Memoirs of My Strange Upbringing in the Mountains of Appalachia

I'm a woman in my late sixties who was born and raised in the coal mining mountains of Appalachia, near the Virginia/Kentucky state line. The backwoods area in which I was raised was so isolated from the “outside” world that, until I was about eighteen years old, I rarely had a chance to travel more than thirty miles from my home. This was due to the fact that my parents rarely traveled far from home themselves, even when my father took his once a year vacation from work. His “vacation” was just sitting at home, resting, and enjoying not having to go to work in the coal mine.

All I knew about the world beyond those mountains was what I read about in books. I loved reading and learning about things, and as soon as I learned to read well in school, I read everything I could get my hands on although this wasn't always a lot. Neither of my parents had even a high school education and weren't the least bit interested in reading (they didn't even subscribe to the local newspaper), so the only books I could usually find were from my school's library. But thankfully I had those.

I guess you could say we were the “poor” stereotype Appalachian family you've heard about except for the very nice, late model cars my father always managed to own. I have to say here that he was a tad bit eccentric. There we were, nine of us in the family (seven kids), living in a small five-room house with an outdoor toilet, and riding in a fancy, late model Buick or Cadillac car.

When I was in high school and got old enough to drive our Cadillac to school occasionally, all the other students thought we were rich because there were only a couple of other families who owned Cadillacs in our small town. The other students didn't know that our family was just like theirs in most ways. For supper on most evenings, we ate pinto beans, fried or mashed potatoes, and corn bread. Sometimes Mom would add some corn or green beans that she had canned from from her garden the previous summer. Of course, during the summer, we did eat a little better because of the fresh garden vegetables she grew. Thankfully, pinto beans have a lot of protein because my parents couldn't afford to buy much meat. But, gosh darn, we had a Cadillac! Actually, we loved the beans and looked forward to eating them as most Appalachian children do.

We were like most Appalachian children in other ways too. We bought very few brand new clothes, getting most of them from a second- hand store and accepting used clothing that other people would give us. Of course those families with only two to three children were a little better off than we were financially. I don't want to imply that everybody in Appalachia had to live like we did. A few were actually very prosperous.

Like many children living in that area at that time, we did not get any dental care when we were growing up. Many of the less educated parents, like mine, did not teach their children to take care of their teeth and going to the dentist was just not done. So by the time I was sixteen years old, I had several cavities, two of which were very noticeable to other people and I was getting embarrassed by them. I remember telling my mother that I needed to get them filled but she said that she did not have the money for it and I was not comfortable asking my father for it (but that's a whole other story). So, I figured out a way to get it myself. I decided to skip lunch at school and save my lunch money for my two most noticeable fillings. Lunch cost $1.25 a week then so, in five weeks, I had a little over $6.00 saved up. I thought this might be enough and I was tired of skipping lunch and being hungry at school.

Then I called and made an appointment with a dentist and within a few days I was happily sitting in his dental chair waiting to get my teeth fixed. I told him that I had saved my lunch money to get my two fillings and he then asked me how much money I had. I suddenly realized that I might not have enough so in a low, scared-like voice, I said $6.00. He then looked at me with a compassionate, pitying look on his face and told me that was enough for the fillings but not enough for the anesthetic, that he would have to fill them without numbing them. Not having had any dental work before, I didn't think that sounded too bad even though he told me that it would hurt some. So I told him to go ahead because I didn't want to walk out of there without my fillings. I could tell he didn't really want to fill my teeth without numbing them but I wanted them filled.

Believe me, don't ever have a tooth drilled into without the tooth being numbed first! It was so painful that I remember gripping the arms of the dental chair so hard that my knuckles were probably white and my whole head felt like it was going to rip off. Looking back, I don't know how I endured it but I walked out of there with two pretty, filled teeth and went home and proudly showed my mother.

Thinking of teeth reminds me of my grandmother, Opal, who had a gold front tooth when she was younger. It was the fashion then and she always tried to be fashionable. How she loved to smile and show that gold tooth. She was quite a character. But I could never say that she was a typical, loving grandmother. Actually, she was contrary and never showed any affection and she shot at two of her own grandsons once. I guess she wasn't having a very good day, or something, because when her grandsons drove up and parked at the bottom of the hill below her house, she looked out of her window and saw them and went and got a gun and stepped out onto her front porch and shot down at their car. Needless to say, they quickly left. But for the rest of their lives, the boys remembered that their own grandmother shot at them and they never knew why. But like I said before, maybe she wasn't having a good day. That's just the way she was.

Talking about interesting characters reminds me of one of my uncles on my mother's side of the family. He was a red headed Irishman who liked to drink too much and had an aversion to working. But somehow he managed to find himself a wife and I remember going with my mother to visit them one day when I was just a small child. This was her first time visiting them since they married. They lived in a big field on the other side of a river and the only way across was walking across a narrow, swinging bridge which scared me half to death because the bridge swayed back and forth as we walked. But we got across it and as we neared their house, I realized that it was really nothing but a small, dark, weather boarded shack. I don't think they were expecting us (in those days you didn't let people know ahead of time if you were going to visit them. You just showed up). They seemed very surprised that we were there and, I could tell, a little uncomfortable. And after we walked into the house, I understood why. They were embarrassed at what they had to live in.

It was only two very small rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom, and was furnished with only the bare essentials. And it had something that I had never seen before, a dirt floor. Yes, a dirt floor. I remember that the adults tried to make some small talk with each other, but my aunt and uncle were so embarrassed at what they had to live in and my mother was acting so sad for them that we didn't stay long. I asked her on the way home what happened to their dirt floor when it rained. Didn't the rain run along the ground into the inside of their house, getting their “floor” wet and muddy? She sadly looked down and said that it probably did. I have never forgotten the experience of seeing that, and I hope they did not have to live there for long. I never found out.

Growing up in the isolated mountains of Appalachia during that time was certainly interesting and unique, to say the least. I hope to eventually write more about it. Some of my memories are good and some aren't, but that's just the way it was.