  | Book Details Title: Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains |
Book DescriptionReview “Women in Kentucky’s Appalachian community come into focus in lawyer Chambers’s powerful debut memoir, which aims to put a human face on a stereotyped region. . . . This is a passionate memoir, one that honors Appalachia’s residents.”—Publishers Weekly “A family memoir that celebrates the inspiration of strong women within a rural culture most often characterized as patriarchal . . . [Chambers tells] stories that illuminate the hardworking spirit and flashes of hope among the populace, the women in particular.”—Kirkus Reviews“In this age of political divisions, Hill Women offers a loving, luminous look at an often misunderstood and undervalued segment of our society.”—BookPage “A nuanced portrait of the women of Appalachia . . . [Chambers] offers a personal and compassionate voice to the national conversation around poverty, class, and economy in the Coal Belt. . . . The argument floating below the surface of this memoir is one about economy and culture—an economy that generates massive wealth, at great human cost, and a culture of contempt for the poor. . . . Chambers carefully documents the personalities that shaped her, as she warns against characterizing the people of her region by their poverty alone, flattening their individuality in the process.” —The Progressive “This Appalachian memoir doesn’t just celebrate the women of the hills—it fights for them. . . . Chambers balances out her personal story with vivid portraiture of her Appalachian kin. . . . Their voices ring out, frank and earthy, touched with King James but practical above all else. . . . She faces the region’s challenges with heartbreaking accounts of opioid addiction and a legal system less concerned with justice than it is with wringing money out of the broke and desperate. Like the hill women before her, Chambers is pragmatic, fighting for achievable change in a punishing system.” —Shelf Awareness “Surrounded by poverty and decay, Chambers managed to beat the odds and explore life beyond the mountains. . . . In Hill Women, Chambers recounts these experiences, breaking down myths about the region and revealing just how strong its people are.” —Nashville Lifestyles “Cassie Chambers tells the story of the women in the mountains of Kentucky who nurtured her, as well as her own journey to become a fierce defender of Appalachian women. This is a book that teaches us about service and gratitude, family and the tenuousness of belonging, and the power of education, loyalty, and home.”—Steven Stoll, author of Ramp Hollow “A fascinating view of an often misunderstood population of America and an uplifting ode to the strong women at its core, whose unique stories and sacrifices inspire . . . a book to be celebrated!” —Cea Sunrise Person, author of North of Normal Read more About the Author Cassie Chambers grew up in eastern Kentucky. She graduated from Yale College, the Yale School of Public Health, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School, where she was president of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, a student-run law firm that represents low-income clients. Chambers then received a Skadden Fellowship to return to Kentucky to do legal work with domestic violence survivors in rural communities. In 2018, she helped pass Jeanette’s Law, which eliminated the requirement that domestic violence survivors pay an incarcerated spouse’s legal fees in order to get a divorce. She lives in Louisville with her husband and their son. Read more Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1The sun was directly over the Cow Creek holler, shining down onto the tobacco plants below. The summer heat was sticky, the type of heat that clings to your skin and makes your hair feel damp. I was standing in my grandparents’ tobacco field, trying to shield my eyes from the incessant sun while holding an armload of tobacco sticks.My five-year-old body was tired. I had been up since before five a.m., when my aunt Ruth lightly shook me awake. “Time to get up, Cassie,” she’d said in a no-nonsense tone of voice. “There’s work to be done.”That always seemed to be the case on the farm. So much work to be done.Even at this young age, I knew I liked work—or at least that I was supposed to. Work was what kept the days full. What allowed me to bury my hands in the earth. What made me the same as my mother, my aunt Ruth, my Granny.It didn’t hurt that my aunt Ruth gave me a dollar for each day I helped out on the farm. I’m sure I was more of a hindrance than a help, my clumsy child hands fumbling through tasks. But she was teaching me an important lesson, one that generations of mountain women have learned before me: There is value in work. Hard work pays off.At the end of the week Aunt Ruth would take me to town. We would stop at yard sales along the main road, or perhaps wander into the Family Dollar store. I would spend my hard-earned money on a used doll or a bag of candy, or some other trinket. And, pushing my wadded-up bills across the counter, I would feel proud.I released one tobacco stick onto the ground below and continued walking through the rows of plants, scattering the tobacco sticks as I went.Up ahead I saw my aunt Ruth, bent over in the field. Aunt Ruth was the best tobacco worker in Owsley County. Even the men said so. She could cut more stalks per hour than the strongest man. She rarely stopped to rest.Watching her move through the fields ahead of me, I was struck by her solidness, the strength of her body. Even then I could see that she mirrored the mountains rising up in the distance. I was also struck by her grace. The way she knew the land. The deftness and ease she carried to each task.“How ya doin’ back there, Cassie?” she shouted from up ahead.I was fine. I was content. I was at peace in this holler in the hills.The sun sank toward the edge of the mountains, and our time in the fields drew to a close for the day. We made our way from the tobacco fields to the green-and-white farmhouse nestled on a nearby hill. We sat on the front porch to rest before beginning the evening chores. The porch’s tin roof was rusted, and the wooden floorboards sagged in places. The attached house looked tired, even then, edges and joints giving way. But pots of bright wildflowers sat along the front rail, their long stems woven into a net of green and color. They made the old house something alive, something beautiful. Aunt Ruth loves to plant wildflowers.Aunt Ruth has not had an easy life. Born in 1958, she was the fourth of seven children and the firstborn girl. My mother would come along—years later. Ruth, like the rest of her siblings, began working in the tobacco fields at an early age. She liked working on the farm—liked working with the earth—and she made it a point to outwork her brothers.She had once dreamed of something beyond the tobacco fields. She had wanted to graduate from high school—to be the first in her family to get an education. But when she was about sixteen she got rheumatic fever and had to stay home from school for a year. She had attended school sporadically before that, and, with no plan to keep current on her lessons, she felt like it would be impossible to ever catch up. She decided that she had been silly to dream of anything more.So Ruth set out to achieve in the only way that she could: becoming the best worker in Owsley County. It was one of the few paths she had to gain recognition, to feel pride. Day after day, year after year, she worked on the farm. Cutting her hair short to keep it from matting against her neck. Wearing heavy jeans even in the summer heat. Breaking her body to contribute to her family.Over the years her siblings moved off of the farm, got married, started families of their own in other parts of Owsley County. Ruth remained behind. She knew that her aging parents couldn’t manage the farm without her. She knew that she was the best worker in the family. She knew it was her job to keep the farm afloat.That’s not an easy thing to do as a sharecropper. Our family didn’t own the land we worked—we never did. We rented the house, the barns, the fields, from the Reed family. At the end of each planting season, we gave half of the tobacco earnings to the Reeds for rent. If it was a good year, my family may have gotten to keep a little less than ten thousand dollars. The constant repairs to the house, need for new farm equipment, and other daily expenses depleted that money quickly. Aunt Ruth took on odd jobs—mowing lawns for neighbors and washing cars in town—to help make ends meet.After we sat on the porch for a bit, Aunt Ruth stood up and told me it was time for chores. I scampered behind her to the barns, where we tended to the animals. More accurately, Aunt Ruth tended to the animals while I tried to track down the newest litter of barn kittens. One of the old barn cats had given birth earlier that week, and she kept moving her kittens from place to place, probably to keep them safe from my unwanted cooing and petting.I loved the smell of the barn. Even now I can smell it if I close my eyes, the scent of cool and earth and animal.The sun had barely set when it was time to get ready for bed. There was no indoor plumbing, so I used well water to brush my teeth and wash my dirt-covered body the best I could. Every few days Aunt Ruth filled up a tin tub with hot water so I could take a bath.Aunt Ruth walked with me to the outhouse and shone a flashlight inside the lopsided hut before I went in. The other day, Granny had said that the neighbors found a black snake in their outhouse. The thought of a snake—even a harmless black snake—lurking in the dark terrified me. Aunt Ruth put a big bucket in the house for us to use as a nighttime toilet so no one had to trek to the outhouse in the pitch dark.That night I crawled into bed next to Aunt Ruth. She told me stories about the haunted holler, and our kinfolk, and the mountain people. Storytelling is an art in the mountains, a way of transmitting history, culture, and shared experience from generation to generation. She told me stories about my mother as a child, the ghosts in the woods, and quick-witted hill people. I listened raptly to her yarns until my eyes grew heavy and my lashes knitted together.I would spend several more nights here, in Owsley County, that week. I would probably spend several nights the next week. Both my mother and father were students, young parents, struggling to build a better life for me. They couldn’t afford childcare, and there was nowhere I would rather be than this patch of earth in the mountains. I often came for a week at a time; my mother says that, as a young child, there were periods when I was here more than anywhere else. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t frequently running through the Cow Creek holler.And I rarely ran alone. There was a slew of kids to get into trouble with. My cousins—Melissa, Ben, and Dustin—are all around the same age as me, and our family relationship mandated that we become friends. Family was important—all of our parents believed so, and they made sure we spent time together, “gettin’ to know your kinfolk,” as Granny liked to say.Melissa, just a few months older than me, was my best friend. We would catch crawdads in the creek and play with dolls in the living room. The boys, Ben and Dustin, would drive us crazy with their wild antics and roughhousing ways. Even as young children they were taught to embody a type of tough masculinity that drew suspicious glances from us girls. We would sneak off into the fields to pick wildflowers and hide when we heard them coming.Aunt Ruth was often charged with supervising us. She had a matter-of-fact approach to life and childcare. “Well, of course that dog bit you,” she once told a crying Ben. “I told you not to pull his ears. That’ll teach you not to bother that dog no more.” She raised her eyebrows at him and went back to work. She was a busy woman, doing what it took to keep the remaining family afloat. She didn’t have time to fuss over us, and she believed that children learned from the natural consequences of their actions. But we never doubted that she loved us something fierce. Read more Customers Review: It takes a certain kind of person to exceed in this crazy world. Imagine growing up in one of the most poverty-stricken parts of the country where your family and peers barely made it through high school, yet you managed to push yourself toward a future that included a Yale undergraduate degree followed by Harvard law. That’s exactly what Cassie Chambers did. This is her coming of age in the rural mountains of Appalachian Kentucky in her memoir HILL WOMEN: FINDING FAMILY AND A WAY FORWARD IN THE APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS.This is not just her story, but her grandmother and her mother’s as well. A grandmother who spent her life on a farm, dedicated to raising her children and caring for her husband, and even though she didn’t have access to one herself, she valued education. A mother, whose family sacrificed their own goals, to meet hers, so that she could be the first in the family to graduate high school and pursue a college degree. Who would then go on to meet her husband, a college-educated man, pursuing a graduate degree, as her teacher when they met, who would soon raise their daughter (the author), who would spread her wings farther than their wildest imagination.HILL WOMEN is a tribute to the women of the mountains, the backbone, of the world that Chambers grew up surrounded by. Including an aunt so hard-working, so determined, while without academic schooling, she knew the value of work and could teach anyone the ways of running a farm, growing a crop, and spent her life providing for her family.Chambers not only came from the mountains that are ingrained in her, but she ultimately, went back, to give back. While she left her beloved mountains to gain experience and a formal education, it is her family and her roots who keep her grounded and made her who she is today.HILL WOMEN demonstrates the importance of the power of going back home to help others in need. The author imparts strength through her perseverance and actions and proves that cycles can be broken.Coming of age and coming home. | |
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