Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers

Root Hog, or Die

'.) '.) 0 J: ...J ...J is ::0 (5 >- :2' "" ARTIE ANN BATES Born in 1953 in Blackey, Kentucky, where she currently lives with her husband and son, Artie Ann Bates is both a medical doctor and a writer. Her children's book, Ragsale (1995), tells the story ofa favorite Saturday event from her own childhood-ragsalin'. Bates has published essays and poems in journals such asAppalachian Heritage. Vitally committed to her communiry and to prominent social issues in eastern Kentucky, she frequently writes political and environmental commentary for local newspapers and the Lexington Herald-Leader and medical consumer items for both radio and print. She is trained in health sciences but has always carefully complemented this training with literature and writing classes. She studied with Harry Caudill and Gurney Norman and has participated in nine workshops at the Appalachian Writers' Workshop at Hindman Settlement School in Knott Counry, Kentucky. Bates is currently writing historical fiction for adolescents about eastern Kentucky and completing a child psychiatry residency in Louisville, Kentucky. * * * Root Hog, or Die Unlike the big cities, where survival depends on the delivery of goods and services , Appalachia is a place where many still root a living out of the land. For my ancestors of five generations, the creed ofsurvivors was "root hog, or die." My past started in eastern Kentucky long before I was born. David and Nancy Back, my great-grandparents, bought the farm in the head ofElk Creek in 1907, about thirty-five years after it was built by her brother. Their youngest daughter, Artie, my grandmother, was married in the living room ofthat farmhouse in 1913. Her oldest daughter, Eunice, and Eunice's husband, Bill-my parents-bought the farm in 1955. At the time ofthe purchase, I was two years old. We still lived at the mouth of Elk Creek in the house where I was born. I was the fifth of six children in my family. Daddy was an underground coal miner and Mommy an elementary school teacher. Daddy worked for twenty-two years in the mines and never finished high school. He was real educated, though, in the field of poor people. There was always one or two staying at our home, coughing, picking sores on their faces, rolling Prince Albert cigarettes. He thought you should always help people because , as the Bible says, you never know when one of them might be the Lord. Most of the people I associated with, until age eighteen, were grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors. They had also lived in Letcher County for four or five generations, descendants ofthe first white settlers to the area. I rarely saw anyone that I did not know, except for the train engineers who waved as they passed each day. Occasionally an insurance agent or vacuum cleaner salesman would knock on the door, and Mommy would turn off the pressure cooker or washing machine to listen, as we stared at his crisp white shirt. Even then I had some clues that the outside world had its own view ofAppalachian Kentucky. We had always watched The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Andy Griffith Show, where the country folks had to set things straight for the more materialistic city folk. At that time I was not offended by those shows.The hillbillies were the wise ones, and there was a lot of truth in that. Of course the mountain people I knew did not always seem so wise, for they were just regular people to me. The four houses we lived in from my birth to age eighteen were within a three-mile radius. One ofthem, the David Back house, I live in now. By the time I came along as a late-in-life baby, my parents were tired, so they no longer traveled. My only links to the world beyond the mountains were television and visitors 54 ARTIE ANN BATES from off. Some of those visitors were from places like Boston, California, England , and China, touring the mountains in the 1960s out ofcuriosity generated by media publicity. Others worked as Volunteers in Service to America or as missionaries . Now and then, one or rwo ofthem stayed with us, and then my mother had extra cooking and washing to do. My first experience living among strangers occurred when I began college at the University ofKentucky in the summer of 1971.These strangers thought/was the stranger. If I said, 'Tm hotter...