Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [14]
Mommy’s name is Clara, but in Butcher Holler they called her “Clary.” Me, they called “Loretty.” Everybody’s name had to end with a y—that’s a hillbilly way. Mommy still calls me “Loretty.”
Mommy’s father was named Nathaniel Ramey, which was changed from the old Indian name of Raney. He came from Jenny’s Creek, named after Jenny Wiley, the white girl who was taken by the Indians, and now there’s a state park named after her. I think she’s kin to me somewhere back there.
Nathaniel Ramey used to stay with us sometimes—a quiet, proud man who never got a gray hair. He had twelve children by his first marriage and six by his second marriage, and he lived to be eighty-nine years old. We Cherokees are tough.
They didn’t used to teach much about Indian history in grade school, but I managed to hear about the Trail of Tears, named after the time the U.S. government made most of the Cherokee Nation leave our mountains and go all the way out West somewhere. Lots of ’em died on the way. When I found out what they did to my ancestors, I had a fit.
I used to respect Andrew Jackson until I found out how he pushed the Indians around. Since I moved to Nashville, I went out to his home, “The Hermitage,” just one time—and I won’t ever go back. He wasn’t on my side—why should I be on his?
Near my house in Hurricane Mills is a place where the Cherokees had to ford the Tennessee River on their Trail of Tears. There are times when I can almost feel and hear them squaws and their babies crying from hunger.
The way I see it, the white man came over here and said, “Look, we found us a new country.” But it wasn’t new. It belonged to the Indians, and it was taken away from them. From us. When I went to see that little Plymouth Rock in 1974, I read how the Indians taught the white man how to plant vegetables and build houses in that cold Massachusetts climate. If it wasn’t for the Indians, them Pilgrims would have all starved.
I’ve always tried to help the Indians. My friends, the three Johnson sisters, are part Indian, just like me. In 1968 we got a campaign going for the Red Cloud Indian School at Pine Ridge, South Dakota. We took up six truckloads of clothing and school supplies and stuff. Then me and my band went up for a benefit show. They just about had to tie me down to keep me from taking an armful of those kids back home with me. I’d a done it, too.
At Christmas time, we still send candy and stuff up to the kids. They put my picture next to John F. Kennedy on the wall. The only thing that made me feel bad was when they had that uprising at Pine Ridge, because I didn’t think that would help the people none. Still, the Indians have been treated bad—just about as bad as the blacks, really.
Nothing makes me madder than to hear people put Indians down. And if I hear some Indian complaining, I tell him to get smart and be proud of himself, because I am. In fact, I’m waiting for us to straighten this country out. Get everybody living in little tribes and fix his own medicine. We’d be a lot better off.
Mommy learned to doctor her whole family when she was still a baby. Her family got the fever during World War I. They were all lying around the cabin, talking out of their heads, and she was no more than five years old. Somehow she didn’t get the fever, so she spent weeks fetching water and helping to cool them off.
Her daddy taught her how to put salve on the bad sores on her mother’s legs, from blood vessels breaking. Her mother had twelve babies, but only five girls and a boy lived.
When Mommy was six, her mother died from the fever, and after that, she was on her own a lot. She’d go from one family to another. If somebody was having a baby, she would take care of the other kids. When she was staying with a family, Mommy would eat regularly. But other times she’d have to pick berries and sell ’em to get enough to eat. She also did washing and stuff like that, anything to