The Dreamingest, Wishingest Visionaries Ever

A call-in radio show with messages for incarcerated loved ones, a brewpub that employs people with felony convictions, and a brick-oven bakery in an abandoned elementary school. Last fall and winter, Tom Lee travelled Central Appalachia in search of a better understanding. In a region that has had its share of stories of despair, Lee found stories of hope, community, and creativity.  

Story and Photographs by TOM LEE

December 1, 2020

Two hours earlier, Rae Garringer put on padded headphones and settled into a black vinyl swivel chair in the second-story studio on Madison Avenue. Within minutes, red lights on studio phone lines are burning brightly. For the next two hours, they will remain that way, Garringer broadcasting intimate messages to the incarcerated.

Hi. Jason, this is Sabrina, here, I just want to say I love you first. And I can’t wait to see you again next year. That’s what I wanted to say to you tonight, I love you. And I’m so happy tonight that you’re hearing this.

Garringer, whose preferred pronouns are they/their, listens and notes the length of each call, choosing whether to reconcile caller, message, and intended recipient. Duration will matter. They will have to compress two hours of calls into the one-hour show, airing Mondays at 9 p.m. 

This is Jasmine. Hey, Rush, I just wanted to remind you that I love you so much, love you to pieces, you know that.

Rae Garringer producing Calls from Home at WMMT- FM studios, November 11, 2019, Whitesburg, Kentucky.

Downstairs, Whitesburg-native Ada Smith is spinning “Hip Hop from the Hilltop,” a long-running Monday night show that’s as much a part of “Calls From Home” as the calls themselves. “The whole point of the music,” Smith says, “is this is how the show got started.” 

In the 1990s, when old-school was breaking news, a woman called WMMT and told the DJ that her brother, newly imprisoned nearby, listened to the show every Monday night and asked if the DJ could dedicate a request. “It just kind of grew from there,” recalls WMMT’s longtime general manager, Elizabeth Sanders. 

On a chilly night 25 years later, Smith spins the longest-running hip-hop show in Central Appalachia. Rihanna. Bad Bunny. Big K.R.I.T. Missy Elliott. And, always, a tip of the hat to those old school days. Tonight, it’s 2Pac and Outlawz:

Will I forever be alone?

Teardrops and closed caskets.

“The more we can understand how our struggles are linked,” Smith says, “and see each other as human beings willing to wrestle with each other and listen to each other, yes, there is potential and hope.” 

Andre, I love you, baby. Keep your head up. 

Long pause, the sound of breath caught. 

Give me a call when you can. Good night. Love you, baby.

Upstairs, as the calls come in, Garringer rarely interrupts. Their heart is expressed in withdrawal from the sacred space between imprisoned and loved one, a ghost in the recording machine.

Weeks later, coffee mugs on tables at the radio station, I ask Garringer about Uncle Joe, his mom, and Cameron.

“I think there’s a lot to be learned about love and forgiveness and, sorry …” 

Garringer pauses and wipes a tear. 

“ … from the people who are calling in. That’s the thing that’s really striking, just like the vulnerability and faith and commitment and solidity of people’s abilities to call in week after week. There’s a lot of strength in it that we’re all lucky to get to hear, and yet at the same time, we know it’s not for us.”

I wonder, then: who is it for?

Since 1969, Appalshop and WMMT have been telling stories of Central Appalachia from Whitesburg, Kentucky.

“‘When did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’

Then the king will reply to them, ‘I assure you that when you have done it for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you have done it for me.’”

— Matthew 25:39-40

It isn’t a ministry at WMMT, not in the ecclesial sense, anyway. The radio station, like all other media offerings that spring from the tiny but mighty Appalshop nonprofit in Whitesburg, exists to share the story of Appalachia. WMMT is simultaneously creating and defining the Central Appalachian community within the station’s listening area of eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia, and southern West Virginia.

If your voice is in public affairs reporting, they’ll train you and teach you. If your voice is in playing the music of your heart, they’ll give you a seat at the control board. In my visits to Whitesburg, I heard trap, mountain gospel, classic rock, and hard mountain folk. The morning of my most recent trip out of town, WMMT played Bruce Springsteen’s cover of “Rhinestone Cowboy” up against Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat,” and it was all I could do not to weep all the way to Hazard, Kentucky. 

“I think that there are many people who understand that our communities are more complex, that there are many strands,” Garringer says.

One of those strands, recently woven by a rusty needle into the ancient tapestry of Central Appalachia, is the very modern thread of mass incarceration. 

Not long ago, there was no audience for “Calls for Home.” As recently as 1990, when the trains hauled more than 10 million tons of coal out of Letcher County, there were no calls — not because there were no broken hearts, but because there were no prisons.

From 1985 to 2014, however, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that coal mining employment fell by 70%. So, when Appalachian politicians realized that the 1980s weren’t coming back, they turned to a growth industry for which they could claim complete responsibility.

The war on drugs of the 1980s created an enormous new class of incarcerated persons. American imprisonment rates became the highest in the world. During the 1990s, 245 new American prisons opened in rural areas — a new prison every 15 days. In Central Appalachia, state and federal authorities built 16 prisons in the hollers and on the denuded mountaintops of Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee, many of the modern “supermax” variety.

The prison boom has reshaped who is living in Central Appalachia. The U.S. Census estimated in 2019 that Letcher County’s population was 0.6% Black. In contrast, at the massive Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex in West Liberty, north of Whitesburg, the inmate population is 31% Black, according to the Kentucky Department of Corrections’ 2018 annual report.

None of this has made much economic difference in the region. In Letcher County, for example, the median household income is $29,856, less than half the national average. In fact, along with many of its neighbors, the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines Letcher as “persistent in poverty,” meaning more than 20% of its population has lived consistently in poverty since 1980.

So, what could a radio show do in the midst of a prison explosion in a persistently poor region?

“WMMT’s mission is to serve this community, and specifically to amplify voices that aren’t often heard,” Smith says. “People who are incarcerated have very few avenues for them to mean anything to people. Part of hearing from their loved ones is a big part of understanding who is here, where they’re connected to, who they are.”

This is no easy mission. The region is not merely famous for its stubborn macroeconomics. There are myths about it as well.

“The highlander is a challenge to all Americans everywhere,” wrote Letcher County attorney Harry Caudill in his seminal 1963 dissection, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area. “His sorrowful history has deposited him as a material and spiritual orphan on the nation’s doorstep. He will not go away, and, unless he is helped, his situation will not improve.”

One cannot come to Letcher County without also confronting the legend — and legacy — of Caudill. His impassioned writing in Night and other essays of the ‘60s and ‘70s attracted presidents, inspired the War on Poverty — launched by President Lyndon Johnson in nearby Martin County — and gave birth to the Appalachian Regional Commission. Letcher County’s public library is named for him. A larger-than-life statue of the late lawyer and author guards the front door.

“The essential element of the plateau’s economic malaise lies in the fact that for 130 years it has exported its resources, all of which — timber, cola, and even crops — have had to be wrested violently from the earth,” Caudill wrote in Night. “The nation has siphoned off hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of its resources while returning little of lasting value.”

For his considerable local stature and his understanding of extractive economics, Caudill’s reputation has frayed otherwise. First, his definition of “Appalachian” only meant white (and male). Second, his chronicles suggested a fascination with eugenics that became clearer as he invited the eugenicist William Shockley to Kentucky in the 1970s to continue his studies. Combined, observations of an Appalachian mountaineer in Caudill’s Night as “marked indelibly as the son of a penniless laborer whose forebears, in turn, had been, more often than not, simply serfs,” did not stand up to further review. 

More, Caudill saw Central Appalachia in the thrall of the zero-sum, honor code memorialized in story and songs like Florence Reece’s coalfields protest song, “Which Side Are You On?” If “Calls From Home,” to say nothing of the persistent backlash to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, suggested anything, it was the flaw in that narrative.

All that said, there is little doubt that, in Whitesburg, Caudill is the first, if not the last, word on Central Appalachian community. If one wanted to imagine the future of Central Appalachia through a new lens, one had to reverse the telescope from Caudill’s storytelling about its past.

So, I took encouragement from the library that bears Caudill’s name. Across the front door, I found a sign:

COME LOOK FOR YOURSELF

Armed with data, inspired by voices traveling over the ether across mountains, I decided to do just that. I would go deeper into matters of insiders and outsiders, community and identity, in search of different answers and, perhaps, different questions.

I set out on the road to meet St. Paul.

I was born and raised in the mouth of the Hazard Hollow
Coal cars rambled past my door
Now they stand in a rusty row all empty
And the L&N don’t stop here anymore.

— Jean Ritchie, “The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore”

Eugene Mooney, a former secretary of the Kentucky Department for Natural Resources and Environmental Protection, famously once said, “There’s not a magic electricity fairy. It’s made by some power plant someplace that feeds on coal.”

I’m crossing Pine Mountain and the magic fairy rises before me. It doesn’t stop rising until it swallows the mountain view whole in pale-horse steel and smoke as if someone relocated the set of “Gotham” to southwest Virginia.

The Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center is not just some power plant somewhere. It is a reminder of a time, not so long ago, when the political fairy of “clean coal” flitted about these mountains. Former Gov. Tim Kaine, who would later run for vice president on the Democratic ticket in 2016 and is currently a Virginia senator, signed legislation in 2006 declaring clean coal the energy policy of the Commonwealth. Then, fast as you could say, “natural gas,” the energy industry stopped talking about clean coal. Never mind all those coal gobs to be burned — Kaine’s most recent successor, Gov. Ralph Northam, proposed legislation this year to shutter the plant by 2030.

I drive past the Virginia City behemoth and across the headwaters of the Clinch River into St. Paul, Virginia, population 840. I have come here looking for lunch, beer, and Jesus, and I found them all at Sugar Hill Brewing Company.

Greg and Jennifer Bailey welcome me into the burger and beer joint they repurposed from an old hardware store in 2018. At first glance, Sugar Hill seems normal enough, if a little remarkable for a town of 840. Perched on the corner of Fifth & Broad in downtown St. Paul, it boasts high-ceilings with floor-to-ceiling windows, beer listings in multi-colored chalk on a 12-foot blackboard, and gleaming tanks open for tours and tastings.

The Baileys look and play the part of the small-town Methodists they are: warm and kind, down to their matching T-shirts declaring, in second-coming type: “I ❤️ JESUS.”

But as I look more closely at the shirts and read the subhead — “And I drink a little beer sometimes” — the first hint emerges they might be up to something.

“I had never brewed beer in my life, and we had never worked in a restaurant, neither one of us had,” Greg tells me over lunch. Initially hoping to invest some savings from Greg’s career in commercial contracting, things took a turn when brewing equipment cost more than planned, and the Baileys’ anticipated labor force — their sons — had other ideas. Suddenly, the Baileys had $400,000 invested in yeast and tanks, and no one to make the beer, cook the food, or clean up the place.

The mother of invention knocked at the door, and they turned to the only people they could hire — people no one else would.

“We used to feel real funny about people with lots of tattoos and piercings,” Jennifer says. “I mean, we didn’t like it. We just didn’t want to have too much to do with people like that, just because I guess we didn’t know anybody that way.”

Word spread like the melting pimiento cheese over my burger. You could get a job at Sugar Hill, just don’t use on the job and don’t steal from the Baileys.

“We got to know some people who worked here,” Jennifer continues. “We hired them. ‘Cause you know at times you’re desperate in a little town like this. And we have grown to love so many people who have the tattoos and the piercings, and we understand they are human beings. And that’s been the best byproduct of this restaurant … We have learned to love people who are different, and people who I probably wouldn’t have given the time of day to before.”

Chalking the menu board at Sugar Hill Brewing Company in St. Paul, Virginia.

Connie Strouth, 55, is one of those people. A felony conviction for conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine sent Strouth to prison and left her virtually unemployable when her probation began. She rented a one-room apartment across Broad Street and watched the people come and go into Sugar Hill. One day, she did, too.

“I tell ‘em everything,” Strouth says on a break from her kitchen prep job. “I tell the truth. I’ve been through too much not to. And I asked, ‘Do you hire felons?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’”

Hiring Strouth did more than change Strouth’s life. It changed the Baileys’ lives, too.

“I used to just deal with people in my little circle,” Jennifer says. “And I was comfortable because that’s all I had to do. But now, it’s like, we don’t mind anybody who walks through the door."

Not everyone in St. Paul understands. One person posted on the brewery’s Facebook page that the Baileys shouldn’t be claiming to love Jesus and selling beer. So, they deleted the comment and banned the user from the page.

There was the time the Baileys hired a cook listed on the state’s registry of convicted sex offenders.

“Oh, yeah, we took a lot of flak on Facebook for that one.” They both look at each other and laugh, as Jennifer explains. “Somebody posted the registry. I wrote back and I said, ‘He’s not working with children, he’s working with adults, he’s in the kitchen, all he wants is a job. We are gonna give him a chance and if you don’t want to come and eat at a place like that, I’m sorry, but we are not gonna fire him because people are saying he needs to be fired.’”

Another friend directly accused the Baileys of hypocrisy for their hiring practices. “‘I’m worried,’” Jennifer says a church member told her, “‘because you’re talking about going to church and being a Christian.’ But I said, ‘We love people. We love everybody.’”

As we talk, the pub's speakers are playing “Carry On” by fun.

If you're lost and alone
Or you're sinking like a stone
Carry on
May your past be the sound of your feet upon the ground
Carry on

“If we don’t give ‘em a chance,” Jennifer asks, “what’s their hope? What are they gonna do? If you treat them like they’re a leper, tell me what they’re supposed to do.”

The Baileys have broken every rule they know, and not just the rules of small-town congregations. They have broken the rule of math. By opening their doors and hearts, they have created something where there was nothing. Because the one inexhaustible thing this area has, thanks to the politicians, is persons coming out of prison. And while the census suggests St. Paul is shrinking, because the Baileys have discovered the true economics of the town, they have more of a long-term future than the multi-billion-dollar, coal-fired behemoth in whose shadow they breathe.

Plus, the beer is fine.

After an appropriate time for the lunchtime beer to settle, I apologize to the Baileys, but I have a Friday night appointment to keep back in Letcher County and a trip back over the mountains. As I leave, pondering these things, I sheepishly buy myself a light-blue “I ❤️ JESUS” tee. I make another beer joke, and then I’m out into the rain, the Clinch, and the electricity fairy.

I’m not fooling. I do love Jesus, that’s true. But I might’ve done more than bought a T-shirt if I’d known what was next.

Bobby was here. He traveled these same mountain roads, walked these same empty streets. Barely 100 days before his assassination, Robert F. Kennedy was here in Fleming-Neon, Kentucky.

RFK packed a gymnasium at Fleming Neon High School for a Senate subcommittee hearing he organized in February 1968, the last of his “poverty tours” that had taken him to the Mississippi Delta, Pennsylvania coal country, and the central valley of California.

He was fulfilling a promise. His brother, the late president, had announced a visit to eastern Kentucky for December 1963. Of course, it never happened. When Bobby found JFK’s notepad from his last cabinet meeting, the word “poverty” was scribbled all over it in the president’s handwriting. Five years later, about to announce his own presidential campaign, Sen. Kennedy stood before a spellbound audience.

“This visit has a special meaning for me because of the great interest that President Kennedy took in this area, and the fact that he had intended to come here in December of 1963,” Sen. Kennedy told them. “Now I’m here and meeting and talking to you, and observing this beautiful land — all this marvelous potential — my visit has even greater meaning.”

Of the 23 witnesses who testified, Caudill, by then an international celebrity, spoke the longest. “The American genius has demonstrated that it can achieve on a colossal scale,” Caudill told Kennedy. “And in the southern mountains, that genius faces a colossal challenge.” When it all ended, the typed transcript filled 109 single-spaced pages.

Matthew Algeo, author of the recent book, All This Marvelous Potential: Robert Kennedy’s 1968 Tour of Appalachia, wrote of the hearing’s conclusion, “The students who’d sat patiently on the bleachers throughout the long hearing streamed onto the gym floor and mobbed Kennedy, as if he’d just sunk a buzzer-beater to win the state championship.” Algeo quoted Nell Meade, daughter of a coal miner, then a 15-year-old Fleming-Neon student: “It was like having the light put out when President Kennedy was killed and having it put back on again when Bobby came and talked to us about what the future could be.”

When I arrive at twilight, 52 years later, you have to look hard to see any evidence that the future has arrived. A tattered “Back the Blue” flag droops from a home on Main Street. An old movie house still bears the large sign, “NEON,” across its front. Its front doors appear not to have opened in years.

Indeed, there are only two buildings that appear to be open. Both are government structures: a modest branch of the Caudill Library, and a brutalist volunteer firehouse, wholly out of scale to its surroundings. Whatever intercession Fleming-Neon had asked of the Kennedys appeared to have been visited elsewhere.

My final destination for the evening is a mile north, in the old miners’ community of Hemphill, also known as Jackhorn, Kentucky. There, the former Hemphill Grade School, two stories of yellow brick and narrow windows, sits empty behind a 9-foot chain-link fence. Behind the parking lot, four shiny, black granite slabs surrounding a concrete angel record the names of every miner killed in a Letcher County mine, including the infamous Scotia gas and coal dust explosions of 1976 that left 26 miners dead. Beside a bell tower, a sign reads, “If you like the monument, ring the bell.” The bell, like the miners, is gone.

Likewise, the school is long discarded. Coal severance taxes that once funded a playground and a community center are gone, too. Inside, though, there is light, for Gwen Johnson is pressing out sourdough.

“Once the school closed, we didn’t have any place that we could have a public meeting. We didn't have any place to belong if we didn’t go to church and buy into something we didn’t agree with. And the marginalized certainly have no place that they could fit. Because if your sexual orientation was different than the prescribed one, then you’re ostracized. If you are a woman and you’re outspoken, you’re ostracized. If you partake of libation, ostracized. You know what I’m saying?”

Letcher County Coal Miners Memorial, erected in 2003.

Gwen understands being ostracized: short and profane, witty, and not unfamiliar with close brushes with the law (“You know, you gotta do what you gotta do.”) It is easy to imagine a 1930s version of Johnson, imploring the miners: Which side are you on, boys? But coal and unions being what they have become around here, modern Appalachian organizing requires a more entrepreneurial spirit.

“Our community’s falling apart,” she says. “We’ve had a brain drain into the jails, the coal economy has crumbled. We’re in a dire place, trying to figure out what the hell we’re gonna do.”

What the hell she did was turn to the same Appalachian resource as the Methodists of St. Paul: people with checkered pasts.

Her nephew, Brad Johnson, once a local high school football star, had become one of those guys, jailed on drug charges. Gwen looked in on him. It had not always been easy on Brad, losing his father when he was 4 to a mining accident in 1990. Those lost miners’ names on the obelisks outside Hemphill School? Rex A. Johnson is one of them.

It was during her regular visitations to her nephew when the idea came to them. Maybe their ex-community school could become a community restaurant. Maybe they could start it. And maybe the lynchpin could be something unlikely gnawing at Gwen: how to make the perfect sourdough.

“So we kinda just got in conversations about it over video chat,” she says. “And then when Brad got out of jail, we went full throttle trying to figure this thing out. And it’s been about a four-year journey with sourdough.”

Evelyn Adkins and Gwen Johnson prep sourdough as Brad Johnson bakes pizza at the Black Sheep Brick Oven Bakery in the Hemphill Community Center, Jackhorn, Kentucky.

The Johnsons registered a not-for-profit corporation with the Secretary of State in Frankfort, Kentucky. Along with another friend, Evelyn Adkins, coming out of her own jail sentence, they got to work. First, they managed a $12,000 grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission to connect local musicians, crafters, and cooks working over open outdoor flames with community members on Saturday night events.

“During the course of that, we got really good cooking with fire,” Gwen says. “And then we started dreaming about this hipster thing that was going on across the nation … in all the cool places with these brick ovens. And we started dreaming about: what if.”

That’s when the next grant came — enough to build a brick oven in the corner of the school cafeteria — and that’s when, in Gwen’s words, the “dreamingest, wishingest visionaries” in Letcher County opened Black Sheep Brick Oven Bakery and Catering.

“We thought [the name] was very fitting,” Gwen says. “Because we’ve all got a history, a negative history that we’ve had to overcome. Some of it we’re trying to overcome, and some of it you never overcome.”

Thursdays and Saturdays, the Black Sheep sells fresh-baked bread, cinnamon rolls, and other sweets, all fashioned from Gwen’s original sourdough starter. It is on Friday nights, however, that Brad fires up the 800-degree brick oven, Adkins measures out the sourdough into 271-gram balls for crusts (“I’m pretty good at weighing,” she says, “it’s what I did for a living.”) and the bakery becomes a pizza joint, Fleming-Neon’s only functioning restaurant.

In no time, the room fills, a band swells, children dance. There is a community again.

I didn’t even know the musicians were there until the freight train of bluegrass covering the Mississippi Sheiks’ country blues tune, “Sittin’ on the Top of the World,” was barreling down the tracks. The mandolin player was a probation officer for the nearby federal court, tie still around his blue shirt from a day at work. The electric bass player wore a blue “UK” ball cap, and the banjo player could have played on John Brown’s front porch the night of the Harpers Ferry raid. From a corner of the cafeteria opposite the brick oven, the Delta lament evolved into a holler protest:

The lonesome days
They have gone by
Why should I beg you?
You said good-bye
Now she's gone.
An' I don't worry
Lord, I'm sittin' on top of the world

So much to take in — the music, the Black Sheep, the breaking of the sourdough, the discovery of community, the setting, the audacity, the proximate memory of tragedy, including the star tour through the Kennedy legacy of loss.

Friday nights are old-time music nights at Black Sheep Brick Oven Bakery. Jan. 24, 2020.

If you ask me how to explain what I saw, what I felt, I can only explain the quickening in my heart, and the sting in my eyes in one word: reconciliation.

The Johnsons and Adkins were reconciling themselves to their people, to their past as well as their present. They were reconciling their neighbors, one to another. The dogged refusal to be turned away, or to turn anyone away, was palpable.

In fairness, not everyone in Hemphill embraces the sheep. Signs proclaiming the restaurant a “Hate-Free Zone” were stolen and torn down. But, Gwen put up more, and more, (like “I Am the Rainbow Sheep of My Family,”) and then she put up signs with Scripture on them (“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” Mark 12:31). That, finally, stopped the thefts.

“We don’t want it just to be what we think, but we think what we think matters, too. We’re trying to have a free space.”

“For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters,” wrote the ancient St. Paul, the one whose life transformed amidst the hospitality of his former enemies. “Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love serve one another.”

I drive darkened, narrow roads back to Whitesburg, thinking about the words of St. Paul.

And, all this marvelous potential.

Out here, there is no time
Time is our imagination — past, present, and future

— Duncan Chisholm, “The Pilgrimage”

In the reading room of the Caudill Library, they maintain the notebooks of public records of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ one-time plan to build a $444 million maximum security facility atop a reclaimed strip mine in the Roxana community of Letcher County, a plan that consumed this community for most of the last decade.

The three-ring binders are long neglected. The library has kept them because they had to, but now, even the librarian has lost interest. She tells me she’s about to throw them away. No one reads them much anymore, anyway.

Here’s why: the Letcher prison appears dead, for now. An inmate lawsuit provided the Trump Administration cover to cancel it in early 2019. Not even the heavyweight support of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the local congressman, U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers — whose power to bring home cash is evidenced by his name on the highway that leads east into the mountains — could get it built.

But the record of the fight revealed much. Persons who attended the 2017 public hearings wrote, in their own hand, the hopes and fears that brought them out by the hundreds.

There was, of course, clear opposition. In strong, block letters, Elvenia Blair wrote, “We have enough poverty we do not need more and all research proves more poverty comes with more prisons. SHAME ON ALL PEOPLE INVOLVED.” Tanya Turner, one of the stars of the “Trillbilly Workers Party” podcast, wrote, “Letcher County and surrounding communities all over Central Appalachia have been imprisoned with a hostile, extractive, and monolithic economy for far too long.”

But for every comment echoing Blair and Turner, there were many, many more like Mildred Carver of Hallie, who wrote in crimped script, “We need all the help we can get,” or Eileen Sanders, the chair of the school board in nearby Jenkins, whose comment began simply: “JOBS-JOBS-JOBS.”

After an hour, I closed the three-ring binder. The Caudill statue — and his legacy — sullenly loomed over my worktable. What were they saying? Did they want a prison?

I asked that question to Smith of Appalshop, who has lived in these mountains her entire life. “I don’t think anyone dreams of growing up to be a correctional officer,” she tells me. “I also think the more people in your life that you know and meet who are correctional officers, the more it seems like, you know, ‘Oh, this is just a job that exists.’ I think, yes, the longer that is a type of employment here, the more normalizing it becomes.”

The normalization of a prison community is not, however, an overnight task.

“We’re a testing ground,” Gwen says. “We’re seen as people who don’t matter. We kinda fueled the industrial revolution. And we’re left in shambles.”

Gwen is right, which makes the fact that a counter-narrative exists remarkable by itself.

For decades, reports from Appalachia have been silver-toned and sepia-tinged. Pick up any narrative, from Our Southern Highlanders to Hillbilly Elegy, and there is, without fail, fog, and woodsmoke in a holler obscuring the vague outline of a cabin. Or a doublewide trailer and an old satellite dish lost in the haze, as if to say even a mighty effort of art cannot penetrate the mysteries of these mountains.

But what if the people of Central Appalachia are speaking clearly? What if, they, too, find no room for silvertone amid the spectacularly technicolor collapse of capitalism that illuminates their days and sears into their nights? Might it be the coal dust in the air is just an outsider’s imagery of convenience, obscuring something genuine? 

We know this: resources are not always what they seem. It’s been millions of years since the coal was made beneath Letcher County. The days of men earning wages pulling that resource out of the ground may as well be that far gone, too. 

The resources created within the beating heart of a community, however, can strengthen, replenish, adapt, and endure. They may be forced to co-create a strange and new world. But they can, even in the shadow of incarceration. Some will make pizza and music in an abandoned school cafeteria. Some will connect by the radio. Some, as the T-shirt I bought in St. Paul reminds me, may drink a little beer.

It is in the creative reinvention of community — and not the pretense of bygone days or the magic of political investment that isn’t coming — that offers Central Appalachia, in spirit and in presence, real hope.

Others have noticed this, too. In Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s 2019 book, We Cast a Shadow: A Novel, a New Orleans lawyer climbing the corporate ladder seeks to protect his teenage son from the pervasive racism around him by medical treatments that bleach his skin white. In the process, he loses everything — family, profession, himself — as his son, eager to protect his identity, goes underground and eventually escapes the city with other young persons of color to begin a new, multicultural America in the hollers of Appalachia.

I asked Ruffin, “Why Appalachia?”

“If the cities are creating systems that are destroying people,” he tells me, “people have to build new systems. And that requires a place capable of something new. I think that may be the future of America.”

New systems? I found these in Appalachia. Interested in a system that replaces the economics of commodification? Go make bread with Gwen Johnson. A system that replaces the stain of incarceration? Go brew beer in St. Paul. A system that offers a redefinition of community? Go spin hip-hop at WMMT.

Ada Smith is among the rotation of hosts of Hot 88.7 Hip Hop from the Hilltop, featuring the best of old school, new school, underground and southern hip-hop. It airs every Monday night from 7-9 pm. Whitesburg, Kentucky.

The first time I heard “Calls from Home,” I thought it quaint and subversive, 20th-century technology penetrating the stone walls and razor wire of the South’s toughest prisons. I was wrong. It is fresh and out there, accessible by anyone with a $6 pocket radio or to anyone in the world that wants to listen. You can tune it out, but you are ultimately powerless against it.

And how do I know that? Because I heard the calls, and I saw the response: breaking down walls that divide us, clearing smoke from the fires we have started, reconstructing from our imaginations the myths that have failed nearly everyone in these hills for decades. If you can imagine a community, you can create a community, and if you create a community, it, too, will send out its own call.

That cri de cœur may sound in hip-hop, not bluegrass, and it may be carb-loaded by homemade sourdough and Methodist beer. But it rings out, clear as a clawhammer banjo.

It can traverse miles and cultures as if on radio waves, to remake what is possible, and not just in Central Appalachia, but to those places where screens glow in the dark night and a young boy waits with open arms and an open heart. 

Can you hear it, Cameron? Uncle Joe is coming home.

Hillbillies Need No Elegy

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