Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [8]
But we didn’t know about prejudice in Butcher Holler. We didn’t know much about anything. Even Van Lear was another world to us. We would go down there about once a month, and sometimes see a Tarzan movie or one of the Roy Rogers serials. We always went in the daytime, because coming back there weren’t any cars, or roads, or electricity for lights in Butcher Holler. I remember going into Van Lear before Christmas when I was around twelve. It was at night, and their decorations were all lit up. It was the first time I really remember seeing electric lights. I sure was impressed.
My home was maybe four miles further up the mountains from Van Lear. The road was paved up to the mines, then it was topped with just coal slag—“red dog,” we called it. That ran from the upper company store to the one-room schoolhouse. Then there was just a dirt path leading alongside the creek, in the narrow space between two ridges.
As you walked up the holler, the path got steeper and steeper, with trees growing on both sides of you. You had this feeling of being all wrapped up in the trees and hills, real secure-like. If you’d stop walking and just listen, you could hear a couple of kids playing outside, or maybe some birds in the trees. I used to love going out-of-doors at night and listening to the whippoorwills. Maybe it was the Cherokee in me, but I loved being outside. In the summertime, we’d hold lightning bugs (that’s our word for fireflies) on our fingers and pretend they were diamond rings. Or we’d just sit there in the holler, and it would be perfectly quiet.
Holler kids were so bashful that they’d run and hide if they had company coming. I was still bashful after I was married and didn’t make friends easily. The only way my husband could get me out of it was to tell me I was ignorant. See, he’d traveled outside the mountains. He’d been around.
We weren’t really ignorant, just shy. If we’d see a stranger coming up the holler, somebody in the bottom house would shout up the hill, “Stranger coming up.” If the stranger asked you questions, you’d just clam up until you knew his business. Lots of times they’d send revenue officers looking for a moonshine still up in the mountains. Us kids would look at him dumb-like and say, “Ain’t nothing up here, mister.” And all the time our uncles were making moonshine right up on the ridge.
Most of the people were Irish—not the Catholic kind, the other kind—from families that kept moving west until they finally settled in the hills. There wasn’t nobody to take taxes from ’em or make ’em go to church if they didn’t want to. So they grew into their own independent ways. They raised chickens and hogs, corn and berries. They didn’t have no papers or listen to the news.
The biggest thing that ever happened in Butcher Holler was after World War II when a pilot bailed out of his army plane and it crashed up on the ridge. You could hear bullets going off in the fire for days. The first time a car ever came up the path was when Doolittle came a-courting in his jeep. Now they’ve got the dirt path widened so two-wheel-drive cars can get up. But it’s about the same as ever. A few men work in the mines, and the women go into Paintsville for their food stamps and stuff. But it’s still country.
I was up there last year, and my Uncle Corman was telling me about the big shoot-out they just had. Seems one of his cousins fired at a hawk. Another cousin down the holler heard the shot and, just for meanness, he answered the shot. Suddenly there were two grown men, cousins to each other, shooting at their sounds. They were both behind trees, a-firing away, until they got tired of it and quit. Didn’t hurt nothing, but they could have. That’s just the way we are.