Home Again

Southern Appalachian Archives/Berea College 7 Life is still hard in the remote, rugged hills of Elliott County, Kentucky. Unemployment is chronic, Kentucky 's highest at 25% and more; there are no industries, no significant coal deposits, little flat land for profitable farming. The sparse population, impossible terrain, financially strapped government and school systems, and politics -the sheriff who doesn't work, the tax assessor who doesn't mail out the bills-keep the county underdeveloped and in the Lexington news. A mass exodus over the past fifty years has weakened the pool of homegrown talent and leadership, and further handicapped this forgotten little pocket of Kentucky. Tobacco crops are cultivated on steep hillsides better suited to growing marijuana , probably today's number one cash crop in the county. Most who do have jobs commute. To nearby Morehead, to Ashland, to the West Virginia coal mines, even to Lexington, a hard twohour drive away. My family is from Gimlet, on Mauck Ridge in Elliott County, but few of us still live there. Most migrated out after World War II, north to the Ohio factories . We moved when I was about three years old, forty miles west to relatively flat and prosperous Fleming County. But we went home every Sunday to Elliott County, and I spent my summers there until I was too big to be spared so long from farm work. Elliott County has held a special place in my memories all these years, a special feeling for home, heritage, and family. I went back to Elliott County on a September Tuesday for a triple funeral, two young first cousins and a wife were killed while trying to blast open an old spring-fed well to get water to a mobile home. The first was killed by poison gas; the other two died in vain rescue attempts. Even in the Kentucky mountains, death is steady work. Probably the newest and nicest building in Sandy Hook, the county seat of Elliott County, is the funeral home. Modern, immaculate , brick-veneered, surrounded by a huge paved parking lot, air conditioned, the facility for leaving this world is far superior to any facility for being born. The crowd gathers early. The men come in dress cowboy boots, jeans or cheap dress pants, plaid flannel shirts or cowboy-cut uniform shirts, the raw and uncomfortable dressed-up look of loggers , truckers, and farmers. The women are too old for their years, worn by hard work, childbirth, poor medical care, and a lifestyle which leaves little room for frills. Some, the younger women, are beautiful in a classic mountain way. High cheekbones, fair skin, light hair, and clear blue eyes reflect the Cox family genes, my mother's blood, the Irish heritage which still surfaces. The older people are stiff, slowed, uncomplaining, grimly accepting of the tragedy. They accept me too, despite my jacket, tie, and uncalloused hands, once they ask and discover I'm Hack and Loval's second boy, the one who went away to college. The service is in the hands of the brothers, leaders of the family church, a dozen of them seated near the coffins, but first there's a surprising guitar-accompanied duet of a popular gospel song. Probably, we decide later, the young surviving wife insisted on this music and had her way despite the brothers ' ban on musical instruments. Then there's the undertaker's brief and formal summary of three short lives, and the brothers take over. Their music is a capella, lined out by the leader, and the hill country's version of a Gregorian chant fills the overcrowded parlor with a strangely harmonic , emotional, and primitive beauty. The first brother then takes the floor, speaking softly at first, warming up, breaking out in a sweat, building, then suddenly bursts into his hellfire and damnation Sunday sermon. For the first half hour or so there is a certain basic beauty and meaning to the rhythmic chanting, and many in the congregation 8 add their vocal support. The second and third brothers to preach, don't fare so well from an audience point of view. Women wander out to change diapers and nurse babies. Men step...