family history

The Long Road to the Last Goodbye (part 2)

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 4 Comments

West Virginia has a long history of conflict. The conflicts are documented in our history books and highlight near-wars like the Battle of Blair Mountain and the textbook controversy that rocked Kanawha County in the 1970s. In these kinds of fights guns are fired; sometimes, people die; and almost always there is a gouged scar on our cultural landscape. On a recent visit to Vermont I heard myself trying to explain how things play out in West Virginia, and what came out of my mouth after a few glasses of wine was, “We are a culture of winners and losers.” My dinner guests were hooked, I could tell, when they put down their own glasses and leaned in to hear more.

I wasn’t sure there was more to say, and I didn’t expound much on my words; I think they speak for themselves. But I have rolled the wine-tinged phrase around and around in my own mind without ceasing for days now.

West Virginia is a culture of winners and losers.

It is something so obvious once I said it out loud that I hardly know where to start, and yet the looks on my dinner companions faces said it was not entirely normal or expected. I think communities that are thriving well  beyond where we are in West Virginia have either never accepted the winner/loser dynamic or have so solidly rejected it long ago that hearing it is still real in other places is like hearing that dragons exist. It’s not out of the realm of possibilities, but you are shocked nonetheless.

We don’t really resolve things in West Virginia, and accepting that reality has been a slow train coming for me. I haven’t wanted to internalize and deal with the fact that this is a place of hurts that fester untended. In an odd way I think we’ve learned, as a people, to allow our wounds to go full-tilt into permanent scars. When I look at mountain top removal, or mine deaths, or cancer rates or any number of “wound like” truths in our Appalachian landscape, I wonder. I wonder where that line is when people stop trying to get well and start trying to catalogue their scars. “We may never get well,” they say, “but we can make you look at what happened. We can try to make you look at what you did.”

The Long Road to the Last Goodbye

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 5 Comments

Following is a spontaneous first draft intro for my next creative nonficition packet submission. It will get better. But one of my favorite parts about pursuing my MFA is to just sit down and let it out.

I am leaving West Virginia. It is not the first time, but it will be the last time. I’ve gone through some cyclical departures, but this one has all the signs of a last goodbye.

This strange place is my home. I was conceived and born in Appalachia, as were many of my recent maternal and paternal ancestors and relatives. We are hardwired into the hills. We come from the rock and the soil and yes, if I am truthful we come from the coal. One of my great grandfathers was a coal miner. He fathered ten children, and yet when I see his photograph not twenty years before his death he is a young man. Handsome, tall and lean, he has a look about him that is telling; it tells of an internal age that a casual viewer cannot gauge.  For some reason I’ve never been able to articulate until now, I have refused to own him. My entire family has refused to own him. His name was Charles Edward, but I had to look up my grandfather’s obituary to confirm that. I’m not sure how I know his wife’s name by heart, but his is a thin disintegrated sheet of paper in my history files.

I can still see her photograph with no effort. In fact her son, my grandfather, prominently displayed for years her photograph in his home. In the picture she is as a vibrant young woman in a lace collared blouse and rich blue velvet gown. It was decades after I first saw this photograph that I saw the entire picture. She is smiling with the glow of love because she is standing next to her husband, Charles Edward, in the unaltered photo.

But in the altered photo my great grandfather is no more. His son, my grandfather, decided to cut him out of the picture and to remove him from a visual place in his home where children and great grandchildren might know who he was. On some level, cutting him out of the picture was who he was to my grandfather, Charles Edward’s son. My grandfather was the ninth of ten, and his father died a coal miner well before he had any real memory of his dad. Better to just cut him away. I don’t know that I would post photographs of an unknown parent myself.

But the unknown, the dead and absent, the ghosts, don’t just go away. They tolerate the neuroses of the living for a time, but they always return to claim what is theirs. This is the story of what is Charles Edward’s. I’ve come to believe that my final goodbye to West Virginia on behalf of myself and Charles Edward’s great-great-granddaughter is part of what belongs to him.