Perceptions of Home : simplebooklet.com

" .,_ .. Ron Eller Director, Appalachian Cenfer, University of Kentucky AMERICA AND APPALACHIA "If you want to make something of yourself,"' the teacher warned, "you are going to have to become something different from your people." My people of course, were hillbillies, and we had just moved to Ohio from West Virginia. Along with 3.5 million other Appalachians who migrated to the industrial cities of !he Midwest after World War 11, we were often received with suspicion and frequently cautioned to speak correctly, dress properly and learn to listen to the right kind o~music. If we were going to succeed in modern America, we were told, we had to look less like "us" and more like "them." What we needed to give up and holiVtWe . needed to change often differed according to the individual and their definition of Appalachia and of America. One thing was certain; we were considered to be part of the "other America" outside the mainstream. This tension between Appalachia and America has long shaped the way Americans viewed the region and its people. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, Appalachia and Appalachians were described as "a strange land and a peculiar people," a region in, but not P E R C E P T I O N S 0 F of, America, as one historian has written. For almost a century thereafter Appalachia was portrayed in the popu1ar mind as the counterpart to modern America, a region to be preserved or uplifted depending up.on how one viewed modern life. As part of the "other America," Appalachia was easy to stereotype, easy.to characterize because each of us has our • own definition of America, viewed from the telescope of our own experiences. If we believed that America was rich, Appalachia appeared to us as poor; if America was urban, Appalachia was rural; if America was progressive, Appalachia was backward. Cast in the background along with other ethnic and racial groups, Appalachians were seldom seen at center stage of American hi3tory, their story seldom portrayed as typical of American life. Ove!r the past thirty years, however, our images of Appalachia and its relationship to • America have begun to change-in part because of the emergence of Appalachian scholarship that has altered our understanding of the region's history and culture but also because of the impact of Appalachian H O M E

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outmigrants on the larger society. Not only did Appalachian workers provide much of the labor that built modeJn consumer 1merica in the second hq,[f of th~twentieth century, but they brought with them to America's cities their music, their humor, and a folk culture that helped to transform popular American culture as a whole. Ti,day we are more likely to understand America as a multi-cultural society and Appalachia as one of many currents contributing to the American mainstream. As a result, those of us from Jt.'ppalachia have gained a new understanding of our own history and culture, and of what it means to be both Appalachian and American. Just as we have learned that there are many • currents i,n the American mainstream, we have come to see the Appalachian experience as diverse and multi-layered. People freim New York and Mississippi are as likely to identify themselves as Appalachian as people from Kentucky and West Virginia. The Appalachian Regional Commission officially designates 399 contiguous counties for federal ARC funding, but Appa(pchian festivals, workshops, performances and symposia are held in urban areas inside and outside that geographic atea. Where local color writers once saw Appalachia as a homogenous society of poor whites, contemporary writers describe a more complex region of racial, class and generational diversity. Once identified only with folk arts and • crafts, Appalachian culture has come to be· associated with a range of creative activities from film-making to the theater and contemporary music As a result, it is difficult to arrive at a single definition of Appalachia today, just as it is difficult to generalize about America. Yet within that diversity there are common themes that bind Appalachians together as a people, whether they live in the mountains or in urban outmigrant communities across the country. Whether their roots are in the coal mining communities of eastern Kentucky or the textile mill towns of North Georgia, on.tobacco farms in western North Carolina or in the factories of West Virginia or Ohio, Appalachians are bound by a common history that is shaped by the particular interaction between a place and a people. This history is not unlike that of many other rural Americans, except perhaps for the fact that our experience • with modernization in this century has been -more traumatic and has produced different eonsequences. Like many other Americans, we left the land and traditional co'mmunities for life in the factories and the mines However, that journey often left us poor and dependent without the res.ources to sustain our new -communities afld new lifestyles, since the wealth of the region had been drained off for the benefit of other areas and other people. Far from being the static, unchanging region of the local color images and stereotypes, Appalachia has been very much a region "in and of" Hie American experience, and it is that very strtJggle with change that harshaped'ffle particular character of the p~ce In fact it is that strong sense of place that has often bound the natives of the region and their descendants together, despite the diversity of local conditions. Appalachians have a strong affinity for the mountains, and many feel uncomfortable outside of the region and long to return to "uneven ground." As the ~ fisherman's identity is shaped by his life on the sea, the Appalachian's sense of security and personal identity is shaped by life in the mountains;and the physical images of the hills themselves permeate the literature, art and music of the region. This sense of place in Appalachia, however, is not necessarily connected to a particular parcel of land (although it can be) but rather a set of experiences and relationships that have 1iccurred on that land. The land itself is the • context for generations of experiences that are larg'er than the individual and connect us to neighbors and kin, the connections that give meaning to our lives. SensE! of place among Appalachians, therefore, is interwoven with common historical experiences shared by individuals and cutting across generations. The fabric for these experiences is the family and kinship system

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that has shaped politics, economy and culture in the mountains for years and has contribuJ:ed to an outlook on life that is more communal than self-center,ed and individualistic In contrast to the modern wyrld view that, according to ~ocial scientists, places emphasis on the individual, the traditional responsibilities of Appalachians were first to the family, to its survival and continuity, and only then to self-interest. My father, like many of his generation, was forced to quit school at the end of the sixth grade in order find work to support the family, and many young outmigrants regularly sent checks home to the mountains. Even the migration itself followed kin§hip lines as brothers and sisters followed each other to the cities and depended on each other until their families found work and residences of their' own. Therefore, one's attachment to ~lace in Appalachia is an attachment to family, kin and neighbors, to shared experiences that imply responsibility beyond oneself and provide linkages between the past and the future. Whether these relationship~ existed among individuals within rural mountain communities or between these communities and outmigrants in distant urban areas, they have helped to define the Appalachian experience and to con..,jct mountain people with each other wherever they have located. To no small degree the relationship between place and people in Appalachia has also been shaped by common historical experiences tha·t cut across state and other political boundaries. The common struggle with the land, a boom and bust economy, job dependency, lack of education, poor housing and health care, and political powerlessness have been historical conditions shared by millions across the region In fact, it was the way in which the region's collective economy developed in the.last century, not the absence of economic development, that pushed millions of Appalachians into the cities of the Midwest in search of jobs and other opportunities. Displaced timber workers from western North Carolina, unemployed coal miners from Kentucky and farmers from Tennessee met in the auto plants of Detroit, the rubber mills of Akron, and the factories-of Cincinnati and shared not only their music, language and culture, but their experiences with unions, politics and absentee corporate owners. Derogatory stereotypes, cultural snobbery and barriers to health care, housing and job opportunities further bound the migrants together as Appalachians and reinforced the natural tendency to develop their own social networks (churches, bars, recreational clubs and activities) and to maintain the ties to the place and people from which they had come. PERCEPTIONS 0 F Ironically, it is these shared experiences that have not only bound Appalachians together as a common people but that have connected ,the Appalachian experience to that of millions of other Americans. Displaced from their homelands by poverty and the lack of economic opportunity (or forced from it by the greed and self-interest of others) countless other Americans have migrated to the cities in search of the American dream. Latinos and Asians, African-Americans and Native-Americans, Irish, , Germans, Slavs, and Jews have all left their mark on the American pageant. Each has suffered from condescension and negative stereotypes, and each has struggled with discrimination and hostility. Each has learned to become "American" without losing the important parts of their own heritage, and each has learned to be "bi-cultural" in a nation of many cultures and ixperiences. Once thought to be part of the "other America," Appalachians have come to understand their kinship with others who have struggled on the land and with historical change. They have learned to be both Americans and Appalachians and to .define success with pride in who they are as well as who they might become. This newfound identity among Appalachians and other Americans has not eltminat~d poverty, social injustice or discrimination, but it has allowed us to focus on the.political and H O M E

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Michael Maloney Community· Organizer, Cincinnati, Ohio • ' • WHO ARE THE URBAN APPALACI tlANS? Urban Appalachians are people now living in urban areas who came from the Appalachian region or whose ancestors came from there. Most are not first generation migrants but long-term city dwellers. People fr~ Appal~chia have been migrating to Cincinnati and other cities outside the region ever since these cities were founded. But it was not until the period following World War II that Appalachians became one of the major population groups in these r.ietropolitan centers. Who these people are and what their experience has been is a major drama in twentieth cerftury American history. The Perceptions of Home exhibit tells the stories of a people and of one of the major human migrations in the history of the world. It is through the lives of such families and the communities in whicfl they live that the real history of urban Ar,palachians can f--'~,,nd. In terms of national origin urba11 Appalachians reflect the varied heritage of the Appalachian region. They are Scotch-Irish, English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh. Some are African-American or Native American. Many have a German ancestry. Others are descended • from people of Central and Southern Europe who were recruited to work in the coal and steel industries. Most Appalachians have a mixture of these heritages. Does this diversity mean there is no such thing as an Appalachian culture? By no means. A common experience of living in the hills, the towns, the valleys or the foothill secti.ons of the Appalachian region, coupled with the eighteenth century frontier experience of the early settlers, did produce a regional culture. Urban Appalachians are also diverse in terms of the kind of places they lived in before migration. Many came from coal camps in the Cumberland Plateau or Allegheny Mountains. Others came from cities such as Knoxville·, Ashland, Charleston, or Pittsburgh. Most, however, came from a rural area or small town. Just as an Appalachian might be white or black, they might be Protestant, Catholic or Jewish, or possess a religious heritage that defies denominational classification. They might be rich or poor, live in the inner city or in an affluent suburb. Most Appalachians in cities are employed in blue collar and service jobs, but P "E R . C E P T 0 N S 0 F H O M E

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. -Appalachians are ·also professionals, owners of businesses and managers. Some are artists, engineers, or architects. Many are educators and health care workers. During the period of Ohio's industrial expansion the majority worked in factories., Now work in the service economy is becoming more important. How DJ[) TnE-Y GET Hr:RE? Ti LE GRfA.T MIGl~ATION Appalachians came to midwestern cities under a great variety of circumstances. Early migrants came in trickles one family at a time over many decades. They came in response to specific opportunities such as the opening of a factory. 1hey qime during World War I and during the prosperous twenties. They were sometimes recruited to work in a specific factory. It has been said, halt-jokingly, that Champion Paper transplanted halt of Wolfe County, Kentucky to work in their Hamilton plant. During World War II, thousands of Appalachians came north to work in defense plants. Thousands more came in response to layoffs in the coal industry. When mines shut down sometimes entire coal towns were depopulated. During the fifties, special bus runs were made to transport laid oft miners and their families to Cincinnati and Dayton. It was during this 1940 to 1970' period that entire neighborhoods in Cincinnati and other midwe!tern cities became Appalachian, ·but the foundations of those communities were ,. often laid much eartier in the century. This 1940-1970 period is often referred to as The Great Migration. Newcomers would often stay with relatives or friends until they got settled. When the layoffs came people might have to go back to the mountains tor a time or "double up" with FORMil\iG C0,\1,\1( 1\;J / ILS To many Appalachians, work in the factories was what attracted them to urban areas. • relatives here. Networks of family and friends were the main support. Soon churches were organized that tor many became an additional means of spiritual and material support. As neighborhoods became Appalachi·an, churches, stores, bars, restaurants, and social clubs were established to serve this population. Appalachian music flourished and Cincinnati Wright Aeronautical (later General Electric). Armco~ U.S Shoe, General Motors, Frigidaire, Ford Sharonville, Champion Paper, Nutone, ._ National Cash Register, Delco Moraine, and Newport Steel: These and many other factories large and small drew people from the Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia hills to southwest Ohio and northern Kentucky. The location of these factories often determiijed the location of Appalachian neighborhoods. Concentrations of low cost housing became "ports of entry" tor some families and long term homes-tor others. Fifth and Wayne and Moraine in Dayton. Over the Rhine, Norwood and Camp Washington and many others in Cincinnati. Covington and Newport in Kentucky Laycrfts, changeover, plant shutdowns, and long stretches of unemployment were common experiences. Some faced discrimination in hiring or the search tor housing. To the black or white Appalachian, doors to good jobs or good neighborhoods could be closed. Banks did not always want to make loans in certain areas or to certain families. • became a center ot the recording industry. Appalachian festivals in Dayton and Cincinnati draw over 40,000 people annually to celebrate their heritage. As more members of a family migrated and • new children were born, family i:ietworks with rural roots and urban branches became larger .. and stronger than before migration. These family netwocks were flexible and often included non-~in in a network of mutual support, informal education ar'fd nurturf. FACING SOCIAL PROBLEMS Some family networks were weakened or virtually destroyed by the move from farm to coal camp to metropolitan area. These \.Wakened families became the concern of social agencjes and church-sponsored outreach ministries. Although relatively few of these families became welfare dependent. tbose few

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became the b,asis of the stereotype of the impoverished "southern Appalachian migrant" Newspaper stories about welfare, crime and violence and "poverty posters" of large, poorly dressed Appalachian families caused many Appalachians to disassociate themselves from an open Appalachian identity. Thousa_nds of families experienced some form of failure.in their efforts to make a new life in the city. Some returned to the Appalachian region, some stayed and experienced the worst of urban poverty, but most have fought the odds and have overcome. Many still await the opportunity to have good schools, ·good jobs and secure neighborhoods. Advocacy and service organizations such as Cincinnati's Urban Appalachian Council were formed to respond to the needs of this population. Even the strongest of families, especially in the inner city, experienced a variety of . hardships. Children were ridiculed because of the way they talked, the way they dressed or because of where they lived. Going to school was often just a matter of survival with little education occurring. Unable to cope with the hostile environment of large and bureaucratic urban public schools generations of inner city Appalachians have had to cope without the benefit of fven a high school education. SUMMARY But most urban Appalachians have benefited in many ways from the move to the city. They have benefited economically and _culturally. Midwestern cities are home to thousands of practicing musicians, craftsmen, storytellers, poets, writers, and other _artists. Appalachians have contributed to the c1v1c, economic, and cultural life of their communities serving as ministers, elected officials, union leaders, and in thousands of small businesses. Appalachian names you would recognize include Branch Rickey, Kathleen Battle, James Rhodes,'\ierne Riffe and Marian Spencer. F~r the most part urban Appalachians are not rich and famous. They placed the welfare of their families and neighbors above their own advancement. They advanced together or not at all. They are the men and women who made the refrigerators, assembled the automobiles, made paper boxes and a thousand other products and hauled them over the road in tractor trailers. They built bridges and highways They made airplane engines and rocket components. They built churches and sometimes neighborhoods. Some longed for home as they saw their . children and grandchildren grow up in the city or in suburban towns or trailer courts. Some were glad to escape the hills in favor of greater PERCEPTIONS~ OF opportunities in the city. All helped shape the life and culture of midwestern c1t1es in the last half of this century. Is there anything uniqua.ibout the experience of urban Appalachians? Perhaps there is-but the experience of this group 1s probably more remarkable in its similarity to that of other ethnic groups shaped by mass migrations such as the Irish, lta_li_an; German and African-American communities. The processes of migration, community formation and long-term adjustment are similar 1n m~ny ways. However, inner city white Appalachians now share with underemployed African-Americans and black Appalachians the tragedies and challenges of the post-industrial metropolis. Finding sulutio_ns in the form of Jobs, good schools, decent hou~ing, safe . neighborhoods and other support for fam1ry and community life is perhaps the greatest chilllenge to our generation. -Being Appalachian is not a mauer of _ belonging to a1pecific race, rel1g1on, or social class. It is, rather, a matter of being tied through birth or ancestry to the Eastern mountain~ of the United States. Most Appalachians in southwestern O.hio came from the Cumberland Plateau of Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. Others came from the Alleghenies, the Blue H O M E

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Ridge, Great Smokies or the many other mountain or hill districts of the region. Some never lived in hills but in the valley country between or at the edge of the mountains. MY FAMlLY EXPERlEN~E: URBAN APPALACHIANS TODAY My own family came to Southlebanon, Ohio. My sister Jeanne and her husband from Breathitt County, Kentucky established a home there. Each of my seven other brothers and sisters fol lowed Jeanne and Frank Gross to South Lebanon. Frank and Jeanne helped everybody get established. Newcomers worked at the local mushroom plant, at construction jobs or whatever until they could get on at Frigidaire, NCR, Ford or another factory. l=hen they spread out ayer Warren and Butler counties. Today more than a hundred descendants of my parents li~e in southwestern Ohio. Factory work is no longer my family's main economic base. Most of us work in service jobs such as nursing, teaching, and food service. Others work in computers, construction, and trucking. Few have ever been on welfare, and those only temporarily. Most members or the Maloney family are not first generation migrants. Five of my parents' nine children are still living. My siblings and I bore thirty-eight children (second generation) and they, in turn, have produced about thirty-five offspring (third generation). And now I have about fiftei)n grandnieces and nephews (fourth generation). Most Maloney descendants still live in Ohio but a few have moved back to Kentucky and one branch is scattered throughout the Southeast. The fourth generation is still growing and will expand more as the remaining ·secood and third generation young people finish school and get married. My father and mother, born in 1900 and 1902, would be very proud if they could see more than a hundred of their descendants and their spouses assembled at a family reunion. Fa~ly reunions are held in Warren Co.unty, Ohio. The relationship. to the mountains is weakening but when we get together some of the young people get out their guitars and make music with the elders as we sing the songs of the mountains. Most of the youngsters are aware of our origins and the homeplace in Breathitt County even if they have never been . there. One of my nieces is a wildcrafter. The gift of storytelling is alive and well in the first generation and may even survive in the age of cybernetics. My own generation has tried to pass on such values as hard work, concern for the poor, the value of education, and tolerance Being a good person and a respected member of the family are rated higher than upward motiility. Some of the elders still miss the mountains but we realize that Ohio is home to our children and grandchildren. ..

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• Marlin Wightman's first impression of Cincinnati is ' one shared by many Appalachians who moved to the city in the 1950s. Seventeen, just out of high school, he left Cumberland County to spend a summer with his sister, who had married and moved to Cincinnati about two years earlier. Here's how Marlin remembers the experience of crossing the Ohio River in his brother-in-law's 1937 Ford "We traveled all day long coming up Rout'e 25 from Tennessee. We got here just after the sun had set We came up Dixie Highway, around Covington Hill, and I saw the lights of the city shining on the river and I thought that was Hie most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life, Cincinnati and all its lights. I'd never seen anything like this before. "That was my impression of Cincinnati. It was ~oon dampened, though, when we got to their apartment [in Over the Rhine] and it was kind of a dingy little place that didn't give anyone a real good impression. But I was so tired and so exhausted that I didn't have a bit of trouble going to sleep that night I slept like a baby." The next morning was a Monday, and when Marlin woke up his sister and her husbahd had already left for work. "I could hear noises, sounds, some that I could detect and some thatl couldn't detect what they were. The Model Laundry was located not far from 13th Street where they lived, I think it was about a block away, and it was coming to life. There was a peddler peddling ice up the back alley on the side. And of course the automobile sounds, the horns, the streetcars were ... • clanging up and down Vine Street, which was just right there close. It was a big giant awakening. It didn't scare me. It was more exciting than anything." For a Tennessee boy, Over the Rhine was a place full of wonder in 1951-picture shows and exotic foods like pizza and cheese coneys. It was also comfortably 'full of fellow Appalachians. "It was a common practice," Marlin says, "when you met someone, you'd ask them, 'Where you from, Kentucky or Tennessee?"' Marlin spent the summer working for the Huenefeld Stove Company, assembling kerosene stoves for ninety cents an hour.. In the fall, as planned, he. went to Cookeville, Tennessee, to enter college. He lasted about two weeks. "I was more scared down there than I was up here, quite frankly. I was alone. I saw that everything that I was headed for was going to cost a bundle of money, which I didn't have, and my parents didn't .,have, and I didn't know where it was going to come from. "After about two weeks of I would say halfheartedly attempting to enroll in higher education, I decided to come back here. I didn't have any real ambitious plan for the future other tha~ the security of coming to a job and being independent and supporting myself." • Except for two years in the Army, he's lived in Cincinnati ever since. He married a Kentucky girl, had children and then grandchildren, and retired in 1995 from a job as a stationary engineer at the Hilton Davis Company An accomplished folk artist-hundreds of people have taken his handcarved woodland creatures home from Cincin-nati's Appalachian Festival-Marlin treasures his Tennesses heritage but has no desire to return there. "I think that the reason Cincinnati became so comfortable, and so much of a home for me, was because of the security it offered. When I was a child growing up in Appalachia, we lived in what would be considered poverty, the same as all over Appalachia. There practically was no work there, no jobs. I look back now and wonder how my parents were able to raise eight children. "Cincinnati had a home feeling for me from the first This is home." •

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J VIRGIL PRESTON Born in 1909 in the coal camp of Thealka, in Johnson County, Kentucky. Moved to Cincinnati in 1945. Now lives in the ·college Hill • neighborhoad of Cincinnati. I. D. Preston figured that when his oldest son Virgil grew big enough to load coal, he'd go to work alongside his father in the mines, like just about every other able-bodied young man in Johnson County. Virgil's mother had differ.mt ideas. "No son of mine," she said, and Virgil's grandmother backed her up on this, "is going to get killed in a coal mine." So the Prestons' oldest son got an education. In May, 1925, wearing a new suit of clothes his mother had paid for by selling eggs and hams from the fami°ly farm, he graduated from the eighth grade at the John C. C. Mayo College in Paintsville. A month later he passed the Johnson County examination for schoolteachers. His first teaching assignment was a one-room school at the head of Greasy Creek. "That was a riot," Virgil remembers. '•It was a log cabin school, and nobody would take it. The county superintendent said to me, you've just got to go over there and take that school for me. And up on the hillside above the school was the moonshiner of the creek, and he would come down sometimes and insist that I drink moonshine with him, and I'd have to dismiss school. "To me, it tasted like ... Well, they called it white lightning. And I would almost lose my breath on it. But I had to do that, because he would do me bodily harm if I wouldn't drink with him. After the second year I went to the superintendent and told him I wasn't going back to that school." P E R C E P T I O N S 0 F Virgil taught in Johnson County schools for twelve years, attending college at Morehead during the summe.c breaks. (Loretta Lynn was a first grader In the school at Van Lear while he was principal there.) He also explored horizons beyond the mountains: in 1935 he and two friends drove a Ford coupe to the World's Fair in Chicago, an eye-opening experience for the coal miner's son. When the war broke out, Virgil joined the Army Air Corps. He and his sweetheart, a schoolteacher from Pulaski County named Edith Broyles, got married in the spring of 1942, before Virgil shipped out. Edith moved in with her brother in Covington fort~ duration. The Army was used to dealing with Kentucky boys, but it wasn't quite sure what to make of Virgil, a Kentucky boy with movie-star good looks and .a college education that qualified him for flight training. Still, he got his share of ridgerunner razzing, like ~e speech the flight training officer · used to introduce him to an airplane: "He said, 'Cadet Preston, before you get in that damn plane, I want you to remember there are more than two · directions, and neither one is up the creek or down the creek. North, east, west, and south."' Virgil was sent to North Africa, flying C-47s towing troop gliders against Rommel's Afrika Korps. When that campaign was over he was rotated back to the states, and finished the war recruiting WACs in Birmingham, Alabama. When he was mustered out, there was never any question about going back to~aching in· H O M. E 4

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4 Kentucky; the pay was terrible. He joined his wife in Cincinnati and took a job as a freight rate analyst in the B&O railyard, where he worked until he retired in 1975. He and Edith, who have one daughter, an intsrpreter for the Pentagon, will cele-brate their fifty-fourth wedding anniversary in 1996. Virgil has lived in Cinoonati for more than fifty years, but his College Hill living room is full of Kentucky. The Preston family traces its Kentucky roots back to a land grant from the English crown, and Virgil has collected much of its history. He writes frequeQtly for Eastern Kentucky historical publications. He Shows a visitor a photograph of a small boy standing beside a mule. "That's Aunt Jewel," he says, and the boy, of course, is Virgil. The little print has faded; it's curled and brittle. He studies it across a gulf of seventy-five years. "The mule was everything," he says. "We rode it It pulled a plow to till the soil. It pulled a wagon. It pulled the sickle that mowed the hay." He slips the picture away. "I'll always think of my home being in • Appalachian Kentucky," he says. "Tha(s where I • was born and reared. And I never got out of there until I was twenty-four or twenty-five And I still go back every year." • •

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Omope Carter Daboiku's heritage-cultural and genetic-is a complicated matter. It's African and Native American, and way back there's an Irish sailor in there somewhere. And she's Appalac.hian, having grown up in the southeast Ohio to~n of Ironton. Omope is a storyteller who holds degrees in sociology and cultLlral geography, and it is partly a matter of professional interest and partly personal curiosity that she has spent much of her adult life exploring where she's from. For years it was only the African part that really interested her. She began a study of the Yoruba culture of Nigeria when she was at the Univ~rsity of Cincinnati in the middle seventies. Named , Deborah Kar Carter at birth, she got Omope·, which is a Yoruba name that means "child who came late," from a diviner. (Why she wanted to replace Deborah is a great story that you should ask her to tell you sometime.) Daboiku came from her husband, a Nigerian choreographer and playwright. Omope didn't spend rouch time thinking about her Appalachian roots until her daughters, Adesola and linuade, were born. Watching them grow up in the city, she reflected on her own childhood in Ironton: and how different it was. "Growing up, you know, folks in Ohio put a great distance between themselves and folks across the.river They were the Appalachians. We wadn't, we was in the North. It's them southern nillbillies. I mean, we're livin' in town, we wear shoes I We have runnin' water and flush toilets I We are not they. Then after I had moved to the city and had my children, I began to realize what's important to me. "I began to look at the things that I was . struggling with, being here. What I missed. I really missed not having a family that I could walk to down tbe street. I really missed walking to the grocery store. I-really mis5ed being able to walk to a park and sit on some swings. I really missed seeing kids walk to school, and singing songs, and I began to think of all the things I had really enjoyed when I was a kid growing ,up." Finally one day she was talking to her friend Debbie Bays about all this, and Debbie said to her, "Well, you know what the problem is, don you? Cause you's a country girl, that's why." It was a revelation. "It was then that I realized that not only was it possible to have a lot in you because c'!'f what genetics required of you, but here was a clear example of how one could have a heritage that was not genetically based. And that, yes indeed, I was different because of the place I grew up, and the time of that place. And that I was havinQ struggles being an urban mother. Because I was a transplant. "Well, let me tell you what I have finally figured out, cause I've gone through the where's home thing. I figured where's home is where you want to be burieQ And I want to be bLJ'ried in Woodlawn "9metery in Ironton, Qhio. That's still home." She is getting pretty teary-eyed at this point and her daughter wants to know why. "Cause I'm happy," she tells Adesola. "You know your mama always cries when she has moments.:if revelation in her heart to accept. "No," she continues, "I went through the, 'I'm an African, bury me on the shores of Gha~a with W.E.B. DuBois.' And I said wait a minute, uh-uh, no. "I really don't want to be buried where can't nobody come and lay a rose on me every now and then. And the only place where I'm going to be, where everybody knows that they could find me, is up there in Woodlawn Cemetery, over by the fence where they bury all the colored people, you know, unless you're a veteran, then you go on the integrated side." She reflects for a moment on the fact that nobody's ever made a fuss over lronton's main cemetery still being essentially segregated, and decides that that, too, is part of the home question. "Actually, it's a matter of convenience. You know that to find the people that you know, all you have to dQ.is go to a certain place, you don't have to hunt. Walking in the cemetery now is like walking down the street when I was a kid. jou know that up here on this end are the Stewarts, they used to live up at that end of Seventh Street, and as you walk down the row, it's truly like walking down the street. And you see all the people who you used to see on the porch. So it's like keeping your neighborhood intact, it really is. "So I think I want to t1lr buried in the neighborhood." She's laughing now "Where on MemQrial Day if anybody just happens to come that way they'll know, oh yeah, that's Aunt Debbie over there in the corner, you know, the one with the headstone that's got all the names on it? And then they'll tell the story about me, and all that stuff, and eat homemade ice cream over my grave or something, or bring me a piece of fried chicken or a rib or something for me to eat."

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.. TAYLOR FARLEY, JR. Born in 1953 in Newport, Kentucky, grandson of an Appalachian,1J1igrant from Breathitt County, Kentucky. Now lives in Covington, Kentucky. Taylor Farley carries his heritage in a black banjo case. His grandfather brought it from Breathitt County in 1922, and passed it to his son, Taylor Senior, and both of them gave it to Taylor. "Well, my grandfather, when I was a little bitty kid, I can remember.he lived-it's really funny-he lived right over top of what later turned out to be Aunt Maudie's," says Taylor, who twenty years 'later met the woman who would become his wife downstairs in that legendary Cincinnati bluegrass bar. "There used to be a Chinese laundry there. He was on the fourth floor, and I'd go up there with my dad. Every time I'd go over there he'd give me a silver dollar and he'd dare me to touch his banJo. He didn't have a case, he had it laying out on a table in the living room. It was an old RB-3 Gibson, and he'd dare me to touch it. Well, soon as he'd turn his back that's the first thing I would do was go for that banjo." p E ., R C E That -.:yas many banjos ago. Taylor's father a13,d grandfather wer@ recreational players who picked in the old-time frailing style. What they gave to the young Farley was the idea of the banjo, and a love for its uniquely percussive and unmistakably hillbilly sound. He engaged in the serious study of Appalachian music by listening to the Grar.id Ole Opry on WSM out of..Nashville on Saturday nigl.lts, and through the medium of the jukeboxes in his father's Newport bars. (The senior Farley was a gambler and bar owner in the wide-open Newport of the fifties arid sixties. He was shot thirteen times in the course of his employment, according to Taylor.) Taylor dates his own life as a musician from the moment he first heard Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs on the radio. "That just ruint me," he says. "I'd been listening to the Beatles and rock'n'roll and everything like that, and when I heard Lester and Earl that was just it right there. Ever since then that's all I've been interested int was the five-string qanjo. You can ask 'em at school. "It was Just pure flat-out soul music to me." In the view of some bluegrass purists, Taylor has taken banJo music to some places the Lord never intended it to go. It's not unusual to hear intimations of Pink Floyd in a Taylor Farley set, or the Grateful Dead. It's an unusual Taylor Farley show if you don't hear a manic, speed-wood version of "Wipeout," with the familiar drum solo executed on the head of the banjo. That got started when Taylor was playing regularly in Ground Round restaurants with Dave • p T 0 N s 0 F Pinson. Bored with the incessant requests for "Rocky Top" and "Dueling BanJos," they'd occasionally work a little piece of "Stairway to Heaven" or something into the breaks. Some of it stuck and became part of the set (including "Wipeout," which has become a sort of a Taylor Farley signature, and which Taylor is now every bit as tired of as he ever was of "Rocky Top.") "It's all music," Taylor says. And playing mainstream music on Appalachian instruments is a way of introducing audiences to the charms of bluegrass. "Right now we're playing for kids that actually must be third or fourth generation [urban] Appalachians, but the difference is, these kids have green hair and earrings througrrtheir eyelids and their nose, and in a lot of ways they've not only forgotten their roots, to them they were never there in the first place. If their father and mother were Appalachian it's like an embarrassment to them. "With TV, it's become a small worlcf Nobody has a 'little girl o' mine in Tennessee' anymore. That's what all the old bluegrass was, was ~inging about the stuff they missed from back down in the mountains. Now, half of them's never been down in the mountains. Not only that, they've never listened to the music and they don't know anything about the culture. So what we're trying to do-we play this one Appalachian show at the community center over in Covington, and there's a lot of the kids like I'm talking about. They're street city kids, but they do have Appalachian roots. And they'lliisten to something like 'Wipeout.' We do some Pink Floyd. We do something by The Band, H 0 M E

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or something by the Grateful Dead. They ooderstand what that solig is, they hear it and they know right away who did it, but they've never, heard it performed on the instruments that we're • .playing. And by the time they get done listening to our show, they're sitting there listening to Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs"'Dig a Hole in the Meadow,' 'Coal Miner's Blues,' or something like that. And they like that, just as much as they like the Pink Floyd. It's just they never would have had an opportunity to hear it b~fore. "Anything that can be played, you can play on an Appalachian instrument. Shoot, we play 'Satin Doll."' The kids that Taylor cares most about passing the music on to are his own. His daughters are serious cloggers, and his ten-year-old son made his stage debut with Pinson and Farley at a 1995 Aunt Maudie's reunion show, playing "Cripple Creek" with the Pinson and Farley band. "I've opened up shows for Earl Scruggs, I've played with Charlie Daniels, I've played some of the biggest shows that you could ever name. But there'll never be a feeling like the first time that youngun comes in and says 'Hey Dad, this is something you play,' and picks up the banjo. So yeah, it's passed on. I sit and watch him and J see the ol' man or my grandpa all the time. Lot a times he's hitting licks that they did, and he don't even know it. It's just weird where it comes from. Something inside of you, I guess." ,

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PATTY CODY .. Born in Hazard, Kentucky in 1941 Moved to her present home in Aurora, Indiana in 1994, after living in Nashville, Louisville, and Bear Branch, Indiana since leaving college. -At seventeen, Patty Cody was so anxious to begin her life outside of Perry County, Kentucky that she moved to Richmond, where she planned to attend Eastern Kentucky University, a few days after graduating from Hazard High School. Now, after thirty years of trying on different ways of living, she's settled comfortably into a home in a small Indiana river town that looks and feels remarkably like a small Kentucky mountain town. "Somebody came to visit me here one time," Patty says, sitting in the big kitchen of her house in Aurora, "and they just laughed and said, you know, you're living in Hazard, it just isn't in Kentucky." It's a long way from Hazard, though: in the intervening years Patty has been an upper-middle class housewife and she's been a back-to-the-land • sodbuster, although not in the order most baby boomers experienced those lifestyles. Here's how she tells the story. Patty ended up going to Morehead State instead of Eastern Kentucky, perhaps because her parents felt she had too much fun during that first summer in Richmond. In Morehead, struggling mightily against the conservatism and isolation of the place, she embraced the spirit of the sixties. "I got hip,"~ she says. "Got into all that hippie-dippy culture, concerts, fatigues, all that stuff." She also got ,_ married, and after three years of college, moved to Louisville, where her new husband started a job i(l sales. There was a transfer to Nashville, then back to Louisville. Joe's career prospered. And Patty became increasingly bored. • P E R C E P T I O N S 0 F "We had a big house, you know, and everything that I thought I always wanted. And then suddenly it didn't mean anything. "I never wanted a Rolex," she says. "He was interested in success, financial success. I think at that point in time, I didn't want that and I wasn't ready for that. It seemed like our lives were geared toward the Rolex watch and having a TV in every room and ~ that kind of stuff. I was bored with that." Patty and Joe got divorced, and Patty went looking for a place in the country. "I've always been interested in gardening and living in the country. I wanted to rough it," she says. "I really needed to do that. And my mother, who had done that of necessity, just could not believe that I was interested in giving up an upper middle class lifest,¥1e to run a wringer washer. But that's what I did." Patty and a friend named Charlie moved off the grid to a place called Bear Branch, Indiana. The¼ grew their own vegetables, heated with wood, bartered for necessities, participated in a food co-op. Charlie occasionally drov.e a truck, and Patty worked for neighboring farms to get what little money she needed. She lived at Bear Branch for twelve years. "It was hard. My friend Carol arid I wquld go out to hoe tobacco. We would do just like my father talked about doing, living on a farm. We'd go out before daylight, and when the sun went down we put our hoes down and came home. I didn't ~ave a life, out of just trying to survive. H O M E •

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' "I was doing all these things, and making my dream comEl true of making life as difficult for myself as I possibly could, when I just started looking around and thinking that I was wearing myself out, and the fantasy wasn't reality. Finally, I just thought, I've got to do something with my life." She decided to go back to school. Through a friend she met Bob Moore, who turned her on to the Union Institute, where he was teaching She got a degree in communications and human services, and then went to Antioch for her masters • in counseling. sl'ie now coordinates volllnteer activities for a mental health center in Lawrenceburg. Years after she talked tb Bob about college, they ran into each other again at Arnold's in Cincinnati. A couple of nights later he called her. "And we've hardly been apart since," she says. She smiles across the table at her husband, who, like the town of Aurora, is a long drive from Appalachia but sure feels down home. Through all the changes, Patty has sta'}(ed in close touch with her family. Both parents are still living io Hazard, and she and Bob visit frequently. "There is a certain feeling when we go back," she says. "There's nothing that's nicer than sitting on my mom's couch. When we go there it's social. There's family coming in an~ out and calling on the phone every s~cond. There's cooking and kids and • talk and people and all that, all the time. And certainly that's what I always say is home. Of course it isn't. Nor would I like to move back there to my mother's house, and she wouldn't like that either."

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.... .. ERNIE MYNATT Born in Knox County, Kentucky in 1923. Moved with his'family to Harlan County as a child, and returned there after World War II. Moved to Cincinnati in 1959, and now lives in the Kennedy Heights neighborhood of Cincinnati. Ernie Mynatt's fierce commitment to social justice was forged on the sands of Utah Beach on D-Day. Ernie was a twenty-one-year-old Navy rigger, assigned to help cle~r German ordnance from the beaches before and during the Normandy invasion. Ernie spent D-Day, and the following fifteen days, on the beach. ' "You know," Ernie says, remembering June 6, 1944. "The little old town I grew up in had about six hundred people in it. And do you know that most of the guys that I ran around with in that town are dead, were killed. They were caJled up, and it was because we were a bunch of ignorant hillbillies who didn't know how to do anything but shoot a rifle. "From the beach, you know where the water slushes up on the beach, from the slush, the water slushing up, the white, it's not white, it's red. For maybe ten yards, twenty yards. I had that blood all over my clothes, you know, it soaked in my britches and everything, and it was stiff as a board. And it was my • buddies, it was their blood, it wasn't mine. If I get through this one, I said to myself, I'll never get into another one. I said if I lived, and got back to the United States, it was going to be different." That commitment to help make things different later brought Ernie to the streets of downtown Cincinnati, helping poor Appalachian kids make their way in the city. It ultimately led to the establishment of the Urban Appalachian Council and a network of social service agencies in Cincinnati's Appalachian neighborhoods. Ernie Mynatt is more or less officially "Papa to His People." That's what it says on the pTaque he was given a few years ago, and it's a home truth in the • P E R C E P T 0 N S 0 F hearts of countless former dead-end kids. Now grandparents with houses and careers, some of them still refer to themselves as "Ernie's kids" when they talk about their Over the Rhine days. Ernie learned about organizing early, during the coalfield labor stuggles of the thirties. His father, a miner all his life, didn't have much truck with the union, but an uncle introduced him to the righteous rhetoric of John L. Lewis. His first adventures out of the mountains came as a teenager, hoboing around on freight trains with some friends. "We'd catch a freight train out of Cumberland Valley to Corbin. Then we got a little bit jolly about it and we'd catch the manifest out of H O M E

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Corbin to Cincinnati." One-summer they rode the boxcars all the way to Texas and got jobs cutting head lettuce. Ernie joined the Navy right out of high school. Assigned to a PT boat, he was part of the Allies' secret campaign to soften German coastal defenses before the Normandy invasion. By the time he was mustered out, Ernie's family had moved to Corbin. He lived at home and began working on a degree in education at Union College in Barbourville, eighteen miles away. During his junior year he got married. After graduation Ernie applied for a teaching job in Harlan County, hoping to be assigned to his alma mater, Hall High School. Instead he was sent to Evarts, where he taught for seven years. Finally he got the assignment to ·Hall, but after three years there he found himself on the wrong side of a dispute with the politically powerful superintendent of schools, Jim Cawood. The disa~eement was so serious, and Cawood's power so absolute, that Ernie not only lost his job but felt it was necessary to leave Harlan County for his own safety. The clincber was the morning he found some dynamite in his coal pile. ""This guy, he'd run Harlan County for years," Ernie says. "And there'd been a whole lot of guys t~atd had bombs in their .garages when they went out to start their cars in the morning, and been blown away. And I said, well, I can see little pieces of me flying all over the county if I don't get out of it. "You ever see somebody shot with a shotgun in Harlan County 7 They put old wires and staples and pieces of bolt and nuts off a bolt in a shotgun shell, twelve-gauger, and you'll look like a hardware store when they come to pick you up." Ernie packed up and moved to Cincinnati, where his sister helped him get a job teaching at Central High School. That was 1959. He settled into a new home in Northside with his wife and, by then, two children. After a couple of years he found himself getting restless. He had met Perley Ayer, the charismatic Appalachian preacher, educator, and social activist. Ayer, who had been watching the migration from • Appalachia to the cities for years,.persuaded Ernie that there was important work to be done on the streets of Cincinnati. With the support of the Appalachian Fund, endowed by Herbert Faber, president of the Formica Company, Ernie started a program designed to help Appalachian street kids learn how to cope with the city, and more immediately, stay out of trouble. He began by hanging out on the streets, getting known; gradually he persuaded the courts to refer youthful offenders to his care instead of sending them to jail or reform school. At first, he worked out of the Emanuel Community Center on Race Street. "I had a pool table, a TV set, and a telephone. I would go to court every morning. That's the first place I went, was the court. I'd Cclmp out up there until they'd give me the kids, and I'd leave. "Most of my guys were hard-core, you know, they'd been to prison. In the daytime I took care of· hard-core people. I had every crook in town there, practically, Appalachian crook. They'd shoot pool for matches. A match was fifty cents, or they broke one in half and it was a quarter. "A't three o'clock I'd tell the hard-core guys to go, and the kids when they got out of school would come in to play on the pool table. I felt they had to make a complete turnaround, because they were heading down the road, and they were going to end up like the guys in the morning that came in there and played for matches." Ernie's work on the streets put a strain on his marriage, and on his physical health. "I got banged up one time," he says. "I got this shoulder broke, they stomped my teeth out and I don't know what all. [Ernie's wife] said she didn't want to be married to a garbage collector, and she left. That's what she thought these people were, garbage. I thought they were angels from heaven, cause that's where most of them were going, you know, if they kept going the way they were." • Over time, Ernie's community organizing began to take hold and expand in ever-widening circles. He 'helped found the Main Street Bible Center in 1964, and the Appalachian Identity Center, which still operates in Over the Rhine. In 1968, with Michael Maloney, he established United Appalachian Cincinnati, which became the Appalachian Committee and ultimately merged with the Identity Center to become the Urban Appalachian Council. A broken hip in the spring of 1995 h1'!; slowed Ernie's step some, but he's still active and he's still well-connected: he's married to Maureen Sullivan, executive director of the UAC. "You know what a spider gear in a car is] In cj_differential7 The part that makes everything else go?" He nods toward Maureen. "That there is the spider gear of the Appalachian community in this town." Of his early days on the streets of Over the Rhine, Ernie says now: "That was a breaking-in time. I was a country boy learning city ways. Now I'm a city boy with a country mind." .. •

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JERRY SEBASTIAN Born 1n 1937.1n Canoe. Kentucky. Moved to the Cincinnati area in 1953, and has lived in Northern Kentucky most of the time since, except for a stretch in the Manne Corps and a year in Berea while attending college. Now lives in -Ft Thomas, Kentucky. Married to. BECKY (GRIFFITH) SEBASTIAN Born in 1937 in Canoe, Kentucky. Moved with her family to Newport in 1943. Except for the year in Berea with Jerry, has lived in Northern Kentucky ever since. Cousin of .. BARBARA (HOWARD) H ERALD Born in Harlan, Kentucky 1n 1941. Went to Newport, Kentucky for a summer job in 1958 and stayed Lives in Highland Heights, Kentucky. Married to. BILL HERALD Born in 1938 in Turne1's Creek, Kentucky. Moved to Newport 1n • 1956 and has lived in Northern Kentucky. ever since. Uncle of JUDY TURN'tR .. Born in Gallatin County, Kentucky, in 1959. Father was originally from Turner's Creek, Kentucky, mother from Appalachia, Virginia. Lives in Covington . . P E R C E P T I O N S 0 F Turner's Creek is a little community on the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River in Breathitt County that was first settled in the early part of the ninetee;ith century. Canoe, also on the ri~r. is nearby. Most of the generation that came of age in those hollers after World War II left as:~oon as they were old enough to find a job in the city. Jerry Sebastian and Bill Herald made that trip, as did Judy Turner's father. Becky Sebastian's family had moved away earlier, catching a train to Newport on her sixth birthday. Barbara Hetald made a similar journey, and although she's from Harlan, she's the daughter of another Breathitt County expatriate. In addition to their ties to a particular stretch of the Middle Fork, these five people also have in eommon upward mobility; they all grew up in retitively difficult economic circumstances and have done pretty well in the city. Becky's a retired teacher; Jerry a retired school principal. Bill retired from General Motors and works as a roofer at Northern Kentucky Univtrsity Barb is benefits marJ.13ger in the personnel office at NKU and is the staff representative on the school's Board of Regents. Judy is a paralegal specializing in immigration law at Taft, Stetinius, and Hollister in Cincinnati. We sat down with the five of them around a pot of coffee and a tape machine tot~ about . what they and their families left behina, what they brought with therrr:,and how they maintain a connection to their family homeplaces. H O M E

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All of you live on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River Is there any significance to that? BARB: I wouldn't live over there for nothing. Why's that? BARB: I hate to drive a car that has an Ohio license on it. Juov: I won't go to Breathitt County in a car that has an Ohio license. Why? Why would that be so ~d? Juov: I'm not sure. There's just something about moving to Ohio, to the north, to the city, to the place where everybody makes fun of you.~ think that's part of it. JERRY: We are not accepted across that river. And we understand that. We go over there and take their money, I did for ten years But we just don't relate to Ohioans. We relate to Kentuckians, We're more comfortable here in Northern 1<entucky than we are in Ohio. Juov: Even in the law firm where I work, they don't know if I'm Appalachian or not, they don't care. But when they say where do you live and I say Kentucky, they say, 'Oh, did you ptJt your shoes on this morning before you eame to work?' Ha, Ha. They say that to everybody and it's not personal, it';, just the attitude in a part of Cincinnati: if you're from Kentucky, you're a hillbilly, whether you,are or not. BILL: That doesn't bother me. I'm a hillbilly-BARB: And we're proud of it. BILL: -and I don't really care how you feel about it. You folks represent something of what Breathitt County and the rest of Eastern Kentucky has given to the Cincinnati area. One way of thinking of that is that this area's gain is Breathitt County's loss. Do you wish things could have.been different? Vo you • Jerry and Becky Sebastian

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• wish you could have made a living and had a home in Eastern Kentucky 7 , BILL: I don't know. I think if I could have gone to . Jackson and got a job and made a living, I probably ... It's hard for me to even visualize, because it wasn't there, and you knew it wasn't going to be there. It never really entered my mind. But I knew J could come here and have something more than I had at home. I knew I couldn't have nothing there, no matter how hard I worked. BECKY: It wouldn't have been a question. If my dad could have made a living in Breathitt Coun.ty, he would never have left. JERRY: I don't think I would have wanted to~tay in 'Breathitt County. By the time I finished high school, I had been here and visited my sister and brother I think I would have been more comfortable at that point leaving Breathitt, somewhat because ~ of the lack of opportunity, certainly, but I think I was also looking for something, maybe the bright lights a little more. So I've never, as I look back, after I've been gone forty-seime years, I've not had that strong desire to go back and live in the mountains. And I've kept those ties, certainly, and I still have very strong ties to Eastern Kentucky. My oldest brother did go back to Breathitt and made that his home, retired as a teacher in Breathitt. To him, Breathitt County was the heart of the world. But he was the only one of twelve children that really felt that, I think, that strongly. Can I ask you all to talk a little bit about your continuing connection to Breathitt County? BILL: It's something that when the spring of the • year comes, you want to go back, because to me there's no place more beautiful than the mountains in the spring and the fall. It's something that's inside of me, that I like to go back, if it's just to go back for ~day. It's almost a physical need, isn't it? .. BILL: It is. ◄ What is the nourishmenJ that you get out of being there? BILL: I don't know. I guess it's that you think of when you wer~ growing up, and all the people that you knew, tfi1J way of life. It's like you want to go back, but it's not there, you know Judy, it was never really there for you, because you didn't grow up there. JUDY: I didn't grow up there, but it's sort of like we are the typical or stereotypical hillbilly story, if you want to call it tbat. My parents were both factory workers. They'd get off work on Friday night, and we'd get in the car and drive four hours, five hours. My mom's relatives were living in Cumberland. We'd get in the car and we'd drive half the night, we'd get there in the middle of the night. We'd stay a day and a half in Cumberland, then we'd make a loop and go up through Hazard into Breathitt County. To get over onto the creek then took forever. There was a swinging bridge over the Middle Fork, and if you didn't go that way, you had to go in the other end. But we'd drive over onto· the creek, we'd spend a night there, .,nd then they'd driv~ half the nightjust 'to get 11ome. So I actually grew up knowing where that place was, who those people were. Even after I grew up I continued fo do that, and I assumed that everybody did things like that. I was grown, twenty, twenty-five, and my friends were going like, 'Why do you drive five hours to go someplace you've been dozens of times?' And you know, I didn't really have an answer for that. It's like Bill said, I just have to do it. Becky and Jerry? JERRY: We 1ust buried my mother two weeks ago. She had made Breathitt County her home all these years. She was a week away from being ninety. So that certainly kept a strong tie for me, because that was home for mother. I'm like Bill. It's always been a refreshing thing for me to go back to the mountains. There's a certain peace in the mountains that. .. I have some spots there on that old farm that I used to get an old shotgun and go up on the hill. There was one tree there that I would sit under and just look ou{ over the river valley. There's probably no other place that I can find the contentment that I can there. There's something there; there's a closeness to nature there, that I don't get here. Becky's mom and dad still live in Breathitt, so she's still got those ties. BECKY: And even if my mom and dad were gone, I would still feel that draw back to the mountains. I need to go back. Some of those old traditions mean so much, like those memorial services in the cemeteries, and dinner afterwards. That'll always be a part of me. I want to do that, and I would hate to see those things die out. Jerry and I have been goir19 back to the Griffith cemetery since '59. JERRY: The third Saturday and Sunday in August, they have the memorial service at the cemetery where most of my family is buried, my mother and dad, my brother, three of my grandparents, a lot of her family. We have been there every time since '59. On Saturday we have it where her grandmother and grandfather are buried, on Sunday then we move up the creek a little ways up on Sebastian's Branch and have it at the Griffith Cemetery. That is very important to us, those kinds of ties. But neither of us want to spend the other 364 days in Bre;.thitt County. ,.,. JuoY: It's amazing. If you go, I know for the.Buck Herald Cemetery it's like the fourth weekend in May, and you can drive up the Mountain Parkway and you can say [of the cars you pass] okay, he's going, she's going, they're going. And you can see all the flowers, because you do decorate then, so there are wreaths and things in the backs of all the

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cars. It's almost like a reverse migration. My dad has cousins that come from Florida and, everywhe~. Indiana, Michigan, you see every license plate you can imagine. BECKY: You can't get.a room in the local motel. JERRY: They have a schedule, almost, in that little area that we were from, and you know which cemetery is going to have the service which weekend throughout the summer. And they just rotate around. The churches there, there's the regular Baptist, the Church of God, the Church of Christ, there's three or four, and a lot of these services are ecumenical. All the people just Cqjlle together and have a community service. And that's one tradition I hope we don't lose, because it allows the second and third generation peopie to at least keep some contact with the mountains. And that may be, in some families, the only time they go to Breathitt. For most of them, that's the time to go back, visit the grave, decorate the grave, clean off the briars and so forth. JUDY: And see all the people that you grew up with who moved away, who maybe didn't move to the same place that you did. So. When you think of home, what comes to mind? Where is it? BARB: I feel about Harlan County the way you all , feel about Breathitt County. But home, to me now, is with Bill. I never felt like I belonged anyplace. Not in Northern Kentucky. Home ';f/aS where my_, parents were. But about fifteen years ago Bill decided that we were going to move to Bowling Green, Kentucky. General Motors was opening a plant down there. And all of a sudden I realized, this is my home. This ts where my friends are. And I had put roots down in spite of myself. But I don't feel a kinship to Northern Kentucky. I guess I still don't have a kinship with anyplace but Harlan County, and that would be the last place in the world I'd ever want to live. JERRY: I see home in a little bit broader sense. I think a part of home to me has to be the mountains, but certainly thi3' is home as far as the place I live, the family connectio~and that, friendships here. I still have those strings. But I guess my home is Kentucky My primary residence Campbell County. And my roots are here to a large extent now, much more as the years go along. I will always have a part of me that recognizes home as where I came from. That will always remain a strong influii,r.-8 in my life. But it will never be my • place of res"i"dence. So you each have a physical home, and a home of the heart. . • JERRY: And to the largest extent, for me I think both are here. But there is a part of that heart-home that will never sever those ties to where I came from. Is that a good thing? Are we richer or poorer because we have this attachment to a place where we can't live? JERRY: I feel very much richer because of it. I think it keeps me connected to a group of people, to a way of life that has changed for me dramatically. I am much richer for it. I think I have been a much stronger person because of my background. It's been very much a blessing for me. And still is, to be able to go back, sit down on a porch with someone there that has been there all their life. BECKY: I will always need to go back and touch ties with those generations that have gone on before. I've had six or seven generations in one spot. And P E R C E P • T I O N S 0 F that's something I want my son to know, 'and my granddaughter to know. This is where your heri-tage is. This is your roots. Being part of something. JuoY: That's what sets us apart from.a lot of people. I mean most of my friends are not Appalachian. And a lot of those people have no sense of history, they have no sense of family. Their family is, maybe they.go and see their mom and dad every now and then. JERRY: There's a little cemetery real clOS!;l to where Becky's mom and dad live now. I can sit there on that cemetery and count at least seven generations of my family. That certainly g~es you that sense of being a part ot more than just an " immediate family. You can sit there and speculate as to the kind of life that this person had versus now this last generation that's here. And those things are important to you. It gives you that sense of belonging. And I think that's all a part of home. That's a part 6f me, and part of my life, being able to connect to so many different circumstances and so many different periods of time, that maybe spal1'S 150 years. So many people don't have that. know people today that hardly know who their grandparents were. H O M' E ,. ,,

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... CONNIE MOORE .. Born in Cincinnati, 1961. Her mother moved to the city from Corbin, Kentucky in the forties. Now lives in the Lower Price Hill neighborhood of Cincinnati. ' If you could plot urban Appalachian hope and disappointment on a map of Cincinnati, the lines would cross at Eighth and State. For thousands of people who moved from the mountains to the city, and for their children and grandchildren, Cincinnati fulfilled a promise of comfort and prosperity. For others, the city has been a harder place. Lower Price Hill, centered around the gritty corner where Eighth Street crosses State Avenue on the western edge of the Mill Creek Valley, is where many of the people in the latter group live. This is Connie Moore's neighborhood, and her daughter Sarah's. Connie has lived in Lower Price Hill since she was about three. She's the youngest 1>f four children; her father left the family not long after she was born. When she was a sophomore at Western Hills High School, her mother was diagnosed with cancer, and Connie dropped out to take care of her. She died in 1979. Connie got her first job, at the Zumbiel Box Company in Norwood, when she left high school. "I was fifteen, but they thought I was eighteen," she says. She's had a series of temp and survival jobs since then, occasionally relying on public assistance to keep things together. Connie was twenty when Sarah was born. The unwed father, as tn the John Prine song, couldn't be bothered, and Connie and Sarah have been a little family for thirteen years. Not long after Sarah was born, Connie set out to improve her prospects, to equip herself to provide for her daughter. She earned her G.E.D. at the Lower Price Hill Community School. She later took some classes at Chatfield College, and more recently she's been PERCEPTIONS 0 F learning how to do computerized record-~epiag in a program run by the Urban League.At the time we talked, she was working as an intern at the offices of the Urban Appalachian Council, a block down Eighth Street from State. "My daughter is my inspiration," Connie says. "I want to give her everything I didn't have, and make a better life for her, as well as myself. I want her to grow up and go to college and do everything that she wants to do." Sarah-"with an H, she's very particular about her H," her mother says-dreams of being far· away. She wants to be an actress:She has performed in school plays at Porter Junior High, and wants to go to the School for Creative and Performing Arts. Then college, maybe somewhere ii;i California. But home, Sarah says, is where her mom is. When she thinks about going away, "sometimes I want to, and sometimes I don't want to. I've already said when I go, my mom's going with me." Connie's not so sure about tbat. If she could live anywhere she wanted to, she says, it would probably be Corbin. She and Sarah still have relatives there, and they go down for family reunions. "I think of [Cincinnati] as home as far as me being born here and growing up here. But I still love going down in Kentucky and staying. Because down there th~ make you feel so right at home. People there are different. They're more homey, they're friendlier, they're more family-oriented, I think. "I love it. When you're down there you're just at peace. It just seems like there's no worries, no problems." H O M E ..

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CLYDE BRUMMETT ., Born in Williamsburg, Kentucky, 1944. Moved to Cincinnati in 1966. Now lives in Ross, Ohio. 4 Clyde Brummett was at a crossroads. Twenty-two years old, recovering from an illness that nearly killed him, he hat:! some decisions to make about what he was going to do with the rest of his life. Two things he knew: He wanted to marry Rubye McFarland. And he wanted to be a teacher. He had done two years of coursework at Cumberland College in his home town of Williams-burg, Kentucky, and had occasionally done some substitute teaching in Whitley County. &Jt he hated the scratch-my-back politics that were an essential part of employment in Eastern Kentucky schools. "My principal told me, 'Clyde, you need to go north.' He said, 'there's a lot of our people up north, and they're having a hard time. I been there.' He said, 'you can do just as much good up there as you can here.'" Clyde took the advice. "That was probably one of the most difficult things I ever had to do in my life, leaving Whitley County," he says thirty years later. "It's like a big magnet, it just attracts me back." Clyde stayed with an aunt in Norwood while he worked at General Electric for ten months to pay off his hospital bills. Rubye got a teaching, job and lived with her sister in Colerain Township. • In the summer of 1967, Clyde and Rubye went back to 1/Villiamsburg to get married. Clyde applied for a teaching position wi~ @incinnati Public Schools and was assigned to Roosevelt Elementary School. He completed his bachelor's degrettduring the summers, and did post-graduate work at the University of Cincinnati and Miami University. P E R C E P T I O N S 0 F ., In those days Appalachian teachers were rare in Cincinnati schools, even in heavily Appalachian neighborhoods like South Fairmount, where Roosevelt is located. . "I gained a lot of trust that other teachers couldn't because of my accent and because of my Appalachian backgrountl," Clyde says. "And I was able to break down some barriers. A lot of times principals had problems dealing with some of these children because they were highly mobile. They would move in for a few months and move on. I was able to be like an interpreter. The problems these children had often [had to do with] just being eccepted, not having anything to feel they belonged to. I could deal with them, and they could trust me. They could confide in me. It worked great." Clyde stayed at Rooseveltior twenty years. He's now at Central Fairmount, and has a year to go before he's eligible for retirement. What he'd like to do then is create a neighborhood-based program that would seek to support the education of Appalachian and African American students by getting their parents more involved ~ the schools. It would be a natural continuation of the community work and after-school tutoring programs Clyde has been involved in since he began teaching at Roosevelt. "We saw a really high dropout rate, even in the late sixties a(id early seventies," he says. "We did some things to help these kids get back in school and find themselves. But today the streets are - H O M E J 4

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When he was eight years old, a time when most kids are learning how to read and write, Estel Sizemore was studying dynamite, helping his thirteen-year-old brother shoot coal on the Sizemore family's land near Hyden, Kentucky. "You worked with older people, guys who'd worked in the mines, and you learn these things, you automatically learn these things," he says fifty-some years later. "You learn it's dangerous. You learn how to make the dummies, out of dirt. You learn how many dummies to put in the hole, and how deep the hole's supposed to go. And then how long your fuse has gotta be, and the dynamite's gotta be in the front, the powder. You learn how much to leave it stick out of the hole to give you a cha'nce to get out of the mine. You'll drill maybe six or seven holes at a time. You have to walk across and light 'em all, but you've got to get out of there, too. That's the way we done. You just learned to work, that's all there was to it." His father had left the farm when Estel, the youngest of ten children, was seven. He went to Cincinnati to look for work, a trip that some of Estel's brothers and sisters had already made. "My brothers and sisters," he says, "as they growed up they would leave, you know It's kind of like a bird in the nest, when they get so old they've gotta go. You kind of got tired of that kind of life. You thought there was something else better. But really there wasn't nothing no better." Estel helped work the farm from the time he was old enough to pick up a hoe. When that work was done, the Sizemore family would hire out to other farmers. Estel got paid a quarter a day; his mother got seventy-five cents. There w·asn't much ~ time for school for a boy whose labor was worth a quarter a day. "I didn't go to school regular," Estel~ays. , "Sometimes I'd go one day a week. School kind of passed you right on by. It was there, a great school, great teachers. It wasn't their fault. It was my fault, I guess, 'cause I was poor." At fourteen, after a short stint working the thirty-two inch coal in a Leslie County mine, he decided to follow his father, brothers, and sisters to Cincinnati. When he first moved to the city, the lack of a formal education wasn't much-of a problem. His father was working at Union Terminal, and was able to get Estel on bussing tables. Later he vvtirked for Hagman Glass as a spray boy, applying lead coatings to the backs of mirrors, and then he got a job with a trucking company. That lasted for about ten years. But as the loading dock became increasingly mechanized, and the company began moving orders and bills of lading by teletype, there wasr:i't much room on the,_payroll for workers who couldn't read. Estel lost his job. His inability to read was Estel's private shame for years. He concealed it even from his three children. He brought home a newspaper every day. "When you can't read, you're handicapped," he says. "You can't write a letter. You can't get a postcard frorri nobody. You can never send nobody no postcard. And you hunger to do that, because somebody has to do it for you. You're handicapped in every way. You know things. You see things, and you know how to do things. You're not a dummy. It's just that you don't know how to read, and that's one of the number one things in your life that you need to know how to do." Finally he decided to do something about it. In the early eighties he enrolled in the Scarlet Oaks adult education program and learned to read, learned to write, began to plumb the mysteries of arithmetic. He's still a student, working on his GE.D. at the Nativity Literacy Center, and he's become a voca( activist on behalf of literacy programs, using his story to persuade young people to stay in school, and older ones to go back. "It's an awful hurt if you don't have a~ education," he says. "Hurts you in many ways. feel like I've got a second chance."

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RAY J(Assow Born in Cincinnati in 1977; mother is originally from • Corbin, Kentucky, father's family from Jamestown, "Tennessee. Grew up in Riverside, Westwood, and Lower Priv_ Hill. Now a student at Thomas More College in Crestview Hills, Kentucky Statistically, the likelihood that Ray K~sow would graduate from high school was pretty slim. He spent most of his childhood in Lower Price Hill, one of several Appalachian neighborhoods in Cincinnati where the high school dropout rate is around75or80pe~em. Yet here i;ie is, taking the sun on the steps of his dorm on the campus of Thomas More College on an unseasonably warm February afternoon. Ray is attendi,ig Thomas More on a football scholarship that covers most of the $16,000 annual cost. He's paying the r~t with loans and by working as a cook at an Applebee's Restaurant. "Growtng up in Lower Price Hill wasn't exactly the Beech Meadows type of area," he observes. "We didn't have picket fences down there." Ray's parents divorced when hEl, was six. His father moved to Jamestown, Tennessee, to live on an uncle's farm. Ray and his little brother stayed in Lower Price Hill with their mother. She remarried, and Ray didn't get along very well with his stepfather, making for an occasionally stormy domestic arrangement. He and his mother have had their ups and down, Ray says. Right now things are okay between them. Two things nappened while Ray was at Dater Junior ~igh that would change the course of his life he got to know Mike Overby of th~Urboo Appalachian Council staff, who got him involved in a Youth cinservation Corps program in Lower Price Hill, and he passed the exam to be admitted • to Walnut Hills High School, Cincinnati's rigorous and respected college prep magnet school. "What really opened the door for me was when I passed the test to go to Walnut Hills," he says. "I began to mingle with other people, see other people and how they lived. That gave me a different perspective on life." At the same time, through his contacts at the UAC and his work in the youth advocate program, he was learning a lot about his own Appalachian background. Things that he hadn't understood before were beginning to make sense. "I thought, wow, Appalachian? How am 11 The more and more I looked into it, the more I realized I was. Being an Appalachian doesn't just mean you come from that area. I think being Appalachian is a way of living and a way of your heart. It's like for me, I'm at peace when I think about it. I'm at peace when I think about the kind of people that I'm involved with " In the summer of 1993, Ray was one of a gr41up of neighborhood.kids who worked on a large mural called "The Journ~y" on the west wall of the UAC PERCEPTIONS 0 F office. It depicts the Appalachian migration from the coalfields to the city. "That was a great summer. That mural means a lot to me-lt gives me goose bumps to think about it. It represents a lot of hard work. "That's where I'm from, and that's where I'm always going to be from. It brought a lot of pride to me. I felt really good. And to me it showed that by working together you can achieve something. A lot of people look down on people from urban Appalachian communities, but to me they're the greatest. The mural showed that they can work together. It just brought a lot of pride." Ray had some difficulty adjusting to Walnut Hills, and in his junior year he decided to move to Tennessee and live with his father. "I had a lot of • pressure on me," he says. "I was working a lot, I had two jobs plus going to school, and that vves tough for me. A lot of family pressure, too. So I made the decisi0n to leave, and I left. That was in a matter of . three days, I just packed all my stuff and left." The next school year, he decided to come bac'k to Cincinnati, largely because he felt he'd have a better chance of getting into college and earning a scholarship if he graduated from Walnut Hills. "Walnut Hills was my main reason for coming •back. Sometimes I regret it, though. I miss a lot of my friends in Tennessee. They Just absorbed me. Their hospitality was so much different'from Walnut Hills and all the cliques." Ray's little brother, who is five years younger, is In Tennessee with his dad now. They live in a trailer in the woods, twenty-seven miles out of Jamestown. " He loves it," Ray says. "He's happy. He's home." H o" M E

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.. I askj\ay what he wants for his brother. "I want him to be happy," he answers. "I'm glad he's out of the situation that I was in. I think the best thing for him to do in his life is stay where he's at right now, and learn as much as he can. I just hope he lives happy. He deserves it. "I think together we've had a rough life. I mean, 1)/e grew up in a neighborhood where you walk to school and you see blood on the concrete. I remember a car blew up in front of my house, and another time a guy was shot in my back yard. "I don't want him to experience that. It's kind of selfish of me, but I used to want him up here. But the more I go down there and see that he's happy, I want him to be there. That's where he seems to be himself. That's where he can act the way he wants to act and b~ the way he wants to be." Ray hasn't chosen a major yet, but he's leaning toward preparing to be a teacher, .ind he thinks he might move to the mountains of Tennessee when he gets his degree. "I wouldn't mind moving back down there someday. I hear there are programs where you can move down and teach in that area, and the government will help you out. Buy a little cabin on top of a mountain somewhere." That's a ways off, though. In the meantime, ~ Ray goes to Jamestown whenever he gets a chance, both to see his father and brother and to be in the mounwins. "I think there are ties to your heart," h~ says, trying to explain the attraction of the place. "Every time I go back, when I hit Jellico and start going up that hill, it's just instantly I feel like I'm back home. "I go hiking a lot, too. Red River Gorge in the Daniel Boone National Forest. There, I just feel like I have no restrictions. I don't have to worry about the world behind me, people nagging on me. There I'm with me and with God and WLth the land, and nothing else matters." • ,

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HARRIET MARSH PAGE .... Born in Stirrat, West Virginia in 1938. After college in Institute, West Virginia, lived in Flint, Michigan and Detroit before movmg to Cincinnati in 1970. Lives in Clifton, a neighborhood near the University of CincinnaJi. • Harriet Marsh Page laughs as she greets a couple of visitors at the door of her gracious home in • Clifton. "It's a long way from No. 9 Camp," she says. She has the kind of laugh that makes you want to hear it again: it's easy and musical and it pegs the VU meter on the tape .recorder. No. 9 was the Logan County, West Virginia coal camp where Harriet grew up. "No. 9 was not a working mine by the time I lived there, but I know where it was, because the mountain's still on fire." She still carries a piece of coal company scrip from those days. She remembers her father's check number: 5922. A portrait of John L. Lewis hangs in her home: daddy was a union man. "To me that piece of scrip says a lot about what happens to people who were working hard and still up against it The whole scrip thing represents the idea that a company could control the economy, and be allowed to have their own money. It was bad enough you lived in their holise, they made the electricity, they furnished the water, they owned the church. I mean there was no part • of your life that they didn't own." . Harriet's father was from Pine Mountain, Georgia. He went to Logan County to join his brothers working in the mines in the thirties. Growing up in the forties and fifties, Harriet attended segregated schools, "which made no sense at all because we lived together." The school buses were segregated, too, but since there weren't enough buses to serve two separate school systems, some of thern had to make two trips. "Now this is how segregation worked to make you mean," Harriet says. "Where I lived, they would pick us up first in the morning, and then we'd go to school and wait an hour before school starte~ while they went back and got the white kids and took them to their school. Then when school wcfs over, they took the white kids home first, and we had another hour to wait So we had like an extra two hours every day." When Harriet graduated from Aracoma High School in 1956, there was never any doubt that she would go to college, even though the Marsh family's money was tight Her father made an arrangement with West Virginia State College, an historically black school at Institute near Charleston, to pay her tuition, room and board in monthly installments. After she completed her degree in music education, Harriet went to Flint, Michigan., where a cousin was living. She got a job teaching music in Flint schools while she went to graduate school at the University of Michigan. In 1965, after she earned her master's degree, she began teaching music in the tony-and lily-white-Detroit suburb of Gross-e Pointe. ... P E R C E P T I O N S 0 F "Henry Ford lived around one corner, and Mrs. Dodge lived up the street, and ~. R. Hudson, Jr. Now that was a long way from home," she says. "But they made a big deal of hiring me. I was front page news." On her first day in the new school, she was reunited with a childhood friend from Logan County, a Hungarian-American woman whose 11 family had left West Virginia for Detroit in the fifties. Harriet's old friend had ma~ied well, as they say, and was now living in Grosse-Pointe. "She had a daughter in my class," Harriet says, "and the very first day I was at this school, she came. And I remember the other teachers, who couldn't afford to live in Grosse Pointe, had this mindset that they were still better than this girl, because of the way she talked. She was probably as proud of me as anybody in my family. We became really good friends up there. • "Actually, I never broke any ties with home because there were always people from home wherever I was. Even though they closed my high school, we still have high school reunions every year. In the odd years they're in Logan, and even years they're in some major city. This summer it's , going to be in Detroit Last time it was in Washington. New York, LA, Denver. Wherever there are ter'r people from Aracoma," she laughs, "they form a chapter of the alumni association. "You kno'h', there are peo~ from West Virginia everywhere, and I always tell people, they're of a different spirit, and a different heart And I mean that I'm not saying there's no injustice or anything but I thirTk they're more likely to judge you as an individual than they are to put you in a class of people, and have you carry the burden of whatever's going on." H O M E

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While she was teaching at Gross:Pointe, Harriet met Cleveland Page, a professor of music at Eastern Michigan University and a visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music. They married in 1968, and in 1970, when her husband was offered a full-time position at CCM, they moved to Cincinnati. It wouldn't have been Harriet's first choice. She had fond memories of the city from attending Reds games with her father in the fifties, b11t Cincinnati had a reputation as a place that didn't offer a lot of opportunities t~ black people "That wc!s the reputation and that was the tl'Uth," she says. • Harriet taught music in Cincinnati schools for six years. She later worked for the May Festival and as fine arts manager at Northern Kentucky University. She earned a second master's degree, in arts administration, from the Un1versity of Cincinati, and in recent years she has been a freelance..Jlublicist and a consultant to arts organizations. She also directs the Marsh Series, a recital program she founded in 1978. Her father was diagnosed with black loog not long after Harriet moved to Cincinnati, and as his health declined, she brought him to the city so she could care for him. He died in 1977. Harriet buried him in the family plot in Georgia, but first she took him back to Logan County for one last time. "I had the funeral in West Vir:ginia, and my family had a fit. But I just thougffl, Daddy loved West Virginia. You would have thought he was born and raised there. Loved West Virginia. And when he would get to that delirium state, he would see West Virginia, and talk about the hills. He loved those hills. "It was important to me for the people that I grew up around to be at that funeral. So we took him home and had the funeral there, and then we buried him in Georgia." .,_

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JERALD ROBl:;RTSO!'f Born m Webbs Crossroads Kentuck,y in 7935. Family first moved to Cincinnati in • 1937, and after a one-year return to Kentucky, settled permanently in the city in 1946. Now lives in Elmwood Place, an incorporated village on the edge-of Cincinnati .. In 1983 Jerald Robertson was a widely recognized expert in industrial laminates and printed circuit board technology. He had just left Cincinnati Milacron and was considering what to do next. "That was when I really made the decision to stay in Cincinnati," he says. "Because I had a good Job, a very good job, somewhere in the world. It just wasn't here. And I looked at it and thought, you know, where have you been happiest In your life? And I said, right here. To me ifmade sense, if that's where you're happiest, why not go back?" So he took a Job with a manufacturer of industrial machinery and bought a house in Elmwood Place, the predominantly Appalachian community where he had spent his childhood. Jerry was born in Webb's Crossroads, which Is still shown on some Kentucky roadmaps but, according to this former resident, no longer really exists. "I was born In a two-room, I guess you'd P [ R C ... p -l 0 N <-; ll O M f

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-11 C. call it a shack. Ten yea~ afterwards I was there and looked at it and had a hard time believing anyone had ever lived there. My mother said the wind could actually blow through it." In 1937, the family moved to Cincinnati, where Jerry's mother had lived for a time as a teenager. His father got a Job for a furniture company and settled the family in Carthage. They later lived on Center Hill and then in Winton Place. In the m1d-forties, after Jerry's father was inJured 1n an accident, they moved to his grandparents' house in Russ.ell Springs, Kentucky, but after a year they were back, this time in Elmwood Place • Then, as now, the village on the northern edge of Cincinnati was heavily Appalachian. "I remember one day 1n class t~y asked everybody who'd been born in Kentucky to raise their hands, and it was at least seventy-five or eighty percent of the class. There was still a little bit of the old Germans, bacause this. community was 11ettled by Germans. My best friend was of German ~scent. But most of them had moved out by that time." rJerry graduated from St. Bernard High School and enrolled 1n the University of ~incinnati. At about that time his father, who had never made his peace with city life, moved back to Kentucky "Which was extremely traumatic for me at the time, 1t was something I didn't forgive him for for many, many years," Jerry says, "because I had no choice QUt to go with him for a few months until I could get back up here and get a job." That's what he did, and after four years of occasional and evening classes at UC, he entered a vyor«-study program at Wilmington College and finished his bachelor's degree in physics. He got a Job with Ralston-Purina, then with Monsanto in Dayton, doing government research. He moved to Formica, got married, had a daughter, leftrorm1ca for a job with a printing company, got divorced. After the divorce he took a Job with General Electric in Coshocton, Ohio, and then moved back to Cincinnati to work for Milacron. His decision to chuck his high-tech career had partly to do with his affection for Elmwood Place and partly to do with a ye"TI to get involved in politics. He established residence in the village just in time to file for a run at the mayor's office in the 1983 election. He ran as an independent and got 25 percent of the vote. He sat out the next election, but ran for mayor again, unsuccessfully, in 19877 and far a council seat in 1991, which he won. He discovered that the politics of Elmwood Place is not unlike the politics of a small town in Eastern Kentucky: intensely personal, factional, and ultimately frustrating He decided not to run for re-election when his term ended in 1995. "The political are~ is very slow," he sa'ys, "and I like to get things done." Now that his village council term Is concluded, Jerry is devoting his civic energy to the Mill Creek Watershed Council, which he serves as president. The council 1s an intergovernmental body that is working to clea, up the much-abused waterway that, not incidentally, connects a long string of• Appalachian ne1ghbo~oods running down the center of Hamilton County. "I look at it this way: the earth 1s here for us to use. The question 1s how we are going to use it. But there's a danger 1n that. If we ruin our environment, '!:Le've got to live in it. And we'll kill ourselves off TI's in our self-interest to pre erve the environment, or we'll kill ourselves off."

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I • KATIE LAUR Born in Paris, Tennessee in 1944. Moved to Cincinnati in 1966. Now lives in the Mt. Auburn neighborhood of Cincinnati. .. • I • After spending the first five years of her life in Paris, Tennessee, Katie Laur grew up in Detroit, where her father worked for Chrysler, and Huntsville, Alabama, where he had a job in the fledgling aerospace industry. Both places she felt like an outsider: first little Nancy Katherine Haley, the Appalachian child thrust into the r,olyglot working class n!.lighborhoods of downtown Detroit, then Kati~. going to high school in Huntsville with the children of the Southern aristocracy and the children of imported German rocket scientists. "It was more than a sense of otherness," Katie says now. "It was a sense of E.T." Katie's father and his brother both moved their families to Detroit at the same time, and the two Tennessee households responded to the strangeness of the city by drawing closer together. "Our family was what psychologists have called over-enmeshed," she says. The major social event of the week was gathering around a piano in one house or the other to sing. "Daddy had a guitar. Uncle Fred played the fiddle. And that was our idea of a party. I feel quite sure that music was our salvation, that that sawed us from going down the drain. Music and storytelling. • "No matter how bad things got. yo_u could sing, and once you'd sing you'd feel better. It's aerobically ... I think it must put those things in your brain, those endorphins." • After finishing high school in Huntsville (" most talented," class of '62). a year studying journalism at the University of Missouri, and a brief, I P E R C E P T I O N S 0 F ~ uns:tiisfactory marriage, Katie found herself in Cincinnati in 1966. She was newly married to a General Electric engineer and feeling just about as socially alienated in her new town as she had in Detroit or the Deep South. Her second marriage broke up after a few years. One day sQme friends suggested that she check out this bluegrass bar down on Main Street. "About 1972, I was really at loose ends il'hd I walked into Aunt Maudie's. And it was like being saved. It was like God had called me. I was electrified. I cannot describe to you how stunning that experience was for me. I can remember just standing in the doorway,'hearing them play "Salty Dog Blues," Jim McCall and Junior McIntyre. I just stood stock still and smiled all over my entire body, and I thoLJQht, this is home." It wasn't long before Katie had met the band, and not long after that she was sittil'ig in with them, and in the fullness of time they were offered an uptown gig at King's Row in Clifton, provided they brought the girl singer with them. After about three years with Jim McCall, Katie met Buddy Griffin and Jeff Roberts and formed the Katie Laur Sand. They played all over the East and Midwest in the seventies and eighties, including a half-dozen appearances on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion. "We toured thirty states in a Ford van," she says. "It was uncomfortable, and we had a lot of fun." In the eighties Katie began to explore another musical interest from ~r past: jazz. "One side of .. H O M E

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• • • my family was pretty sophisticated musically. The other side was real country. I saw immediately in jazz a way out of traveling. Because you couldn't earn a (iving as a bluegrass band in Cincinnati playing weekend after weekend after weekend. I knew people would get sick of that. If I did several kinds of music, then I thought well I could be working at home and I wouldn't have to travel all the time. I was pretty sick of-traveling. You don't have much of a ~fe." Katie's still a bluegrass musician,•and bluegrass is where she goes for comfort when she needs it. On the day we talked, she was thinking about the upcoming memorial for Margy Craig and the many Cincinnati musicians who have died in recent years, including her longtime companion, Tom Cahall. "I always go back to bluegrass whenever somebody dies. Because there are no songs about death in Jazz. Jazz musicians are much too sophisticated and too cool to talk about anything that emotional, but in old time country music, death is a very prominent theme. YoJ.l go back there and you can find some songs to comfort you. And there's noti)i;g like that in jazz. There's ' nothing like that 1n any other music."

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]AMES E. TALKINGTON Born in Fairmont, West Virginia in 7 964. Grew up in Columbus, Ohio and Buckhannon, West Virginia. Moved to Cincinnati in 7983. Now lives in the Clifton neigQborhood of Cincinnati. At nineteen, Jim Talkington left his central West Virginia hometown of Buckhannon to make himself into a photographer. Ri,ht out of high school, he had taken a job at the town's one photography studio, a wedding and portrait operation run by a guy named Dave Ander!>on After a year he had learned just about everything Dave, and Buckhannon, had to teach him about photography. Although he had been a good student in high school, Jim had no interest in college. Tfre alternative for a young mar. ';Yho is serious about commercial photography is to serve an informal apprenticeship, assisting in an established studio. That meant moving to a city. Pittsburgh would have been an obvious choice; natives of the northern counties of West Virginia are uniformly Stealer fans, Jim included. But his sister had recently moved from Columbus to Cincinnati, so that's where he landed in 1983. His first job was selling cameras in a downtowR shop Then there was a short-lived partnership in a photo lab. (Jim, broke, contributed his darkroom expertise as his stake in the business.) Finally he landed a series of shooting assistant positions, usually working another job or two to pay the rent. "At one point I was assisting during the day, and then I would go to Elder-Beerman and sell electronics, and then I would go to Izzy's in Florence and slice corned beef for four hours," Jim ' says. "So I'd get about three or four hours of sleep every night, and I'd change my clothes while I was driving my car on the interstate." ~e persever~d and learned the business, becoming expert.at two wildly div,ergent and demanding kinds of work: finicky, highly controlled tabletop product photography and the violent, reflexive, mud-in-the-shutter shooting of off-road motorcycle racing. Motorcycles had been his other passion, besides photography, when he was in high school, and for several years in the eaw nineties he followed the racing circuit, becoming one of the top shooters of dirt bike racing in the country. He found there was more honor than money in that narrow specialty, and although he still shoots racing assignments occasionally, his bre~ and butter job • is on the staff of the Norton studio in Corryville, making photographs for commercial clients. Does Jim's small-town background influence his visual style? "It does. I think I appreciate simplicity more. I like real simple _messages. Anything I do, I'd like for people on different levels to be able to enjoy it. So many people I know are art photo-0 F graphers who produce work just for the art community. That's all they care about. I like to make photogra~s that everybody everywhere will enjoy, and I think simplicity has a lot to do with that. I always think, Would my mom enJoy this? You know, she's not an artist, but she's got a good eye. Would she enjoy this? Would the average person 7 "I want the average person to be able to enJoy what I produce. And I think coming from West Virginia where things are, to be honest, relatively simple compared to a lot of other places, that's real important." Somewhere Jim also picked up a manic, off-the-wa!I sense of humor. He loves making people laugh, and he's good at it. A gifted mimic, he lapses into impressions of his two cultural icons-Barry White and Elvis Presley-at random intervals. He traces that, too, to a Buckhannon influence. ·"I love the ability to tell stories," he says. "A • great influence on me that I didn't realize at the time was the father of.the owner of the motorcycle shop where I worked when I was in high school. There was Smitty and then there was Smitty, his dad. Smitty senior. A guy in his seventies who was just a lunatic." I didn't know how to deal with him. He was always one up on me. I figured out what he had decided to do was start acting senile at an early age so nobody could tell when he was senile. He could catch me off guard at any time. It's a kind of humor that I've only found in the hills, based on either gross exaggeration or gross understatement. It's a way of looking at the world that can take an enormously complex situation and summarize it in two or three words. Simplicity, again." H O M E

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, Jim's father died in 1995, and his mother has • moved to northern Indiana,-so he has few connections to his home town. But he still expects to live in West Virginia again someday. "Cincinnati's my home," he says. "It is now, be1t it wasn't always and it won't always be. But for right now, everything's here that I want. At some point I want to go back. There's a certain spot on the Buckhannon River, a rock I want to stand on again. "Someday I'll end up back in West Virginia, if not all the time, I'd love to have a place there that J could go to. We'll see if the yuppies discover it, if I can still afford land there. "There's a certain comfort about being there, and that's connected to the fact that I grew up there. What that actual comfort is, I've never really thought about. The more I travel, the more I realize what I like. I go out to L.A., and I just wonder what anybody's doing out there. It's a semi-de~rt. it wasn't meant to be populated, for God's sake, they don't even have water. I just don't understand that. I've spent time in Florida for work. Sand: not my gig. Just something about the hills is definitely comforting. I lived in northern Indiana for a while, ~here my mom lives now. The terrain-" He shudders at the memory of the flatness of Ft. Wayne. "In the winter, everything's gray, there are no coniferous trees, everything's bare. That was unsettling to me. "When I left West Virginia, my goal was to see as much as I could. T.he more I see, the more I realize what I had."

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Ninth Street, her mother as a ticket-taker at the Empire Theatre at Liberty and Vine. But for Charlene, the adjustment to city life was difficult, especially in school. Kids made fun of her clothes, the way she talked, her Kentuckyness. She started at Washington Park Elementary School, and that wasn't so bad, but when she moved on to Porter Junior High School, "that, was a really bad experience for me." "I learned survival," she says. "I never really got into the studies, because I was afraid when I wer.it outside what was going to happen. And I was the protector of my sister. I was kind of like the family-I don't want to say bully, because,! didn't bully people, but I'd take up for 'em. Tell stories, whatever you've gotta do, but I didn't want to see tAem hit. And that's what it amounted to, was survival. "I learned survival and I learned to fend for myself and I protected my sisters-and my brother, as far as that ~oes-and it was rough. It was truly to God rough " It didn't get any easier when her mother died and her father, devastated and defeated by the city, moved to Tennessee. The childreQ_chose to stay. Charlene and an older sister were already married; another sister was engaged. Charlene got a job as an outreach·worker at HUB Services, a multi-service agency on Elder Street near Findlay Market. It was a good match, the streetwise family protector helping poor Appalachians with the same kind of prbblems she had dealt with growing up. "I really fell into it," she says. "I loved the work. I loved the agency." • • Her husband, Gerald Ledbetter, a seventh-grade dropout, got his G.E.D and took advanced training as a mechanic. They had four children together. .fhings were looking up. "We gradually moved up the hill," Charlen~ says. "By that I mean Over the Rhine to East Clifton, and then you moved up to the real Clifton. You Just inch~ your way up into the better neighborhoods." HU£ Services closed in 1980, and Charlene went to work at Frisch's, waiting tables. That's what she was doing when Larry Holcomb, director of the Northsidl'l Community School, recruited her to be a social worker for his G.E.D program: She's now the assistant director, and is active in community affairs outside the school. Her leadership duties with a coalition of Cincinrtclti neighborhood groups called Communities United for Action take her to Washington regularly, and when Attorney General Janet Reno visited • Cincinnati in 1995, Charlene persuaded her to drop by a CUFA meeting in Northside. In 1996 the mayor presented Charlene with a key to the city in recognition of her community work. There was some irony, which had not escaped Charlene's notice, in the fact that she had spent most of her life helping Appalachians pull themselves up by their bootstraps without ever earnjng a high school diploma herself. Finally, in 1994, she got hlir G.E.D. from her own school. "I finally said to myself, or really my son said to me, 'Mom, I can't believe that you talk to people and you give them incentive and strength and tell them you can do '1'r, you can do it, and you ain't done it r yourself.' So I had.to kind of listen to that. He called me up on it." .., Chilflene and Gerald eventually divorced, and she ~as remarried, to Ray Dalton, who's from Jackson County, Kentucky They're building a home near London, where Ray's family has a tobaGco farm, and eventually they hope to move there permanently. • "My life is here," she says. "My kids, all but one, are here. But yeah, there'll be a day when I'll go back. It won't be ,to Harlan, it'll be probably Jackson County. "The city is, I guess it's home in a lot of ways. You kindly adjust to the noise and the racket and looking behind your back and stuff like that over the years. But it's nbt like the home down in Ken-tucky where it's peaceful and all that. You can lean baE:k and you can breathe. The city's a real rat race. "As you're growing up, you know you romp and you tromp and you enJoy everything, but as you get older there's not a whole lot to do. So you kindly waQt to spread your wings, see what this big city's about. And then somehow, wheri you get up here, you get stuck in it, and then it's hard to get back. I think that most Kentucky people want to go back, because they've got something nobody else has got."

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I • PERCY MARSHALL Born in 1912 in Blanche, Tennessee. Grew up there and in Docena, Alabama and worked in Lynch, Kentucky and Coretta, West Virginia before moving to Cincinnati in 1942 Now lives in the Kennedy Heights neighborhood of Cincinnati. To say that Percy Marshall loves golf does not adequately express his relationship to the game. Percy believes in golf. It has been good for him and it will be good for you, too. If it seems to Percy that you need a golf club-and if you're not holding one when you meet him, he will consider that to be evidence that you do-he will give you one before saying goodbye. Percy estimates that he has given away between seven and eight hundred golf clubs-they're old ones that he gets from the Cincinnati Recreation Commission-in the past several years. What some people would consider an eccentricity is to Percy a missict11. "When they gave me the first golf clubs, I took 'em to the bank. And the tellers in there, I said, you want a golf club? No. I said, you need one. You need the exercise. And that will keep you from having rheumatism, arthritis, and so-so. You gotta be on your p's and q's to play golf." All this started back in 1927, when Percy, the grandson of a former slave from Tennessee, was a fourteen-year-old caddy on a whites-only golf course in Birmingham, Alabama. He and his fellow caddies were paid a quarter for working nine holes, and they didn't think it was a fair wage. What's more, they hadn't been paid, as promised, for picking peas on the fairways; the peas, Percy explains, had been planted to sweeten the red Alabama clay the course was built on. Percy and his friends used the only negotiating tactic at their disposal: they withheld their labor. "We just walked away and caused the other boys -not to caddy, said we was on strike," Percy says. And th~Birmingham authorities responded in the only way they knew how: they threw Percy and his friends in jail. P E R C E P T 1 0 N S 0 F "That got it in my blood," Percy says. "I wanted to play the game of golf. On that golf course." Percy's parents paid his ten dollar fine the next day, and three weeks later, he and his friends got their caddying jobs back, at fifty cents for each nine holes. It wasn't until fifteen years later, after he moved to Cincinnati, that Percy actually started playing. In the interim he had graduated from high school in 'Alabama and spent several years working in the coal mines in Lynch, Kentucky and Coretta, West Virignia. He moved to Cincinnati in;he early days of World War II, when defenS'e industry jobs were plentiful. He worked for a paint manufacturer for a while, then for the railroad, and then Powell Valve. In 1943 he got a job at the General Motors plant in Norwood. He worked'for G.M. for the next thirty-three years. ' He is still loyal to the company, still wears a denim jaclt:et with the G.M. "Mark of Excellence" logo stenciled on the back. "I'll tell anybody," he says, #"General Motors is about the best company that there is," because of the way the company insurance took care of his wife Gennie's medical bills when she was dying of emphysema. Yet on the day he retired in December 1976, he was so happy to get out of the plant that he broke three of Gennie's ribs when he got home, he hugged her so hard. Gennie and Percy were together for fifty-two years, until she died in 1985. They raised nine children (Gennie already had six from a previous marriage when they got together in Docena, Alabama). Percy now has fifty-one grandchildren. Well into his eighties, Percy is still active. He will tell stories at the drop of a hat, to children or anyone else who is within-earshot. But where you'll usually H O M E

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Richard Hague is a poet from Appalachia.who writes about home, so it seemed like a good idea, • when we got together to talk about home and Appalachia, to ask him to read a poem. He chose this one, which is called "Directions Back." _, First, wake from your bitter sleep full of subway and airplane dreams, hot noise and yearly strain of leaving, drunken careerings and jobs. Lie still, for a change, there where your head fits the pillow like a stone its little slope of field. Recollect yourself, the outskirts of your body, the far townships of your ankles and feet beneath the quilt like a landscape itself, your hands across your chest as if holding tenderly your own heart like a rabbit flushed from its nest. Recollect the far sandstone counties of your mind, the dwelfjngs your thoughts have built on t,tieir every oak ridge and creek bottom. Recollect their inhabitants, old friends like the words you always return to: stone, dark, sycamore, creek. At home again in your flesh, as words are at home ,n their stories, or lives at home in their days, gather yourself in to the notion of rising, and rise, cross the room, look out the window to where your past waits to begin. Open your borders, unfolding them like hands extended in welcome toward the prqcession of your selves and their family-common names: oak, sandstone, water, slopes and light. Steu~ville, where Dick grew up, is an Appalachia of a different sort from the coal and subsistence farming country that most of Cincinnati's Appalachians know. It's a steel town on the Ohio River, population about 30,000 when Dick was a boy there, closer to 20,000 now that most of the mills have shut down. Like most of the industrial towns in the Ohio Valle'i_, it is much more ethnically diverse than the Kentucky mountains. If you're from Steubenville, down-home food might mean stuffed grape leaves, kielbasa, gnocchi. "That was really a great part of the fun of growing up in Steubenville," says Dick, whose Irish family goes back five generations in the town. "I think I even knevy it at the time. I fell in love with the names, Greeks, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Czechoslovakians. My best friend in our neighborhood was named Robbie Schwartz. His father was a Czechoslovakian Jew and his mother was an English war bride. T~at was pretty typical." Dick has lived in Cincinnati for almost twice as long as he lived in Steubenville, and he is firmly rooted in the city. He came here straight out of" high school to attend Xavier University in 1965. He's taught English at Purcell Marian High School for twenty-seven years; he and his wife Pam Korte-and somewhat more recently, their two sons-have lived in the same house in Madisonville for fifteen. But his poetry keeps going to that other river town. I ask him to talk about writing as a way of getting back.home. "For me, and I don't think it's stretching it, to have grown up in Steubenville is to have grown up right smack in the middle of American history. You know, from the ethnic diversity to the history of the town, changing over from this pastoral paradise-and then all of a sudden, in 1970 or '71 • when the EPA first published air quality standards, we were number one. It was the dirtiest place in the~ountry. "Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School of painters, one of the most gorgeous ' landscape schools in all of American painting, spent his most impressionable time as a boy sketching the landscape in Steubenville. On the one hand we have this fabulous beauty, this natural lands~ape with hills and hollers and rivers, just,. fabulous. And then we've got this industrial place, that when I'd take people home with me frof!l college, who lived in places like Richmond, Indiana, they would be astonished. We'd enter the Ohio Valley and it's one mill, and one light at night, all lit up, and they'd be like, 'Where are we7 This is not like where I come from.' "So that contrast, and the history of the region, is utterly fascinating to me, and is inexhaustible as a subject, really. And there's a lot of personal history of my family that I'm still learning, that goes with the sort of public history of the place. But there's also a mythic history, that I've felt all my life, and all that stuff gets mixed together, and you're right, I mean every time I write about Steubenville it is a road back. And I feel weird that I Tiaven 't lived there for so long, because I still live there in my thoughts and imagination to a great extent." But Cincinnati is home, too, and Dick has worked to make it so. • "I don't just stay in a place. I've got to feel at home, and what that means is I've got to read a little history, and get a sense of the culture. That's why I_ live in a neighbor~ood jike this. This is an old neighborhoo.d, it's working class and middle class, it's diverse ethnically. We moved here deliberately. "I think having kids, living in a neighborhood, having a garden, you know, these kinds of things connect you to a place. It's just a kind of habit of rooting, I guess. The nesting instinct or something. I gotta feel at home, and that doesn't hap~pen passively. You pursue it."

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jENNlFER HENDERSON BRIERLY Born in Cincinnati in 1959, granddaughter of an Appalachian migrant from Stab, Kentucky, on her mother's side, she has traced her father's familr through Falmouth, Kentucky and southern West Virginia to Ireland Lives in the East End neighborhood of Cincinnati. \ Jennifer Henderson Brierly, who sings in a heart-breaking clear ~entucky soprano, has a simple criteria for choosing material: if it doesn't make her cry, she isn't interested. "Any music that makes me cry, I think it's special," she says. "In order for me to even ~ant to sing it, either somebody has to request it, and I'll do it because they want me to do it, or it has to make me cry. I have to have some connection with it emotionally." Jennifer has been singing since she was five, growing up in Cincinnati's East End, a predominantly Appalachian neighborhood along the-banks of the Ohio River. She's been singing professionally since the age of sixteen. Mostly it was folk songs, generically, unattached to any particular folk tradition, until she was in her mid-twenties. Like many second-and third-generation urban Appalachians, Jennifer grew up unaware of her mountain heritage. "The first time I connected with it was when an old fellow sang at my church. He sang the old mountain-type tunes, and I was really drawn to it. I thought it was weird because I never liked country music, but I liked the music that I was hearing." The old Appalachian sacred music passed the makes-Jennifer-cry test, and she asked the man, . whose name was Don Lawson, to let her sing with him. "I started singing with him, and he said my voice was made to sing this kind of music, and that I had to be from Kentucky. I argued with him, of course." Then she sat down with her parents and started asking questions. The family stories began to flow, and Jennifer wrote them down, and as time passed, shared them with her children. She has four: Heidi, twenty-one; Joshua, sixteen; Nicole, fourteen; and Tina, thirteen. Nicole and Tina were sitting in part of the time on the day we talked. Nicole, a student at Taft High School, wants to be a surgical nurse; Tina, who goes to Shrader, is int~nested in veterinary medicine. Married and a mother at fifteen, Jennifer tried • .going back to school after Heidi was born but couldn't manage classwork and caring for a baby at the same time. She and her first husband got divorced when she was eighteen, and a year later she remarried. She worked on a G.E.D. off and on, finally earning it from the East End Community School when she was twenty-eight. Later s~e took courses at Chatfield College. PERCEPTIONS 0 F It was during the period when she was attending classes in the East End that she heard Don Lawson sing,-end she began getting connected with her home culture in other ways. There was a school trip to the annual Appalachian Festival at Coney Island. There was a theatre group that came in and turned student writing into theatre pieces, and that was a natural fit for Jennifer, already a seasoned performer. Soon she was har1t)ing out with, and performlhg with, a group of Appalachian writers and theatre folk. While home in the sense of where I'm from was coming into sharper focus for Jennifer, home in the sense of where I live now has been a moving target for much of her life. She has lived several different places in the East End, and in Loveland, Milford, Goshen, and Lower Price Hill. For four years in the early eighties, her second husband's work took the family to the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. "We moved becausE. of finances, mostly," she says. "Our finances were never very good. That was the mairi reason, money. And needing more room, because our family kept increasing." Now things are more settled. She's had a good job, running the computer lab at Taft High School, for the past six years. Three~ears ago, she got married for the third timti, to Mike Brierly, a preacher in the Church of Christ: And she now owns her home in the East End, a place with a porch and a foundation stone from her grand-mother's house in Stab, Kentucky in the front yard. H O M E

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Her parents are living in ber house right now, while she rehabs theirs, which is nearby. "I think they want to do something like sell their house to me for a real small amount so that it stays in the family, but I don't know what's going to happen," she says, sitting at the dining room tab.le of her house. "I don't think I'm going to die here. Or there. "My husband is interested in missionary work," she explains, "and he might try to drag me oft somewhere, I think once my kids are raised and I know my mom and dad are okay. My brothers and sisters are sort of struggling right now, and I am too, but I think once they feel more like they can help our parents out and I feel like they're okay, then I might be movin' on." Jennifer and Mike have talked about Bangladesh, Australia, Mexico. I ask her if she's comfortable with the idea of moving'so far away. "I think my relationship to my new family, my husband, is going to be more•important once my children are a little more able to takr care of themselves. And my relationship with God is more important because I'm getting older, and I guess closer to death. "It'll change When I get older, because my parents won't be here. They"re gonna be somewhere else, and hopefully they're gonna be where I'm g'onna be. And if you think about your faith, that's where they're gonna be." ..

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FRANCES MARTIN .. . Born in Williamsburg, Kentucky in 7935. Moved to Cincinnati in 1952. Now lives in the Over the Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati. . - , Cincinnati's Over the Rhine was the port of ent~ for thousands of Appalachian migrants in the middle part-of thjs century. By 1940 the German working class neighborhood was losing its old-world charm and most of its Germans. io the Appalachians moving into the city it offered cheap housing, easy proximity to service jobs downtown and manufac-turing jobs in the fy1ill Creek Valley, and the company of people who shared their way of talking, their values, and their struggle to make a life in the city_ In the fifties Over the Rhine was essentially a • medium-sized Kentucky town in the middle of Cincinnati. A map from the period identifies more than twenty bluegrass-bars in the neighborhood. Little of that remains. The neighborhood has a rock and roll band named after it now, and three-dollar Heinekens have replaced quarter Hudy drafts as the beverage of choice in Main Street bars. One of the few old-time Over the Rhine institutions that persists today is Stenger's Cafe, on Vine Street a block from McMicken. Stenger's is a place where you can get an honest lunch for a little bit of money, as it was when Over the Rhine was a predom-inantly Appalachian neighborhood, and for that matter, as it was before the Appalachians came. Sit down at the bar at Stenger's any weekday or Saturday and you'll be greeted by Frances Mamn, whd's been working there for fifteen years and has lived in Over the Rhine since 1952, when she moved there from Williamsburg, Kentucky. "I lived in a little old log cabin with my grandma and grandpa," Frances, whose maiden name was Bradford, says. "When my mother got married, I didn't go with her, I stayed with my grandma and grandpa. Then when I lacked a month of being sixteen I got r:narried. Me and my ~usband stayed with my grandma and grandpa for a year, and then · p ER CE P T , I ON S 0. F .. we come here. We got married in 1951, and we come here in 1952." Frances got a job at Abbot's Linen Laundry, earning sixty-eight cents an hour, and her husband Luther worked for a company that manufactured scaffolding. Together they had eight children. "When I first come here, they had furnished apartments that you could rent furnished by the week, and it waSf1't too hard that way Groceries was a lot cheaper, too. You could live a lot better. "It was strange, because I had never been in the city, I had just been in the country all my life. Dowri there you lived a mile or two miles apart from people. Ycu wouldn't be right on tcp of somebody. And there wasn't nobody living upstairs over you or nobody living under you. It was a lot different. "I didn't like it," Frances says, "but we found work here. If I wasn't working here l,'.d be rigrit down in the country where my mother is." The Martin family lived for years on McMicken Avenue, then on 15th Street, then on Main. In 1978, after a long illness, Luther died at the age of fifty. Frances now shares an apartment on Orchard Street with Bill Fleming, who is also from Williamsburg. They met at Christmastime at Topper's Lounge, where Frances was waiting tables, the year after Luther died. France~, after more than forty years in Over the Rhine, still hopes to return to Williamsburg. , "To me that's my home. It I stay able to work and I retire I'll probably go back there and make it my home. "I really miss being around my mother, my sisters, the people I love. People treat you a lot better down there. You feel more welcome. ~round here people, I don't know, some people are nice, and some aren't." H O M E

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.. PAULETTA HANSEL -PROJECT DIRECTOR Pauletta Hansel was born and raised in southeastern Kentucky and went to college in West Virginia. She left the Appalachian region in 1979 for graduate school in Cincinnati, and hasn't made it back yet. Her educationalbackground includes a Bachelor of Arts in Human Services from Antioch College/Appalachia and a Master's in Education from Xavier University A published poet, Ms. Hansel is active in the Southern Appalachian Writers' Cooperative and in other local and regional literary activities. She is a member of the Appalachian Womens Alliance and the Appalachian Political Action Committee, and is a past recipient of the Appal4ehian Community Development Association's Outstanding Service Award and the Urban Appalachian Councils Stuart Faber Award Ms. Hansel is resource and advocacy services director for the Urban Appalachian Council. ... MALCOLM J. WILSON -EXHIBIT CUR~TOR AND PROJEC:f PHOTOGRAPHER Mateo Im J. Wilson, a native Appalachian, spent his first twenty-seven )'ears in Harlan County, Kentucky but now resides in Florence, Kentucky and works as a commercial photographer in Cincinnati, Ohio. Wilson makes photographs that reflect the culture and lifestyle of the region through images of people and events in small towns and rural areas. Wilson s talent is in photographing people and his work is emotive, personal, and honest. His images reflect the soul of his subjects. H(j has several professional exhibits and publications to his credit including Poets of Darkness and a book published by The Jesse Stuart Foundation and written by James Barry Goode titled Up From The Mines. He has exhibited in such places as the Kennedy Center in Washington, D. C. and the Center for Contemporary Art at the University of Kentucky DON CORATHERS INTERVIEWER AND WRITER Don Corathers is from Clarksburg, West Virginia, a glassmaking town that has lost all but one of its glass plants and more than a third of its population since 1950. He was educated at West Virignia University. Five years of working as a reporter and editor for newspapers in Parkersburg, Grafton, and Buckhannon, West Virginia were enough to persuade him that he was never going to be able to send his daughters to college on the salary of an Appalachian journalist, and he moved to Cincinnati in 1979. Since 1986 he has edited Dramatics, a n'ational magazine for theatre students and teachers, and his work has been published in other national magazines, including American Heritage, American Theatre, and Basic Education. He has worked as a volunteer for Cincinnatis annual Appalachian Festival for eight years, chairing the festival in 1994 and running its music program in 1995 and 1996. He is serving as president of the Appalachian Community Development Association for 1996. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife, Robin, and ,. occasionally with one or the other or both of his expensively educated daughters, Gina and Sarah.

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• ' MICHAEL MALONEY -HUMANITIES ADVISOR Michael Maloney hails from Breathitt County in southeastern Kentucky. His educational background incluoes degrees in philosophy (BAJ, educational research (M.Ed.) and community planning (MRP). He has studied at the University of Kentucky, Xavier University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He currently teaches Appalachian Studies and Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati and Chatfield College. He was the founding director of the Urban Appalachian Council and still serves that ~gamzation iJS a volunteer and consultant. Publications include A Directory of Appalachian Artists in Ohio, The Social Areas of Cincinnati: An Analysis of Social Needs, A Rites of Passage Program for Adolescent Appalachian Males, anrJ..iumerous articles and reports. As a management consultant, Mr. Maloney has worked with a variety of organizations in such areas as planning, organizational development, grantsmanship, fundraising and board development. • . ' HELEN M. LEWIS -HUMANITIES ADVISOR Helen M. Lewis, Ph.D., is an educator, writer, film maker, and activist who has lived and worked in Central Appalachia since 1955. She is a former instrurtor at Clinch Valley College at Wi~, Virginia, Eastern Tennessee University and Appalachian State University. She was recently interim director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College, Berea, Kentucky. She is currently on the education staff of Highlander Reseqrch and Education-Center, New Marki!/, Tennessee. She has also worked with Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky and the AMERC Appalachian ministries program at Berea, Kentucky. She is the author of numerous articles and books on Appalachian issues, community development, coal mining families and health and safety issues. She is co-author with Mary Ann Hinsdale and Maxine Waller of a book on community development published by_ Temple University Press (1995), It Comes from the People; Community Development and Local Theology. Dr. Lewis received her master's in sociology from the University of Virginia and her doctorate from the University of Kentucky. RONALD D. ELLER -HUMANITIES ADVISOR Originally from southern West Virginia, Ron Eller has spent the last twenty-five years writing and teaching about the Appalachian region. A descendent of eight generations of families in the southern mountains,•Dr. Eller currently serves as director of the Appalachian Center at the University of Kentucky, where he coordinates research and service programs on a wide range of Appalachian policy issues including education, health care, economic development, civic leadership, and the environment. He is in demand as a speaker on Appalachian issues at colleges, conferences, and community forums throughout the nation, and he serves as a frequent consultant to civic and governmental organizations and the national media, including the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Ford Foundation and the American Council on Education. A former Rockefeller Foundation Scholar, Dr. Eller holds the Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at-Chapel Hill and is widely known as a scholar of Appalachian history and the study of rural economic development and social change. He has published more than thirty articles and reports, but he is most well-known for his award-winning book, Miners, Millhands and Mountaineers: The Industrialization of the Appalachian South. He currently serves as chairman of the Governor's Kentucky Appalachian Task Force and as a member of the Sustainable Communities Task Force of President Clinton's Council on Sustainable Development. Dr. Eller is married and has three children. •

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THE URBAN APPALACHIAN • COUNCIL Urban Appalachian Councrl .. The Urban Appalachian Council (UAC) was formed in 197 4 to act as an advocate and catalyst for individual and community development among Appalachian migrants and their descendants in the Greater Cincinnati area. UAC's mission is to promote a decent quality of life for urban Appalachians, and to concentrate on and be a fellowship of persons acting on their issues and concerns. Initially, UAC researched the status of urban Appalachians, documented their p.oblems and needs, and identifi~ critical gaps in resources and services. This information was used in legislative advocacy, program development and the creation of information resources. Currently, UAC provides a brnad spectrum of programs, BOARD OP TRUSTEf:5 1996 Class of 1996 Class of 1997 John Blevins Teresa Brown Cecil Good ' Rev. Don Drewry John Graves Rev. Joe Henry Bonnie Kroeger Rebecca Herrin Harmon McClung Dr. Susannfl Kirk Barbara l3tanley Ed Shaffer ' . services, research and advocacy efforts targeted primarily to specific Cincinnati nejghborhoods which are predominantly Appalachian and low-income. Programs include adult basic education services, community-based human services; support to community based organizations, leadership de>Jelopment, services to youth, cultural programming, and public information and training. Akey element of UAC's work is to promote positive images, oppose negative stereotypes and reinforce pride in Appalachian heritage. Through its cultural and training programs, UAC brings increased awareness and appreciation of Appalachian people and heritage throughout the greater Cincinnati area. Class of 1998 Rev. Joe Gann Gus Morgan Pat Timm .. Richard Westheimer ..

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5PFClAL THANKS To ... ,. Barbara Stanley, Michael Maloney and Larry Redden for planting the seed. Maureen Sullivan and Debra Bays, Perception's first project director, without whose careful nurturing the sprout would not have grown, Ron Mason for all his weeding and hoeing. James R Goode of the University of Kentucky's Appalachian Center and Melanie Warman of the Ohio Appalachian .Arts lnitiativewho with their scheduling a~sistance are helping to spread the fruit .., 8qrbara Bayless Duraid Da'as Ron.Eller Judy Jennings Helen Lewis Phillip Obermiller Raenell Schoering Deborah Tuck Oscar A. Velez Tom Allison Julie York Sandy Wilson Nancy Jackson Acutex Signs and Lettering . Norton Photography and Norton Photography 2 Jim Kaelin & DesignMark, Inc. Rose Laminating Cincinnati Plastics Paula Norton for the photographs of Pauletta Hansel, Malcolm Wilson, and Don Corathers Photo of Katie Laur in performance • courtesy of Jim Talkington We also extend our deep gratitude to all those who helped us identify urban Appalachians for participation in this project, and most especially to those individuals and families who shared their stories.

Perceptions of Home

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