Were it not for heritage — for the accounts our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers have handed down to us like an oral gospel — being young in Appalachia in the 21st century might feel like being young anywhere in the United States. Our America is the America that institutions, networks, and devices have built for us. We live in tension with the past and the future, and it can be easy to feel like we’re wearing someone else’s clothes. So, we ask our mothers. We borrow from them. We make our garments using their patterns.
My mom was raised a coal miner’s daughter in McRoberts, Kentucky (less than 100 miles from Tom Fletcher’s cabin, where Lyndon Johnson — all front-porch tenderness and sympathy — launched his war on poverty). In that part of the world, I am known not by my first name, but as “Donna’s girl,” and this carries weight, because my mother is “Leora and Oxur’s girl,” and our people are known to have always been firm in their principles and generous with both their efforts and their earnings.
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