In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  IN THE SHADOW OF THE VALLEY

  “In sobering detail and with open palms, Bobi Conn mines the depths of her desperation to earn love from a sadistically cruel father and an abused mother, from the boys and men who darken her path, from friends who betray her, and from a God who seems to have turned away from her. Conn’s honesty is heroic and heartbreaking as she shares her story of enduring the stigma of poverty and abuse, claiming her self-worth, and discovering the limits of forgiveness. A necessary and timely read.”

  —Susan Bernhard, author of Winter Loon

  “This important and necessary debut memoir explores the rich beauty and disturbing tragedy of Appalachia, how the people, like the land, have been exploited by corporate greed. Bobi Conn is a masterful storyteller weaving a tale of extreme poverty; an abusive, drug-addicted father; and a devoted grandmother’s love into the wider tapestry of an entire at-risk population’s lives. In the Shadow of the Valley is like the hollers that pockmark the land; the beautiful and haunting words will echo in your heart and mind long after the final page.”

  —William Dameron, author of The Lie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing & Coming Out

  “In her memoir, In the Shadow of the Valley, Bobi Conn recounts the nesting doll of her life, from growing up in a Kentucky holler to eventually becoming a mother of two. But before the promised land, the route there is labyrinthine, complete with moving walls and trapdoors. Even so corralled in these pages, it’s clear that Conn’s aptitude for survival is enviable. Yet, her strength is that writing has become, for her, a kind of performance art. She wields her own experiences without romanticization or adding shock value for effect, which makes her voice accessible whether she’s speaking of exposure to trauma at an early age or grappling with the implications of her upbringing as an adult. In that sense, she has crafted a relatable memoir where she reaches the reader wherever they are and reminds us, ‘The hero of the story is always the storyteller. The storyteller is the one with power.’”

  —Bianca Spriggs, Affrilachian poet and author of We’re Still Big Banging

  Text copyright © 2020 by Bobi Conn

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Little A, New York

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  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542004169 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542004160 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542004176 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542004179 (paperback)

  Cover design by Laywan Kwan

  First edition

  I dedicate this book to my children, who have taught me everything I know about giving, and to my granny, who taught me to receive. I love you all more than words can tell.

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1 The Commandments

  CHAPTER 2 Gravel

  CHAPTER 3 Leaving Now

  CHAPTER 4 Sunday Morning

  CHAPTER 5 Gifted

  CHAPTER 6 The Dark of Night

  CHAPTER 7 What We Can Fix

  CHAPTER 8 Spare the Rod

  CHAPTER 9 Holy Vows

  CHAPTER 10 Fish out of Water

  CHAPTER 11 A Long Way from Home

  CHAPTER 12 Out Loud

  CHAPTER 13 Hunger

  CHAPTER 14 Happy Now

  CHAPTER 15 Love and Marriage

  CHAPTER 16 A Pretty Smile

  CHAPTER 17 The Walking Wounded

  CHAPTER 18 Holding On

  CHAPTER 19 Letting Go

  CHAPTER 20 Say It Right

  CHAPTER 21 To the City

  CHAPTER 22 Faithful

  CHAPTER 23 With You

  CHAPTER 24 The Cathedral

  CHAPTER 25 The Canary in the Coal Mine

  CHAPTER 26 About Love

  CHAPTER 27 The Gift

  CHAPTER 28 Cyclical

  CHAPTER 29 The Whore

  CHAPTER 30 Pretending

  CHAPTER 31 Handwritten

  CHAPTER 32 Silver Dollars

  CHAPTER 33 The Brokenness of Everything

  CHAPTER 34 Strangers

  CHAPTER 35 That Would Be Good

  CHAPTER 36 Patron Saints

  CHAPTER 37 The Long Night

  CHAPTER 38 Defiance

  CHAPTER 39 Out of Line

  CHAPTER 40 In the Holler

  EPILOGUE Endless Revision

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I wrote this book to tell a story that I believe to be both important and good, and the best stories are true—the truth is complicated, compelling, and moving. At the same time, memory is fallible, and some of the material for my book derives from events that happened several decades ago; some of my stories are based on what I have been told by others, and that material has been identified as such. I have told each story with careful attention to the objective truth as I know it and with the utmost care for the people involved. I have changed the names and identifying features of characters in this book to help protect their privacy.

  PROLOGUE

  Life was different in our holler, I came to learn. And we were definitely living in a holler, not a hollow like you might read about in the dictionary or see on a fancy map. Merriam-Webster’s will tell you it’s a small valley or basin. The dictionary can also tell you it’s a depressed or low part of a surface; an unfilled space. But what it can’t tell you is what that means, where the depression becomes visible in the land, what is inhabiting all that unfilled space.

  Only people who were raised in hollers can do that.

  A holler is a place where you very likely grew up in spitting distance of a relative, or at least close enough to see their house when the leaves had fallen for the year. It’s a place where the sun takes a little longer to show itself in the morning and falls to sleep behind the hills a little sooner. Someone’s always discovering the treasures buried in hollers—lumber, mineral rights, gas rights—and when they’re not ravaging the forests we explored as children, unsupervised and unafraid, or muddling the clear streams where we splashed and found fossils and learned to pick up crawdads without getting pinched, when they’re not ravaging our minds with OxyContin and cheap heroin and low-paying jobs and Mountain Dew and broken schools, it is us doing the ravaging: pulling our guns out or throwing fists, taking a beating in front of the kids, or searching desperately through Dad’s dresser while he’s gone, knowing there’s something in there that will get us high.

  But the holler is more than that, too. The holler is quintessential Appalachia—the perfect symbol for this complex physical and cultural landscape. Here, the word is everything—it is saturated and dripping with history and sorrow and, still, beauty—a living paradox of place wrapping its arms around you in verdant honeysuckle vines that hold you close, that never let go.

  Before my dad’s friend burned our house down, I could have taken you to the holler where I grew up. We could have stood on our old front porch to witness the Appalachian Eden sprawled around us, a patchwork of color and beauty and memory. If we looked to the left, toward the mouth of the holler, we would catch a glimpse of the white boards of Granny’s house, especially in the winter when the two pawpaw trees shed their exotic leaves in her cow field. Up the road was the head of the holler, but nothing really seemed to exist past the sycamore tree that towered over the corner of our yard.
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br />   I used to stand on the porch when the rain poured down, all other sounds drowning in a symphony of water that beat the tin roof. In the spring, the frog songs reminded me that the land was waking up, and the whip-poor-will sang its refrain—always, it seemed, a love song. A few months later, the cicadas would buzz and hum and an ominous feeling hung in the air between them. It was the sound of summer in our holler and I loved it, though I troubled over how those strange creatures knew to break their slumber and join the rest of us aboveground.

  Most of this land is the Daniel Boone National Forest, but Granny had a hundred acres tucked into it, and she had given my parents one of them. We had a small yard in front of the house—big enough to play and ride bikes, and even let hogs root around in, for a time. A page-wire fence ran the length of the yard, and a one-lane gravel road lay just beyond the fence. A narrow ditch separated Mill Branch Road from a hillside that came out of nowhere, and I explored that landscape without end.

  I came to understand that the blackberry brambles by the side of the road appeared in the same places every year, as did the Indian paintbrush flowers—the brightest splash of red I ever found in a forest dominated by the green of living leaves, and the brown of the dead. The blackberries were sometimes as tart as they were anything, but it was worth the risk when you bit into a sweet one, its juice exploding onto your tongue while the skin surrendered to your teeth. Those wild berries were so good, you might not notice you had also eaten a sugar ant that was trying to get its own fill. Every year, I looked for two patches of purple phlox, one on the hillside across from where our wooden picnic table sat and one in the shady part of our yard, behind the old smokehouse. I found the little flowers, so perfect in their symmetry, blooming again and again in the same places—born and bound to this land, like me.

  Although I spent a lot of my time alone as a child, I felt surrounded by figures that I couldn’t see. I wondered where I came from, who I came from, because I somehow knew there was more to my story than what I saw each day.

  My father had told me that our Irish ancestors were sent to the States as the English emptied the Irish prisons of debtors and violent criminals; our family were terrorists, he said. I like to think they caused trouble for the colonizers, just as a lot of the Irish did on the southern plantations where they were sent to work as indentured servants. According to some accounts, the Irish and Scots-Irish prisoners escaped from plantations and trekked north into the Appalachian Mountains, where the southerners would not follow.

  I grew up thinking Kentucky meant dark and bloody ground. I believed the popular myth that claimed Native Americans never lived in Kentucky but used it as a hunting ground. That epithet, dark and bloody ground, is often attributed to Dragging-Canoe, a Cherokee chief, who either warned or promised the whites that this land would be stained with their blood. Other sources say our state name is from an Iroquoian word that means land of tomorrow or from a Wyandot word for the geographic plain. Regardless, the violent colonization of Appalachia at large—this place many have used as a way to describe heaven itself—began centuries ago.

  And this land is heaven on earth, pulsing with life and beauty. But there is darkness in this unyielding, incomparable landscape that is saturated with tears and blood and forgotten roots that lie beneath the ground, now soft, now decayed. Whether we are bound to some bright tomorrow or the failures of yesterday is yet to be seen.

  Most of my family members either can’t or don’t want to talk about their histories. My father, though, loved to tell me stories about my great-grandfather Conn, the moonshiner. My father valorized him and had helped him make moonshine until the old man died. Papaw Conn wouldn’t talk about him, and Granny said it was because my great-grandfather was a drunk and habitually imprisoned, so Papaw was raised by his grandparents. Though my great-grandfather wore a suit and a fedora during the Depression, my great-grandmother couldn’t feed all her five children.

  What is history anyway? A story: The last man standing holds the pen. A sense of place: I am on this path that is hardly comprehensible. A birthright: I may be from, but I am not of that world.

  I grew up idolizing the flawed people of my history. The cheaters, the drunks, the mean men and their women. They were my first heroes, and they lived their hard lives surrounded by the unspeakable beauty of the land that I call home. But the older I got, the less clear it was where my home could be. Not the holler I was born to, which I finally stopped visiting even for Christmas because Dad still might shoot someone, and I would have only myself to blame if I was there. Not the college town where everyone knows every mistake I have made but none of the reasons for them, and where men I once loved tell stories with their accounts of my flaws and faults. Not out West—Lord no, there aren’t enough hills, and the whole place seems naked. Not down South or up North, because I’ve always been in this in-between state and that suits me. But there is no comfort here.

  Home—can anyone define that? For some, it’s simple: Where the heart is. Cross-stitch that and hang it on a wall. For the rest of us, it’s a negation: Where I’ve never been. Perhaps it is, after all, that one place to which we can never return. I left my home and grew up, carrying my child self everywhere I went, full of longing and fear and memory. I couldn’t stay there and survive, but now Granny is gone, and I can’t drive to her house and eat the best chicken and dumplings you ever had. There is no creek to keep me company, us running wild together behind the house and wandering through the holler. No hills to hike up so I can check on the spring and get a good drink. No trees to hide me. All the things I loved, I had to leave.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Commandments

  My father ordered me one warm afternoon—I must have been five or six—to walk the half mile to Granny’s and call her a whore. This remains my sole memory where my father knelt down and held my shoulders, speaking to me at eye level. Kneeling there, he calmly told me that the church my granny took me to was all a lie. God was dead, he died a long time ago, and he wasn’t coming back.

  I had been going to the First Church of God with his mother, Granny not only to her grandchildren but to her own children and husband, since I was born. She wrapped me up and carted me off as soon as it was decent, and we went every Sunday morning, to the holiday services, and on Wednesday nights when I was old enough to go to youth group. Every once in a while, I had to go on a Sunday night, when there were few kids and there was nothing to do but wait for it to be over. At the end of the Sunday evening service, though, the men would sometimes stand around whoever sat on the front pew in the middle aisle, lay their hands on that person, and pray in a babbling, overlapping way that made me think they might do something even stranger.

  Still, I knew that my father had things mixed up—it was Jesus who died, not God, and he did come back, and God never went away at all. We didn’t spend much time on that topic once my father was sure the message was clear. His attack on the church and God didn’t bother me too much. I somehow knew it was retaliation for something Granny had done or said, like daring to voice her disapproval of his booze, his pills, his fighting-man ways.

  At five, it never occurred to me that I could refuse the task he assigned to me. I nodded a Yes, I will do that, sensing his rage would quickly be redirected toward me if I showed any emotion. Nothing he ordered us to do was ever optional, and I wouldn’t have the audacity to refuse his commands for a long time to come. I understood that I did not own the word no.

  What does no mean? What do we accomplish when we speak it? It is a refusal: I do not accept this dubious gift. Self-protection: You will not violate my sovereignty. Denial: I am not these things that you name me. Children learn the word at a young age, as they test the limits their parents set for them and the boundaries the physical world imposes upon them. As frustrating as it is to accommodate the child’s no, that word is essential. No functions in a way that please don’t never has, in a way that tears and cries never will. It took me many years to learn the word no. I do not rem
ember ever saying that word to my parents in defiance: You cannot make me do this. Or in resistance: I will no longer be subjected to . . .

  In fact, I do not remember speaking much at all as a child. I may have—my mother claims I did—but I remember so much more the quietness that engulfed me, shame and fear twisting my insides. I waited for moments to pass, for the confusion to subside, for the adults around me to say, Everything is okay. No one ever did. Words were weapons, just another form of violence that I hid from. I hid myself deep so that on the surface, people would see quiet and good girl. I thought I could control their understanding of me, keep my inner torment a secret—it seemed like another sin to be so angry—but I did not realize how much my sense of self was controlled by all that hiding.

  As a child walking down that one-lane gravel road, I thought I understood the word whore. I had heard it before, growing up in a home with few attempts to censor the vulgarities of the world. I had probably already heard it screamed at my mother, who never denied any curse but who seemed to think her motherly arms would somehow protect her face and her self from what rained down. Somehow, I knew it was a word for women, and I knew it was something to be ashamed of. It was also a word for girls—girls who had been molested or maybe wore short shorts, as I was to discover soon enough. I was scared to call my granny such an ugly name.

  It was not my word, but it came to be mine before many others. It was roughly akin to little slut, which I learned around the age of nine, when I was wearing a floral shirt that tied at the bottom. I thought it was fashionable, though I had no way to know such things. It came from a real clothing store—not a Big Lots or a consignment shop—so I prized it above my other shirts and felt just the faintest hint of being pretty when I wore it. But my dad caught a glimpse of skin between the bottom of the shirt and the top of my shorts. When he first told me I should cover up, I laughed, thinking it was a joke—after all, I was nine, and who sees a nine-year-old’s stomach and thinks little slut?