The Third Rainbow Girl

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  This was not a camp for “needy” girls. It was a camp for girls who wanted to do hard math problems, create wild art, learn the names of medicinal plants, and make friends with other girls who also wanted to do those things. No savior complexes or outsider bullshit would be tolerated, the other interns and I, who mostly came from schools throughout Appalachia and the East Coast, were told during training. But facts were facts, and the director of Mountain Views, one of the Founder’s daughters whose blond bangs shook when she spoke, needed us to know them just the same.

  Some of the girls Mountain Views served rode the bus an hour and a half each way to the county’s single high school; going to the doctor could be a similar time commitment. Women in West Virginia are less likely to work outside their homes than women in any other state in the nation. For every dollar made by a man working full-time in West Virginia, a woman in West Virginia earns seventy-four cents (the national figure is eighty cents). Thirty-two percent of West Virginia women and girls smoke (the highest rate in the nation), and they report much more stress, anxiety, and depression in their lives than women nationally.

  The Director gave us poems and novels and academic articles to read that showed poverty was a false god imposed on Appalachia by outsiders and spun into a story that had been used for harm. As Helen Lewis writes, the region’s history “demonstrates the concerted efforts of the exploiters to label their work ‘progress’ and to blame any of the obvious problems it causes on the ignorance or deficiencies of the Appalachian people.” I learned that by the late 1920s, the state of West Virginia had been completely deforested: after it was logged, nearly all the old growth forest that remained had burned in forest fires. When it rained then, it flooded—valleys where towns sat filled up with water; topsoil got washed away into streams and silted up waterways that West Virginians were still trying to use for transportation and industry. The streams became so polluted with sawmill and coal waste that many of the fish and plants died. Conservationists established the Monongahela National Forest in 1920 to protect more than half of the total 1.7 million acres—much of it in modern-day Pocahontas County—and ensure the regeneration of some forest land, but could not reverse the damage that had already been done.

  The Director gave me Denise Giardina, the great chronicler of the years when West Virginia’s miners fought back against exploitative mine owners, and local poets Louise McNeill and Irene McKinney. She gave me Nikki Giovanni, and bell hooks, and taught me about the rich Affrilachian community that had been thriving in the region for centuries. I read Chad Berry, who directs the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea College in Kentucky, and learned about his idea of “the divided heart,” a condition of divided allegiances and longings that some believe most centrally defines the experience of being Appalachian in America. After the timber and coal industries came to Appalachia, Berry writes, “People were suddenly faced with a number of decisions: stay on the homeplace or move to a new coal camp or mill town; try to continue the traditional life or venture into the more modern; migrate temporarily, perhaps to Atlanta, Nashville, or any of a number of growing southern towns or even to Cincinnati, Detroit, or Akron, and then return home; be hungry, poor, but happy in the South or be comfortable but perhaps unfulfilled in the North; stay near family and kin or light out on one’s own; be content or curious.”

  One in nine American girls will experience sexual abuse or assault by an adult before she turns eighteen, and one in six women will be the victim of a rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. From that summer, I learned that Pocahontas County is not immune to this epidemic and that its workings here felt even more difficult to understand or prevent. Rural towns are farther from educational programs, crisis centers, and laws designed to protect children. Communities where everyone knows and needs each other pose unique problems for reporting sexual violence, as well as for healing.

  Leaving was gendered, I began to suspect—the girls, if they had good grades, by and large left; if they didn’t, they mostly got married and had kids and lived in houses that sat far from 219, their lives already lived in private. The boys stayed.

  I stood at the highest point in West Virginia that summer. I learned what stinging nettle feels like on the skin of my calves (a ferocious itch), that the antidote to stinging nettle was jewelweed, and that Mother Nature, in her kindness, usually made sure the two grew side by side. I learned how to make my hands into the shape of animal paws and how to ask teenage girls questions that could not possibly lead to one-word answers (how, why, describe). As a New York City kid, I’d taken driver’s education classes at eighteen but had little impetus to actually get my license until applying for the internship at Mountain Views, which required one. I was a brand-new driver, and it was painfully obvious to all the other interns and staff—in the way I couldn’t reverse a Mountain Views van full of coolers of water even a few paces without ending up in a ditch; in the way I full-body startled and pulled over when a gunshot rang out in the song coming through the van’s speakers.

  I learned how to pump gas into a car that summer, how to pump gas into a plastic container, how to change a tire in the rain, how to take the batteries out of a smoke detector, and that most problems in the physical world could be solved if you simply got down on your knees to look and believed in your own ability to find a solution.

  The intern house sat in a small grassy clearing; above us was the mountain and the campground where the girls slept, below us the steep dirt driveway one had to climb up to the Mountain Views property, which was occasionally blocked by a big brown horse called Delilah. Next door to me slept a girl from Kentucky who had short hair and wore a baseball cap with a heart on it.

  I learned how to use a weedwacker. You’ve got to prime it. The girl from Kentucky showed me how, pushing her thumb over and over against the plastic circle button as it filled with dark oil. We weedwacked the whole campground in preparation for the campers’ arrival, and I discovered that in the hum of that machine and afterward, my body coated with bits of grass and oil, I felt good—working felt good.

  My cell phone got no signal—not even when we descended the mountain in minivans and bought snacks at the gas station in Hillsboro. In this absence, some space loosened up. On nights off, the girl from Kentucky taught me to like the taste of beer and then excused herself to go to the Mountain Views office so she could talk to her man in Massachusetts. A trans man, I learned, with a small name like a girl’s cut in half.

  I don’t want to be one of those girls who doesn’t shave her legs and then shaves them when her boyfriend comes to visit, I said at some point that summer, standing in the pantry of the office building where we stored our cans of beans. I had a gentle floppy-haired boyfriend from college, who would be arriving any minute.

  You don’t want to be, the girl from Kentucky said, tapping her foot against an interesting rock she’d dragged inside. But you are.

  I came back from that summer in despair. I sat in my childhood bedroom in New York City, which had recently been repainted purple. Outside my door, my mother’s sadness sat just beneath our stippled ceilings like a layer of warm air. I could feel my father standing at the closest window looking down at the street. Pick up your feet, pick up your feet, he had been directing me since childhood (I scuffed them when I walked), and I had learned to comply.

  The people I’d met that summer at Mountain Views sat heavy on my mind. I felt blocked, squeezed, a tightness in my chest that kept tightening. Ideas had been introduced, ideas about the lived experience of sexism and rape culture as it intersected with rural life and Appalachian history, but I still didn’t know what they had to do with me.

  I went to study in France. In Paris, as we rode a crowded metro train to the outskirts of town for a day of flea market shopping, a man stuck his hand up my friend’s skirt and inserted his knuckles inside her. I watched how suddenly her face changed—one moment she was just living her life; the next she wasn’t. On a different dry afternoon, we were followed by two m
en who, when we ceased replying, called us slut, bitch, whore. They followed us for a long time, touched the backs of my hands, my palms, kicked my feet, threw a plum that splattered against a nearby rock. I couldn’t comprehend it—so blatant, so unequivocally there, in the light of day. As my friend and I stood with our backs against a low brick wall covered with wisteria and waited for the full minute of silence that meant these men had left us for good, something sparked alive in me, then caught. It was a bubbling in my throat like hiccups you couldn’t hear, a vibration in my thighs you couldn’t see. My heart began to beat faster, and the energy spread through the fat of my upper arms and down into my elbows, knees, and hands.

  “Reflect on a personal violence you want undone,” directs the poet CAConrad. “Some terrible THING that removed the beauty you once lived with.”

  That night, I listened to my roommate whistle through her nose as she slept. She was a German and a good girl who never left our sterile apartment complex after ten at night. I wanted to burn my body, or both our bodies, to throw a bomb down one of Paris’s metro passageways, just pull the pin and let this whole old and graceful motherfucking city burn. Hmm, I thought. What’s this?

  Back in America, I read Paulo Freire. I read Nancy Scheper-Hughes. In a class for people who had done summer internships similar to the one I had done at Mountain Views both in America and abroad, we had debates on “cultural relativism,” the idea that people steeped in one culture, particularly a Westernized or dominant culture with wealth, should not judge the ideas or practices of people living in another culture, particularly those of people living in developing nations.

  We learned about meddling white people who imported giant fish into a lake in East Africa to help “save” their food supply, but then the imported fish fed on all the indigenous fish, destroying the lake’s naturally diverse ecosystem. We learned about the ways in which mostly white, middle-class American or European feminists passed judgment on traditional practices important to other cultures, dictating which behaviors could be considered liberatory and which oppressive. Trying to help was an inherently privileged and colonialist position, and besides, it only made whatever it was that was wrong worse.

  We also read about moments when people or organizations chose not to intervene in the face of violence or suffering in favor of what they felt was the more important act of witnessing it or recording it for all the world to see. A documentary filmmaker continued filming while young girls in Kenya were genitally circumcised and filmed still as they cried out, “I don’t want it,” and “You’re hurting me.” Photojournalist James Nachtwey photographed the atrocities of wars in Kosovo and Rwanda and, among many other subjects, a family who lived hungry and exposed to the elements along a Jakarta railway track. On the one hand, some of his photographs sparked meaningful humanitarian action and financial resources. On the other, as critic Susie Linfield writes of the people in Nachtwey’s work, “I do not think their spirits are intact. In showing us the many ways that the human body can be destroyed, Nachtwey’s pictures can inspire revulsion more easily than empathy.” Nachtwey himself was plagued by this ethical imbroglio. “Do I make a living from other people’s suffering? Has their suffering and misery been my ladder to success? Do I exploit people? [Am I] the vampire with the camera?”

  There was nothing an empathetic and politically involved person could do, it seemed, from text after text we read, that wasn’t in some way catastrophic; there was no direction to move in that wasn’t flawed or corrupt. Cultural relativism, in its sense of compromise and lack of active harm, seemed like a good place to stop thinking.

  But some nights, alone or beside my sleeping boyfriend, my mind could not find rest and wandered further down the path. What was that kind of judgy Feminism with a capital F anyway? If it was saying that we should strive to make women living in minority cultures “like us,” to be free in the ways that we were free, wasn’t that also fundamentally flawed because even I, a middle-class American white woman, was profoundly aware of the effects of sexism, profoundly not free? But, further, if we as engaged people striving for liberation dismissed our own gut reactions and moral convictions on the grounds that it was fucked up to have those feelings in the first place, wasn’t that just further patronizing and ghettoizing minority and historically dispossessed cultures by making a line between our own supposedly neutral culture we could judge and an “other” we couldn’t?

  I started to have the suspicion that there might still be room for saying, “I think that is a problem,” and, under very specific circumstances, “I want to do something about it.” At the end of that class, I wrote a paper arguing for the views of an anthropologist named Sally Merry, who wrote that cultural relativism is “primarily about tolerance for differences and is incompatible with making any moral judgments about other societies.” But, she continued, “this incompatibility depends on how one theorizes culture. Thinking about culture as a homogenous, integrated, and consensual system means that it must be excepted or criticized as a whole.” Cultures could be taken apart and considered piecemeal, with nuance. It was possible to keep some parts without keeping all, and to lose something without losing all.

  But did I learn? I did not learn. Another professor gave me Adrienne Rich, who said that all heterosexual sex with men was inherently oppressive and that the only way to find freedom was to live a life in which you did not depend on men for love, pleasure, or money. I broke up with my boyfriend for a tall woman I’d been watching in my poetry class. This alleviated the pandemonium in my mind for a season, but still the air was wrong.

  What was wrong in the world was metastasizing inside me. I became metastasized. On the outside I was alive and cared about people and school, but on the inside I was hollow and didn’t. People of color, poor people, indigenous peoples, women and queer people were being diminished and killed every day I was alive. Cement mix sloshed rocky through my veins. I became a concrete girl. Walking around campus, I recognized other concrete people—in particular, a young black man who often stood apart at parties tapping his wing tips. Once, by the pretzels, I tried to speak to him, but his face said one word: don’t. I didn’t.

  It was 2009. National unemployment reached 10 percent, the highest since 1983; the unemployment rate for twenty- to twenty-four-year-olds peaked at 16 percent. May was coming. I watched other people make interesting or sensible or desperate decisions—a job at a nonprofit in Philadelphia, law school, Teach for America. All these things were part of the problem, I had decided. They trained you to know things or teach people things or make things, none of which were real.

  I knew the very position of dissenting and dismay was a privileged one and that my rejection of these choices made, to rational people and people with less class and race privilege, very little sense. Yet there is a particular cognitive dissonance that sets in when you have many of the advantages this life can bestow but have seen, up close and in slow motion, what they mean for those to whom they are denied. You start to think maybe you can abdicate your privilege like a crown, if only you try hard enough, and that maybe that will settle the score.

  I felt broken and running from the system in my mind in which the only choices were to dominate or be dominated, stay completely still or get annihilated by my feelings and the terror of history. It was a system of impossible twos and endless double binds, and I was afraid to move within it or choose anything. I felt that no one I knew had a clue about America, its true texture and shape and flavor, and that the ways I had been taught to live in it were no longer working.

  Mountain Views called me on a bright April afternoon. Did I want to come back to Pocahontas County again for a year or maybe two? They said I had done a good job as an intern, that I had worked hard, that a few of the girls had been asking about me. If I said yes, they said, I would technically have to apply and be accepted into the federal aid program AmeriCorps VISTA and then be placed with them. They said they had new ideas, new projects in the works, that it was an exciting tim
e to live there. A little light went on—I cared.

  I spent a week thinking about it. During nights eating cereal in my college library and supposedly working on my thesis, I looked at road atlases of the United States instead. I had a collection of ideas about West Virginia, but I had a hunch that they were all gross misinformation, plus none of them agreed: coal and the end of coal. Poverty and a mansion on a stripped mountain. Pickup trucks and VW buses. OxyContin and Jesus. Mother Jones and Don Blankenship. Knobby elbows and the fattest city in America.

  None of it made any sense, and I knew that it would not, likely, for a very long time. I would tell my family and friends that my reasons were service, sacrifice, and to see a new part of the world, and they would seem to accept this. But in truth, I did not understand my own feelings or the instinct, below language, that was driving me back toward Pocahontas County. I felt mixed-up, with the sense of foreboding guilt that always accompanies our most important lies. I called Mountain Views back and said yes.

  2

  GIRLS GOT DROPPED OFF AT Mountain Views by every conceivable family member, from grandma to oldest sister’s boyfriend. Some girls hopped out of shiny pickups with extended cabs and diamond-patterned metal boxes in the back, trailed only by a sturdy dad in a reflective state roads vest. There were Subaru Outbacks driven by feminist moms who worked in tourism in Greenbrier County and lowrider sedans owned by grandfathers who wore black buttons telling the world they had served proudly in Korea. Asked to reflect on what they hoped for their girl campers during these weeks, many said they simply wished for their kids to get to be kids, to have fun and make friends. It was always the toughest-looking dad with the highest-lifted truck and the most beautiful girlfriend who got choked up and said that he wanted his daughter to learn to love herself.