In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

  Though I tried my best to figure out what I was supposed to do in my gifted class and did well in my work, I did not have what it took to succeed socially with the other students. I continued the program in the fifth grade—we all rode a bus to the board of education building, where we held our weekly class in a large conference room. Like dogs, wolves, and flocks of chickens, the kids had figured out a pecking order where I was at the bottom. They particularly enjoyed calling me Boobie, which tormented me to the point that my mother wrote our teacher a letter and told her I wanted to quit the program. The teacher took a few of the kids aside and told them to stop, and for a while it seemed they gave up that particular way of taunting me.

  At one point, I told them about my nickname from grade school, E-bob, thinking it would be a preferable nickname to hear from them. I didn’t realize, though, that anything they did or said would take on a hurtful edge, and the silly nickname that I had helped create and laughed about with my friend became the subject of songs, chants, and endless cruel jokes in my weekly gifted class. They seemed to take a lot of pleasure in provoking me, though most of the time I either glowered silently or cried with frustration and exhaustion.

  Once, as we waited for the bus to take us to the board of education building, I sat on the front steps of the elementary school in town with my science project. We were given pretty loose parameters for constructing a science project, and I had no idea how to do one. My mother bought me a figure of the Statue of Liberty from the dollar store that, when placed in water, would expand over several days. I had never seen such a thing, and though I had a nagging doubt that it did not qualify as a scientific experiment, I did my best to make it work. I carefully cleaned an empty glass Tang jar from Grandma Wright’s house and peeled the label off, then placed the figure in it and measured the amount of water I could add. I also measured the figure as it expanded, but before long, it outgrew the jar and sat contorted, the substance all soft and grotesque and Miss Liberty looking anything but regal. But I had nothing else to use, so I took it to school and hoped it would be acceptable to my teacher.

  My fears about my misshapen Statue of Liberty were quickly confirmed by the other students, who began making fun of me in earnest while we waited for the bus to take us to class. I felt my face grow hot, and I tried to ignore them for a few minutes, but they were standing in front of me as I sat on a step at one side of the school entrance. They didn’t seem likely to grow tired of their game that particular morning. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I moved from one side of the school door to the other, desperate to get away from them and their mockery. When I sat back down on the steps, I slammed my Tang jar onto the concrete in rage, and the glass shattered while I was still holding on to it. Pieces of the jar flew away from me, and my swollen Statue of Liberty fell out, all her water lost around us. My classmates were suddenly silent and stared at me with wide eyes, and I ran into the school toward the bathroom, afraid of what I had done but relieved that they were finally quiet.

  The tears fell hot down my face, and a man in the hallway looked at me, asking, How are you doing today? I didn’t recognize him and assumed he was a teacher. I paused for a second and responded, If I was any better, I would be dead. He gave a concerned, Aw, don’t say that, but I was already walking again. I rinsed my red face in the bathroom and ignored the girls who came in, too angry to feel embarrassed in that moment. When I went back outside to catch our bus, my classmates had gathered my things together, picked up the broken glass, and salvaged what was left of Miss Liberty. I was surprised by their rare kindness but got on the bus silently and did not acknowledge it. When my anger subsided, we were right back to the same roles.

  I understand now that there were, in fact, other children like me—though they weren’t likely to be in the gifted classes with me. The gifted program was full of kids whose parents liked them, or at least signed them up for gymnastics lessons and took them to get their teeth cleaned and all the things that were foreign to me. On normal school days, I was around other kids whose parents drank too much or did pills, who hit them with belts and mostly just didn’t want to hear the kid make any noise. Not all of them were like that, but because we were in a poor part of the county, I didn’t stick out like a sore thumb. There were plenty of other kids with their own personal hell burning inside them as we tried to memorize capital cities and the names of all our presidents and multiplication tables.

  My little elementary school was mostly a haven, where my teachers liked me and I didn’t stand out too much. Some days, though, after I turned in my work and was drawing or reading while the other kids finished, in my head I would hear my mother screaming like she was in two worlds at once, being beaten by my father some two miles away and coming to me at the same time, reminding me that something was always wrong. I didn’t stop to think about it, but I somehow knew that the other kids weren’t torn apart by what came from finishing their work and sitting in stillness, no longer distracted from their mothers’ distant screams. I knew I wasn’t like them.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Dark of Night

  Growing up, I learned that although holidays were the best thing ever, there was also a very real chance that something would go wrong anytime we gathered for a family meal or opened presents. We went to Grandma Wright’s on Christmas Eve, but we went to Granny Conn’s house for most other holidays. Granny cooked all the food you could ever want in eastern Kentucky: turkey, ham, chicken and dumplings, mashed potatoes, corn bread, Stove Top stuffing, green beans from her garden, corn that she grew, and macaroni and tomatoes (made with her own canned tomatoes).

  She insisted on giving me her canned vegetables long after I stopped appreciating them, and then after I started again. I remember the day I opened the last Mason jar of tomatoes she ever canned and gave to me. I held on to it like the treasure it was and still thank whoever is listening that I had sense enough to know its value.

  On Christmas Eve, Grandma Wright usually baked a ham with pineapple rings—we didn’t have pineapple anywhere else—but there was pizza, too. Nobody would deliver up in our holler, so we usually had pizza only at Grandma’s. They got normal television, so Papaw Wright would be watching racing, wrestling, or The Andy Griffith Show. I always gave Grandma chocolate-covered cherries and gave Papaw a tin of cashews or walnuts still in the shell. I wrapped them with care, each time so proud I could give them something they loved.

  I walked to my bedroom door one day not long before Christmas to find that my bed and floor were covered with plants, drying and sending off a scent that reminded me of the smell that came from my parents’ bedroom sometimes.

  My dad told me not to go in—That’s your Christmas. And he laughed often about the way Christmas came for us, a good harvest that was quickly spent on the things we couldn’t afford the rest of the year. Tax returns were like that sometimes, too—we got the Nintendo that one year, and my brother and I played Duck Hunt as much as we could stand it but played Super Mario Bros. until we beat it. Every time we went to a grocery store, I searched the magazine aisle for a cheat book and could usually memorize one cheat to use once we got back to the looming violence of our home.

  When I was around six years old, Christmas Eve came, and my brother was eager to open a gift—Just one, he said—and my mother said we could. Dad wasn’t home. I admonished them: How could you all think of opening presents while our dad is out there working to make money for us on Christmas Eve? My mother was as disgusted with me as I was with her: Your dad’s not working—he’s drinking with his friends. Do you want to open a present or not?

  I opened the gift she handed me, but I was too young to pretend I wasn’t crushed. That night, I slept on the couch until he stumbled through the door. He went to wake up my mother while I pretended to sleep in case he started hitting her.

  My brother and I would get up in the mornings and check with each other. Did you hear it? I’d ask him. Yeah. Did you? We didn’t really discuss the details. One night,
I awoke to her cries, and I heard the sound of his fists. Then, If you wake those goddamn kids up, I swear I will kill your fucking parents, you hear me? He threw open my bedroom door, flipped the light on, and stood above me, looking for a flicker of awareness to betray me. After a minute—a few minutes? a lifetime?—he turned off my light, shut the door, and went to do the same thing in my brother’s room. I knew Junior must be pretending to be asleep, too, fearing for our lives, her life, our grandma’s and papaw’s lives.

  It is remarkable how good I became at hiding my feelings. I learned to keep my face blank, hold back tears, lower my eyes, and to lie when it really mattered. You would think this kind of skill would come in handy later in life—I could be an expert poker player, or an actress, or maybe even a politician. But still, I felt things too deeply—the hiding never lessened the intensity of all that feeling. As I grew older, I hid my emotions and pushed down my feelings in all my relationships, which was actually somewhat beneficial since I kept finding myself surrounded by people who reminded me of my father in some way. But all that hiding, all that silence, makes you vulnerable in a different way.

  My six-year-old Christmas Eve, though, ended up being less violent than those kinds of occasions often were. Dad told us all to wake up, and as he fell to the floor and into the coffee table, as he cussed and pushed and threatened, we got our coats on. He wanted to go to the little country store owned by a woman named Birdie. That little country store should be on a calendar somewhere, one that depicts the simplicity of quiet country living. There was room for only two or three cars to park at one time, and you walked up worn wooden steps to get to the front door. Weathered wooden slats covered the outside, and white paint chips fell from the boards in a year-round, lead-based snow. Inside, it was just one room that held a child’s dream of candy. All the pops were in hard glass bottles, and on the counter sat two obscenely large jars, one filled with giant pickles, the other with unnaturally pink pork franks. Birdie had white hair even when I was young. She seemed soft, like old age was treating her mercifully.

  I still think of Birdie and that little store, and I long for the moments I remember in there, picking out candy cigarettes—the best ones had a bit of color at the end, which made it easier to pretend you were really smoking.

  Everything was dark and closed, but Dad wanted a pop from the machine on the front porch of the store. Mom drove, and Dad grabbed the steering wheel over and over, pulling our long yellow Buick toward the creek, into the other lane, everywhere, as Junior and I sat silent in the back seat, at a time before children wore seat belts. There was the creek that bordered our one-lane gravel road, and then there was another creek across from Birdie’s. I don’t know how Mom kept us out of either one. Somehow, we did not die, and Dad got the Grape Crush he wanted. The next day, we waited until the afternoon to open our presents. From his bed, we heard him: Tell those little motherfuckers to be quiet out there. My head hurts, and I don’t want to hear a fucking sound. I was still young enough to be surprised, at that point. Still young enough to think, Surely he doesn’t mean that.

  The holiday I looked forward to the most was the Fourth of July. My dad’s cousin would bring his family from Tennessee, including a daughter close to my age and a son close to my brother’s age. Their middle child, a girl, had the hard lot of trying to fit in somewhere, anywhere. They would show up with a trunk load of fireworks that were illegal in Kentucky, and we would grill hamburgers and hot dogs and fry potatoes in aluminum foil, waiting for the sun to set. The adults would drink their cheap drinks, and my dad would give us liberal sips of beer or hard liquor while his cousin wasn’t looking. Then they would slip off to smoke a joint or maybe snort some pills while we caught lightning bugs, impatiently passing the time until we could watch the jumping jacks burn up the grass and experience the pure novelty of the Roman candle. The next day, we’d all go camping on the other side of Cave Run Lake, the biggest tourist attraction from there to Winchester.

  The lake was built by flooding part of the Daniel Boone National Forest, but it happens that my great-grandmother—Granny’s mother—owned land down there, too. The Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Licking River after paying, I’m sure, a terribly fair price for her land. By the 1960s, when the project began, the US government had watched while speculators bought the lumber and mineral rights from Appalachians, and those robber barons left the region polluted and broken. Even as a child, I knew we weren’t supposed to trust politicians.

  I grew up knowing that fact in the same way we knew not to pick up a snake—not because someone told me, but because it was necessary to survival. Listening to the news that Papaw Conn sometimes watched, I heard about promises of a brighter future, good jobs, better pay—but those things just didn’t seem to make it to the poor people around me. How would someone like my father get a good job anyway, without a high school diploma?

  The politicians who made these promises didn’t look like us or talk like us. They always seemed to be talking out of both sides of their mouths—saying whatever they thought their audience wanted to hear and changing the message accordingly. Besides all that, it would have taken sacrifice to truly address the reality of poverty and the many kinds of despair in this country. Despair takes on a different look, depending on where you go, but those who have lived it can see it in others. No, the kind of sacrifice it takes to make real change isn’t glamorous, and it’s not a sure bet you’ll get reelected or even recognized. Why would anybody want to stick their neck out for some ungrateful rednecks? At some point in my childhood, it seemed like the long-standing cultural disdain toward Appalachia became mutual.

  None of that bothered us kids, of course, as we swam in the lake that drowned my great-grandmother’s home, as we ran through the tame forest, picking up sticks for the grown-ups to build a fire. In retrospect, those vacations seemed to always go so well because the adults had plenty of beer, weed, and pills on hand. If it could have been that simple all the time, I would have loved to have seen my dad drunk and high. At home, though, he wasn’t prone to being jovial unless someone else was around, and if he just couldn’t get what he was looking for—well, we all suffered with him.

  One particular year—1987?—something went wrong as we waited for our cousins to arrive for what was usually a whole week of Dad being mostly bearable. Junior and I were playing in the front yard when he yelled for us to come to the living room, and right away we recognized that as a bad sign. Sitting in his recliner, he was holding a tape recorder, one that my brother and I used to make recordings of ourselves telling stories and talking in funny voices, and sometimes my brother would record the sounds of our parents having sex. I thought we were going to be in trouble for something my dad had found recorded, but instead, the battery cover was missing from the back of the tape recorder, and the batteries along with it. He started out asking us, with unusual calm, Who did this? You’re not in trouble, just tell me. Neither of us said anything. Was it you? He asked us both, and we each denied removing the battery cover. Who was it then? One of us offered that maybe it was our cousin, the daring one, the one who got whipped a lot. Dad didn’t think it was him.

  The more he asked, the more his voice betrayed an agitation that told me we were, in fact, getting closer to trouble. Still, we both denied removing the battery cover until he was calm again and said, Fine, I’ll whip you both and send you to bed, and there will be no fireworks for either one of you. I knew he would follow through on the threat, and I looked at my brother, my one confidante and fellow prisoner there. I always felt like Junior was nicer than I was, and maybe more fragile, for some reason. He grew up to be nearly a foot taller than me and by no means a scrawny man, but back then, I wanted to protect him and thought I could maybe take a whipping better than he could, maybe it hurt him more since he was smaller. It also seemed terribly unjust that neither of us would get to see the fireworks, when both of us were innocent.

  I took a small step forward and told our father, I did it. His calm ga
ve way to rage, and he demanded over and over to know why I did it, but I couldn’t answer him and didn’t know what to say, so I stood there saying, I don’t know, which might have been his least favorite thing. After a few more minutes of demanding that I explain myself, he finally got to the whipping, bringing his belt across my bottom and wherever else it landed. Was it three times? Four? More? It was excruciating. I knew the Bible said it was good for me, but I wasn’t sure my father did it out of love. Could he save my soul even if he didn’t mean to?

  The worst part about my father’s whippings was that afterward, we were not allowed to cry in his presence. If we cried, he said, Dry it up, or I’ll give you something to cry about. And my brother and I would suck it all back in—the tears, the cries, the yelps—so he would not be further enraged. I held in my cries until he sent me to my room, where I threw myself on my bed and sobbed into my pillow as quietly as I could.

  When my mother came to check on me, I told her I hadn’t done it. She said she knew, so I asked her why she let him whip me. You know how your father is, she said. At that moment, I began to understand how each of us—my brother, my mother, and myself—were very much alone in that house. In my child’s mind, I felt the most alone of all.

  I didn’t know why I wanted to protect my brother, and why no one could protect me. I didn’t understand what happens to people when they are just trying to survive. I couldn’t have told you that, as a girl, I felt like I had a duty to my family, a responsibility that was God given or something close to it. As if I was the only one who could save us.

  CHAPTER 7

  What We Can Fix

  On our one-lane gravel road, my brother and I had more freedom with cars than most. From the time we were three or four, we were often allowed to sit on our parents’ laps and steer the car as they drove from our house to Granny and Papaw Conn’s, since it was such a short distance and there was so little traffic on our road. Of course, there were no police patrols and no neighbors close enough to see anything that happened at our house. The best treat was when our father would let us sit on the hood of the car, which he started letting us do when I was about six, and we would press ourselves against the hood or windshield, hanging on to nothing as he drove.