Coal Hollow
the text
Excerpt from an Oral History:
Faye, 65, Mountain Woman
Faye lives in a house next to an abandoned gas station deep in the
West Virginia hills. She has cobbled together a life and a living from
scavenging
things and reselling them. Most recently, she and her grandson, Ray,
were selling miner’s overalls out of an abandoned yellow school
bus on the side of the road for ten dollars a pair. She would scavenge
discarded overalls, mend and clean them and sell them right back to the
miners. Faye is a mountain woman, entrepreneur and a serious packrat.
"I’m
Indian and Irish, mixed together. Dad died when we was all little. I
was about nine when Daddy died. He was a farmer. He was out in the dankness
and wet weather so much he took something called TB and pneumonia and
it killed him when we was all real young.
"We had our own mountain water. We didn’t have electricity ‘till
I was a great big girl. I was about eleven or twelve years old before
we had electricity. We used oil lamps, and a lot of times nothing. The
house was three rooms, made of logs cut, hewed and notched and stacked
up.
"Either
you worked or you didn’t eat. They did not keep no sorry
people around. They wouldn’t fool with you. What food we had to
eat when I was a kid, we had to raise in the hills. If we didn’t
raise something to eat in the summer, we had to do without when winter
come. All of us had to work ‘cause Mommy only had a little
bit of money coming in to buy the flour, the sugar, the coffee and
a little
bit, not much of nothing, for clothes.
"And if one didn’t have something, the others would share. You’d
give them a piece of the pig for a sack of potatoes or a piece of the
pig for a sack of corn. Today, the mountains are all growed up and there
ain’t no food being grown out there.“And if you got sick,
you doctored yourself, ‘cause there wasn’t no hospital. If
you broke a leg, you fixed it yourself. Two or three people’d come
along and you’d slap that person upside the head [to give] him
a pain shot. If it was broke to where you could see, you’d stretch
it back – splintin’ it.
"I just moved aways and got married and didn’t better myself. Getting
married with four kids was just a rough, rough life. I was married twice
and neither husband was any good. They just wouldn’t work and what
work they worked, they didn’t put to benefit toward the kids. I’d
pick up stuff and recycle it. Wash it, clean it up, take it to the
yard sale and sell it, like, for a quarter, fifty-cent and feed my
kids. Same
way my mother raised me.
"I don’t have anything. I’m broke now. I got hit with this
flood this spring and part of my garden down there washed away. Now I’ve
got a few volunteer tomato plants and I’ve got some onions down
there and something else is growing. I believe it’s squash or a
pumpkin …and potatoes, come back from last year. …I’m
not gonna go hungry.”
Edited by
Melanie Light, ©2005