smoked cigarettes to steady their nerves, who sometimes snorted a line of Lortabs with Dad because that was the most loving thing he ever offered. People who had babies they couldn’t love with men who didn’t love them. My liberal friend summed it up perfectly in class that day: They made their choice. They have to live with it.

I knew my granny and papaw to be the kind of Christians some politicians claim to be, the kind of people any of us could want to be. But there is no faking that kind of humility. You can’t pretend to love and give and forgive like my granny did. She didn’t go around telling people how much faith she had, or how good God was to her. I heard it in her quiet prayers. I tasted it in the food she grew, canned, killed, and cooked. I felt it in the softness of her skin, which grew loose and spotted with age, unprotected and unadorned. It filled her house and spilled into the creeks and waiting hillsides, it wrapped itself around me, and I held on to that when there was nothing else.

It was then that I understood the difference between theory and life. It was then that I realized I could never go home to the women like my mother—like me—and tell them feminists were working for them by writing essays or books or songs. I finally understood that the same people who sign petitions for laborers across the world don’t always love the laborers next to them. And that health care for all sometimes means not the ones who smoke. I realized that the feminists around me would still ask, Why didn’t you kick him in the balls? because a woman should be able to fight off two men twice her size. A feminist can still say, She was sprawled out for the men, and an entire community will shut out a young woman who is trying to figure out how to survive and be a mother if her decisions don’t meet their standards,

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.