In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

  I knew I couldn’t move back in with them if I couldn’t survive as an adult—now a parent myself, with someone else to care for. I tried to hide my fear at work, and I kept my face as expressionless as possible—an essential key to survival, as I had learned when my dad whipped me for crying, and at other times for smiling, or when, all those years ago, I saw Granny talk to my dad like her grandchildren and our mother weren’t crouched on the floorboard of Papaw’s truck, holding our breaths.

  Eventually, I became friends with another woman there, who told me she had thought I was haughty due to how disinterested I looked all the time. I hadn’t thought I was better than my coworkers, but as in the past, I found that I couldn’t relate to them, that what I did to survive somehow made me wrong in their eyes. They talked about watching The Bachelor, losing weight, and giving their husbands blow jobs. When I brought Indian food for lunch, they made faces, and the director asked me not to eat it at my desk. I didn’t understand why they were content with fast-food cheeseburgers and fries, or how it mattered if one woman didn’t like another.

  Once I left Morehead, a lot of the people I met told me I didn’t have an accent after they found out I was from eastern Kentucky, but anyone who heard me on the phone with my family commented on how my accent came right back. I had worked hard in college to say words the right way, enunciating the endings like we never did back home and quickly scanning my brain for different words when I wanted to say wallering around or up in the holler or I reckon. I didn’t know anything about linguistics, and even when I did take a linguistics class in graduate school, it didn’t dawn on me that my people had their own grammar. Like all cultures everywhere, there are unspoken rules for how certain sounds are pronounced, and for arranging those words, but it all follows a structure and has nothing to do with being ignorant or lazy—we were just country people talking like people from the country. Every group of people, everywhere, has a way of talking.

  The mockery of Appalachia has evolved from The Beverly Hillbillies to concerts where musicians who’ve gotten rich off Appalachian music traditions don’t mind making fun of toothless Kentuckians right here in Kentucky. Quiznos featured a “hillbilly hot tub” in one of their commercials, which was met with some disdain for the homoerotic undertones, but I never found any backlash at the ad’s depiction of hillbillies as ignorant and mentally slow. Maybe I was the only person who boycotted Quiznos from then on. And I was horrified when I recently watched The Simpsons, and it featured a woman from Kentucky—she was a hopeless heroin addict who made beautiful music but who ultimately disappointed everyone by turning back to drugs and alcohol after Lisa tried to save her from herself. I knew when we were supposed to laugh, but all I could think of was the people I have loved and the mounting losses between us. The punchlines we’re so good for.

  Sometimes, when I was around my family, they would turn to each other when I used a word they didn’t understand—a five-dollar word, too rich for our blood—and I would look away, knowing my new way of speaking marked me as an outsider. No matter what I did, I couldn’t do good enough in someone’s eyes. But I couldn’t take back the education and years of reading poets and philosophers and history. And I couldn’t tell them, I am still one of you, because in so many ways, I wasn’t able to be. For a while, I thought I could show them what was so good about the education I had received, show them that the going away and having your head filled with nonsense our people had looked down on for so long was just wrong thinking, that there was so much good in those books and classrooms.

  The years wore on, and each time Jacob was angry with me, another group of friends and acquaintances turned their scorn toward me. One friend who had told me, He doesn’t help at all with the baby, later described him as one of her favorite people. Another friend, a man who had been as good as a brother to me, ended up telling me, Jacob isn’t so bad these days. When Jacob told a story about me, no one ever asked me my side of what had happened, and I didn’t volunteer it. If there’s one thing you learn growing up as a girl in the country, it’s not to air your dirty laundry in public.

  I started to wonder, though, what would have happened if I had told all my stories to these people. Would they have believed me, would they have cared? Would they have turned their backs on Jacob in line at a restaurant, or have stopped inviting him to their parties? Would he have seen so many friendly faces close themselves to him, shut him out from the small-town social life of the farmers’ market and elementary school events? And would Jacob have wondered what he had done wrong, how I had single-handedly taken a town—a chosen home—away from him? Or does that just happen to girls like me?

  The answers don’t actually matter. I didn’t want him to feel lonely or abandoned, so I didn’t tell the stories that would have led to him being judged by those people. The loneliness I carried for so much of my life, though, was deepened and sharpened, somehow a vast hollowness that left me bleeding and aching and wishing for comfort. And though I shared my stories with my closest friends, some of those people chose him, in the end. It took me years to realize that they couldn’t love me and still celebrate the man who had belittled me. And even longer to realize that those people, with their talk about community and female empowerment and protecting children, could not see the disconnect between their theories and the world we live in. They did not want to see people like me, who needed the world they claimed to want.

  I wasn’t great at being an employee, as hard as I worked. Sometimes it was because I had bad luck—two flat tires in one month, a boyfriend living with me had a seizure and I had to stay home with him. Sometimes it was because I drank so much while my son was at his dad’s, I drove in late or I had to sleep during my lunch break. Other times, I was clearly just sabotaging myself, and my boss had the kindness and good sense to point that out, but I didn’t know how to fix it.

  Because of my absences and lateness—you could have only five occurrences in a twelve-month period—they sent me to the employee assistance program. I soon found myself in a therapist’s office, trying to figure out why I had a hard time enjoying my job and getting to work on time, and he asked me whether I believed in God. He seemed like a nice guy, but nice in the way that I felt like he couldn’t understand a word I said, or he could be a really crazy person who would shock me with his own darkness. Either way, I didn’t trust him. When he asked me to close my eyes and pretend I was telling Jesus why I was angry with him, I was even more concerned. It didn’t seem worth it to try to explain that I didn’t blame a god or Jesus for anything I had experienced but that I wasn’t very happy with the people in the churches I knew.

  I couldn’t keep my eyes closed for long. I took about fifteen minutes to tell him what I thought had been most traumatic to me. Then I suggested I needed a female therapist, someone I could open up to a little more comfortably. He sent me to the in-house psychiatrist, who was, indeed, a woman, so I could get some medication for what he thought was post-traumatic stress disorder. That made sense to me—I could imagine what it meant to have PTSD but not due to war or famine. I hadn’t thought about it before, but it made sense that enough scary experiences might have impacted me in ways I didn’t understand, that I might be carrying some of that with me still.

  It took a long time for me to feel safe enough to let go of my church-induced hellfire-and-damnation, born-into-sin fears. For a long time, I cast a glance upward and asked to be enlightened—either gently prodded or firmly reprimanded—if I was sorely mistaken in my views. But ultimately, no matter how afraid I felt of my own sinful nature, I saw God as a smiling benefactor, someone like Papaw Wright, who was quick to give us kids a quarter or a dollar, who always offered us his exotic cans of pineapple juice, and who never seemed drunk even though he always had a beer in hand after his workday was finished.

  I found the Sufi notion of God more poetic and enjoyable—God as the Lover and the Friend, the ultimate companion. I found the Hindu gods particularly attractive—especially the trickster and sedu
cer Krishna. I imagined myself in the woods, happening upon the beautiful, blue-skinned god as he played his flute. I could see myself going to him, disarmed by his gaze and enchanted by his music. I always thought that whatever consequences there would be in losing myself with one such as he, the ecstasy would surely be worth it.

  I read and consumed whatever I could find in religion and philosophy, searching for a cohesive map to lay on top of the story of my life. I felt I could stitch discordant fragments of spiritual truth together or convert to Judaism, so long as it gave me the magic missing piece, like the prize from a cereal box that you set upon the jumbled picture, and it suddenly becomes clear, it suddenly makes sense.

  After a twenty-minute question-and-answer session with the psychiatrist revealed I was prone to making bad decisions, they prescribed two different medications and scheduled my first appointment with the psychologist. I liked him—he wanted to sit outside and smoke cigarettes with me while we talked, and when I told him I had been praying for clarity, he told me how he had prayed for the same thing. And when I told him I was afraid of being alone, he said there would always be a man who would love me and my fine little body. The next time I expressed that fear, he said, With that tight little ass? You’ll be fine. He had set me up with family medical leave due to my condition, and when I stopped using one of the medicines, he told me he would have to take away the benefits.

  But I didn’t want a therapist talking about my tight ass, and I didn’t want a prescription to help me stop making bad decisions, so I stopped taking both medications and bid my family medical leave farewell. I decided to try to make better decisions more or less on my own. I broke up with my boyfriend and stopped drinking bourbon all the time, too. I had my birth control removed—the one that had kept me from having a period for years, by that point.

  After three and a half years of working in the corporate world, I decided to go to graduate school. Now and then, I had fleeting thoughts that maybe my desire to be a writer would dwindle away, but instead, it seemed to eat at me, like a wolf that wouldn’t leave its prey alone. I called my mother and stepfather to tell them the news.

  What will you do with an English degree?

  Maybe I’ll be an English teacher.

  The world has enough English teachers. You should move to Vegas and deal blackjack—that’s where the real money is.

  I loved graduate school, though—especially literary theory class. We looked at so many different theories—lenses of perception, I thought—and each one made sense, each was so valuable and good. One day in class, our professor asked me how old I was. Twenty-eight, I told her.

  You’re gonna be all right, she said.

  For one of my comprehensive exams, I decided to explore Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass through feminist theory—it seemed easy, really, but fun. Years later, I found myself standing in the coffee shop where I had bought coffee and brownies and sandwiches for twenty years. Our local prominent feminist stood beside me, a woman who had written plenty of books and essays on all aspects of what it means to be female and how race intersects. She was one of Jacob’s best friends. To that point, she had been friendly with me, though I never got to talk to her in a real conversation, as I had asked Jacob to introduce us, but he had not. She loved my son, though, and made that clear, doting on him anytime she saw him. She had chatted with me and introduced me to her sister, and I was glad to finally be able to form my own connection with her.

  This time, though, was just after Jacob had grown angry with me again—our son wanted to live with me full time and wasn’t happy with Jacob’s home. We had blindsided Jacob by asking to meet at a restaurant to talk, and he didn’t even want to know what schedule our son was suggesting. He told our fifteen-year-old that if the schedule involved less time at their house, he didn’t even need to hear it.

  In the coffee shop, the prominent feminist author turned away, instead of acknowledging me, and gave my son a cold hello instead of her usual affection—she had told me more than once how wonderful he was. I stood in line behind another friend a few days later—a woman I had known for nearly twenty years—and she and her husband looked at me before turning away, silent.

  It was then that I understood the difference between theory and life. It was then that I realized I could never go home to the women like my mother—like me—and tell them feminists were working for them by writing essays or books or songs. I finally understood that the same people who sign petitions for laborers across the world don’t always love the laborers next to them. And that health care for all sometimes means not the ones who smoke. I realized that the feminists around me would still ask, Why didn’t you kick him in the balls? because a woman should be able to fight off two men twice her size. A feminist can still say, She was sprawled out for the men, and an entire community will shut out a young woman who is trying to figure out how to survive and be a mother if her decisions don’t meet their standards, if she doesn’t control the story told about her. I finally understood that so much of what I did looked ugly to the people around me, and they were happy to accept whatever a man decided was ugly.

  I had never asked myself what I thought feminism should be. I try not to worry too much about what people call themselves, or what nuances separate their ideas from mine. There are so many of us trying, striving through our imperfections to be good. But what would I tell a daughter who calls me one night, excited about the young man she has met, who knows so much about everything and is a feminist who really cares about women’s rights, Mom?

  I think I would tell her to see how he reacts when she doesn’t please him, when she doesn’t follow his unspoken rules. When she is too loud or accidentally breaks his favorite cup. When she wears something he doesn’t like or gets excited about something he doesn’t care about. Does he talk out both sides of his mouth? I’d ask. She’d know what I mean—does he find a way to make himself right when he’s wrong? Does he charm people with his endless wit and wisdom, and where does he want her to sit while he does it?

  And then there’s the other women, so good at deciding when a woman’s sexuality is her empowerment or her sluttiness. So wrapped up in keeping women in their place—whatever that place may look like—they forget that the rules they embrace are also their own bondage.

  In my small world, I found myself more alone than ever and wondered whether any of these other worlds would ever truly want me, whether I could belong anywhere. I couldn’t return to the holler where I grew up—my father lives there still, shut in my granny’s house, all the old magic gone from a place now filled with the sorrow and torment of a man shooting up heroin that is somehow affordable to the hillbillies that once had to rely on Lortabs for such a high. The new home and family I thought I had—the family I chose, the ones who care about social justice and the environment—have abandoned me each time a man told them to, and I never know who is gone until I meet them in the grocery store or at a restaurant and they look at me, full of knowing, then turn away.

  CHAPTER 31

  Handwritten

  After I graduated from college, one time I went to a party in Elliott County—the same county in which I had gone to court as a girl but never testified. The party was thrown by one of my college friends who was living on someone’s lovely, rambling wooded property. When I first arrived, I went to the deck adjoined to the house and introduced myself to the owner. I knew he was an attorney in this godforsaken county, and I asked him what kind of law he practiced. He said he was a criminal-defense attorney, and I grinned.

  Criminal defense? You must know my father, then!

  I laughed a little at my joke, and he asked me my father’s name. When I told him, his eyes widened, and he looked at me in disbelief. I stopped laughing and asked, Do you know him?

  It turned out that not only did he know my father, but, as he said, he had kept my father out of prison.

  Which time? I asked breezily.

  It was the time my dad got caught stealing copper from railroads
, when I was about six years old. I remember the fires he had by the creek, stacks of coiled wire burning and melting away the protective rubber casings. I don’t know how he got caught, but like every other illegal thing he has done, he managed to stay out of prison—and here I was, looking at the man who kept him out of it that time, getting ready to eat a hamburger on his deck. As he stared at me, I grew nervous and wondered what he was thinking of me, this man who knew where I came from, who may have even seen me in his office fifteen or so years before that.

  My mind raced through the same thought I’ve so often entertained, trying to understand how the hell my father has been in a courtroom and even in a jail cell so many times, and yet it was never for anything he did to me, my brother, or our mother. Like many poor people, I grew up learning not to trust the police, and nobody had to sit me down to tell me why. I knew that poor people had a good chance of getting into more trouble if they called the police—you might have a warrant for unpaid traffic fines, or maybe the baby has a bruise and the police call Social Services. Maybe you had a drink or something to calm the nerves, and now your husband’s come home to knock you into the wall a little. Call the cops—maybe you’ll go to jail, maybe he will. Maybe both. It’s harder to pretend when you’re poor—harder to keep up the shiny veneer that tells the rest of the world that you’re harmless and innocent, that you deserve protection.