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616 The Kentucky Anthology Linda Scott DeRosier from Creeker Linda Scott DeRosier has deep roots in Appalachia reaching back to the early 1800s. She was born in a log house at Two-Mile Creek in the mid-twentieth century and grew up in a closely knit family and community, which has been lovingly and realistically detailed in her memoir, Creeker: A Woman’s Journey (1999). It is an inspiring story of a woman whose girlhood ambition was to get married and have four children , whose names she had already picked out. Her dream, she says, was thwarted because she was a scrawny girl, not the full-figured woman that local boys found most attractive. She changed her plans and became the first person in her family to attend college, eventually earned a Ph.D., and became a college professor in psychology . Her second book, Songs of Life and Grace (2003), is about her parents and their lives. In an essay in the spring 2000 issue of the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, she asserts emphatically the importance of her family and background. “It has always seemed to me that you cannot ever really ‘go’ anywhere until you establish pretty firmly where you come from.” She sympathetically deconstructs parents and other relatives in this passage from Creeker. h My momma was the single most intelligent human being I have ever known. When you consider that I have spent my entire adult life in higher education , that is saying quite a lot. It is not, however, an overstatement. Although children are likely to overestimate the power of their mother, let me suggest that every person who ever had contact with my momma would attest that she was, indeed, exceptionally bright. The tragedy is that, with all that capacity , she could never think her way out of the trap that was her life. Momma was the youngest of nine children born to a most unusual family . Every one of her brothers and sisters was extremely intelligent, but not one of them had a lick of common sense. All three of my mother’s brothers were drunks. In Bible-thumping, whiskey-hating, local option territory, they did not just drink; they were dead-dog-get-down-lay-in-the-bed-for-days drunks. The females in the family did not have a drinking problem, perhaps because they were all fundamentalist Christians who never had a drink in their lives. My momma was brilliant and spirited and passionate in a time and a place where a woman was allowed to be none of those things. She graduated 616 Linda Scott DeRosier 617 from high school, passed the state teachers’ exam, and was given a teaching appointment in a one-room schoolhouse on Hurricane Creek near her homeplace around on Greasy. She saved her salary, bought a car—an act absolutely unheard of in that time and place—and proceeded to get herself engaged no fewer than five times in three years before she met and married my daddy, whom she had known less than a month. Daddy was good-looking , funny, and had a car. What more could a country girl want? Maybe if she had known him a little longer, she might have made a better choice. It’s hard to figure out what better might have been, since Daddy made a better living, loved my momma more, and treated her better than anybody she might ever have expected to meet. That does not mean, however , that he was good for her. They lived together nearly sixty years, but they were just about as different as two folks could be. Daddy’s world was extremely small, and, with my mother in the center of it, he could not have been happier. My momma, however, was Sarah Bernhardt performing in a small-town dinner theater; she was much too big for the stage. You see, my mother was very special and not the least bit like any other mother in our little community. In those days, birth control often was not used successfully. Girls married early, began having babies immediately, and continued to bear a child every year or so until “the change” took them out of the babymaking business . After their first child was born, most women pulled their hair back in a bun, wore no makeup, affected big aprons from sunup to sundown, and generally adopted a very matronly appearance. Not so with my mother. She put on bright-red lipstick first...

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