Mary Ann Browning

Mary Ann Browning, Manufacturing Office Manager; Barboursville, West Virginia, Cabell County:

“[My name] was supposed to be Mary Annette, but I guess the nurses at the hospital didn’t like that so they put Mary Ann. I went to get my birth certificate when I went to get my driver's license and I was like, ‘I always thought my name was Annette, mom always told me it was Annette.’ There on my birth certificate it had Mary Ann and I was like okay, I like that, too.

I was born in Huntington, West Virginia, St. Mary’s Hospital. I was only like the third or fourth kid that was actually born in the hospital ‘cause I was number eight of nine. My mom had twelve kids; she had two miscarriages and two sets of twins and one died from each set. 

[I’ve lived in the mountains] pretty much [all my life]. We’d get up, eat breakfast and head for the hills you know; come back, we’d fix us a lunch or something like that and we’d be out in the hills all day long. During the summers, we worked in the garden. 

We lived alongside the Guyandotte River and were always going swimming, we had to get the house clean and make sure all the dishes and the beds were made and all that stuff. Then we would go swimming. It’s really weird; I learned to swim, my uncle, my dad’s brother, he took bleach jugs and tied strings around them and they fit right underneath our arms. All us little kids and mom would freak out cause she never learned to swim; her dad never would let her go swimming because she couldn’t swim, so she never wanted us to go. 

After I got out of high school I went to work. During high school I worked in this program where you could work half a day and go to school. I went through that program and I got a job at a credit union. I started out there and I tell you, to this day I can name every zip code within a sixty mile radius because my first job was to type up these little plates in a, kinda like mimeograph machine, but they called it like a stenograph or something. I’d go down in the basement where all the GSA guys worked and I'd go down there and type those up. And then once a month we would send out a credit till to all the members and I’d stand in there, stamping them and sorting them by zip code. It’s amazing I still remember all those zip codes, but that was my first job. 

My grandma divorced her first husband to marry my grandpa. They met at barn dances; she played the banjo and he played the fiddle and they used to go around all these old barn dances and that’s how they met. 

She was the baby of the family and she was supposed to get the home place; and she had it, but all her brothers were preachers and they were giving her a really hard time. [Divorce] back then, [my grandma] was shunned; that was horrible. The family was giving her such a hard time that they gave her three hundred dollars and she moved and she gave it to my grandpa to go find a place; and he found the place where we live now. 

My grandparents, they were so cool. My grandpa was ninety-three when he passed away, and his sister lived till she was ninety-seven. Him and my dad used to run a riverboat and sell fish and stuff up and down the Guyandotte River. They trapped, and I remember growing up seeing all these little boards where they would tack them up and with the skins and stuff. 

I remember [my grandpa] coming in and sitting in the chair in the dining room. We lived in a little house beside them and they lived in the house in front of us; my grandpap, my grandma and my dad’s oldest brother. They lived in the big house, as we called it. [Grandpa’s brother] never married. He was funny. He would always say, ‘Confound that confounded, confounded thing’ when he would get mad. 

I remember being little and him telling us stories about panthers, and wild cats and all this stuff. He was an amazing person. They all called him uncle Amaizah. When I moved out there and they were asking me, ‘Well, who are you?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, do you know uncle Amaizah? Have you ever heard of uncle Amzar?’ ‘Oh yeah, yeah! Boy, he could really tell some good stories.’ 

My mom left this journal that she wrote from the time that she met my dad, up through I guess maybe all of her kids getting married; so there was nine you know that lived. It’s amazing, I’ve read her story and I just sat and cried you know, cause it was rough, it was rough; I don’t know how she did it. I have three and it's just amazing. 

[My mom’s journal] was really strange because she got married and my dad could do anything, but he liked to drink and he liked to hunt and stuff. He was never mean to me or anything; the only person he ever hurt was himself. That’s the kind of drunk he was. Him and his brother built the house that we live in now, and we grew up in the little four-bedroom house. 

There was a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom and my mom and dad’s bedroom. And all us girls slept in that bedroom and there were only two boys so they slept in the living room. She had one of these old sofa beds that when you’d bend it over this way and it would slide apart and go flat and my brothers slept in there. I had one sister got married when she was thirteen, but Lord, she looked like she was twenty. Mom got a lot of flack for that. ‘Oh yeah, her mama let her sister marry when she was thirteen.’ Other than that, my mom was a really wonderful person. I don’t know how she put up with all of us. 

I asked her one time, ‘Mom, I don’t know how you ever stood nine kids.’ She said, ‘Oh, I’d much rather have them younger, ‘cause the older they get, the more heartache they bring. At least when they were little I can control what they do.’ The older they get the choices and things they make broke her heart, but she was a wonderful person. 

I think about when she had her miscarriage; it was snow and she went out to the outhouse back then ‘cause that’s what they had, and just broke her heart. My dad was on the riverboat with my grandpa fishing and she had to go through all that by herself. She did a lot of stuff for us and done without a lot. You know, nine kids. It wasn’t as bad for me because I was on the lower forty or four you know. When my other sister’s were going to school it was hard for them ‘cause back then you had to wear a nice dress or shirt, skirt, pantyhose, shoes; all this stuff and I don’t know how they did it. It was rough. 

When she died, we had her service in a little church across the river from us and there were people standing out in the grass in the yard [and] up in the balconies. The preacher said, ‘I have never seen this church this filled before. What an amazing person.’ 

She wrote a lot of poetry about her family and growing up; [she] was always writing and doing something. At Christmas I remember she would always take pictures and when we’d go back after Christmas she would have a little book; she’d go through it and cut out all these little sayings. ‘My clan’ and all this stuff. Little funny things to put as captions on the pictures. She would write a story about what happened like ‘This one came and brought me this.’ It was like a little story every year. We’ve got probably about nine or ten of them so each one of the kids have one.

When [my ex-husband and I] got divorced, [he] was so horrible; I wouldn’t take none of his crap. He would stop by my Mom’s and tell her all kinds of stuff, ‘I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna do that.’ He was a jerk. She would call, and I hate him to this day. He didn’t have to hurt my mom. That was the one thing I guess I never forgave him for. You get into that kind of situation and it doesn’t happen overnight; it’s kind of gradual. They use your kids and they use all these things against you. I’m glad that I got out of that situation and I don’t take that crap anymore. I don't, and I’m a stronger person for it. 

[Meeting Raymond] I worked with his sister and I’d just split up with my ex-husband. His sister, Nell, said ‘You need to date my brother.’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I saw him.’ I paid the payables and I processed his checks. Our office had upgraded the cable, going digital, and moved our office, that’s when I worked at the cable office, from Wayne to Milton. Contract work. 

We started dating. Well, we went bowling and I was like, ‘Oh no, that’s where I met my first husband.’ That was in August, and in September we were at this function where HBO and all these different cable channels used to come in and they would take us out to dinners and sponsor all these things. We were sitting in the parking lot getting ready to leave and just looked at him and I was like, ‘I love you!’ and he was like, “Really? I love you too!’ 

I can’t believe it you know; I’ve been married for fourteen years and we’d only been dating less than a month. We met in ‘89 and got married June 11th, 1994. We dated five years and lived together two years ‘cause I had three kids and he was working in Missouri, all over the place. 

He would travel twelve hours to come and see me. The moment I knew that he really loved me [was] my next door neighbor’s daughter had married this guy that was in the Army and got stationed in Honolulu. She had never flown. Her grandpa, [who] was like my Dad’s first cousin called and asked me if I would fly out there with her if he paid for the trip and everything. I was like, ‘Let me check and see if I can get a babysitter.’ 

I called Raymond and he came down and watched them. He would drive three and a half hours to get to work. [He’d] get the kids up and fix them breakfast and come back home in time to fix them dinner. I was like, ‘This man truly loves me; who else would that for me to go to Hawaii? He’s a keeper.’ 

When my mom passed away [was one of my saddest times]. She had been sick; she had multiple myeloma. She kept saying she was on the verge of it. Before that, my dad got Alzheimer’s. He drank a lot, so he had the alcohol dementia, too. It was kind of like losing him twice when he passed away because he got to where he didn’t know us. 

She passed away very quickly. I was in my middle forties and at the same time my son had just turned thirteen and he wanted to move to Virginia with his dad. My oldest daughter had graduated and she was going to Marshall in September. All this stuff just happened at once. 

Getting back to my mom; she was in the hospital and they were all trying to save her and I had to go to the airport to pay for a ticket for my brother to fly him from California and while I was gone she passed away. In a way, I think it was a good thing that I wasn’t there to see her go. 

A couple days before that she had told me, ‘Whatever you do I want you to keep the family gettin’ together.’ Usually, when parents pass away, especially the mother, the brothers and sisters each kind of go their own way. So she said, ‘Promise me you’ll keep all of them together.’ We always got together [during] Thanksgiving, Christmas, in the summer. 

We was a really close knit family. I’ve tried to do that. We have a family reunion every fourth of July. We tell everybody, ‘We’ve got hamburgers, hot dogs [and] you’re welcome to come.’ We never know who’s going to come. It may be a different branch of the family, but we always have a good time. 

When my kids were born [was a happy time in my life] and being with Raymond. We went on vacation [for the] first time we’ve got to go and just get away. This year, we wanted to go to Mount Rushmore. That was our main target so we left first of May and went all over the place. We got to Deadwood and it was so funny ‘cause Raymond was thinking it was going to be an old western town. We opened the door and [it] had the bar and all these lights and slot machines everywhere. I was like, ‘What the heck?’ It’s all gambling. 

It’s funny, when I was growing up, we lived four miles out of Barboursville and going to school I was always a country bumpkin and never in the ‘in crowd’ because I lived out in the country. After they all graduated and went to school they’re all in a little sub-division up above my house. A little ‘ole place not even a half an acre [and] right beside each other, and all these people I went to school with, they live in the colony. It’s cool to live in the colony.

[Raymond] is the best thing that ever happened to my children, my grandkids and me. He’s just a wonderful man and his mother was the same way. He’s got stop and go. He does amazing things and I don’t know how in the world he does what he does. He has Crohn's Disease. He went through heck [and] it’s just amazing he can still get up and go. I’m getting hit with arthritis and leg cramps, and he’s gone through that for years and just keeps right on trucking. 

[Outsiders] When I was young and went to Cleveland; my older sisters were living in Cleveland and one lived in Columbus, and I think in Cleveland I went to the store to get something for her. We got everything was on the counter and I said, ‘Do you have a poke?’ and she said, ‘A what?’ and I was like, ‘A poke to put this in there?’ and she said, ‘You must be from West Virginia, you mean a bag?’ and I was like.’Yeah, a poke!’ 

I’m definitely a hillbilly and always will be. [A hillbilly means to me] to respect other people, I respect myself, I respect the land. I love having a garden, I love having a flower garden. I love being a part of the state of West Virginia and the mountains. My dad used to love to hunt and fish. Growing up hunting and fishing and the mountains that was a part of all of our lives. I was eighteen before I ever got to go anywhere on a big trip. Yeah, I’m a hillbilly. 

We sit out on the porch, our porch is 20x32. We’ve got bird feeders and hummingbird feeders and I plant all these flowers that the birds like and we’ll sit out there just to see the green. Raymond mows the grass and we’ve got a big field and see all kinds of stuff. There’s deer that come around and we’ll see that and we’ve had to chase them off because they ate our sunflowers. We had one that was just getting ready to bloom with the head and we went out there and it had chewed that thing all to pieces; all the way down to where it was like four foot tall. We got our revenge. 

[True Appalachia] is about people helping people. People caring about people [and] having empathy. You know your neighbor and [are] always there to offer a helping hand ‘cause you never know, you might need one, and they’ll be there for it. I’ve always believed, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and it’s always seemed to work out for me.”

Shaleigh Ryan Lilly

Shaleigh Ryan Lilly, Age 14; Beckley, West Virginia:

“I’ve been living with my grandparents, since I was two. It’s great. I get spoiled. I love that. 

[They have instilled] Christian faith; going to church. Worship. It’s just something we got, [we’re] holding on to. We cook a lot. Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. We cook. I cook fudge a lot. You can’t make fudge on a rainy day. I didn’t know that. 

We make sweets mainly [like] Monkey bread. It’s kind of like cake, and you roll little pieces up in a ball, and then stick ‘em in a pound cake pan, and then you bake them [with] cinnamon caramel sauce, and all that good stuff on it. You take it apart [and] eat it in little pieces. It’s just so good. 

I did dance for a long time, and right now I take piano. I was doing band at school [and] I played xylophone. My grandfather, he can pick up any musical instrument, and just start playing. Anything. 

If you live in the city, you don’t really get to do as much. But when you live in the mountains, you can play around, and be as loud as you want.

My grandparents live in Hinton. We live up on the mountain and there are no streetlights. You just have the light on the four-wheeler, and it’s so much fun to go around. You see deer and bears, a whole bunch of pigs. 

Just go get a four-wheeler, and ride up in the mountains. It’s fun to go mudding, like you splash mud everywhere. Especially when you can’t drive, but you know you can drive a four-wheeler. 

I’ve been coming here [the annual Lilly Family Reunion] as long as I can remember. It’s just a good time to meet family, hang out, and have fun. Honestly, it’s a whole bunch of old people, but just sit down and talk to some of them. They’ll tell you like how they used to come here when they was a kid, and how the old life used to be. All that penny candy. It’s just going around meeting family, telling stories, having a good time. 

When they was younger, they didn’t have, I guess that you’d call them privileges. When my Pawpaw was fourteen, he was driving a car, and going out and about, and doing whatever. I can’t do any of that, but it’s like, back then they [were] young and clueless about things. Now, we’re just more advanced, so it makes things a whole lot different. But either way, it’s still fun. 

(Difference between country life and city life) A kid up in New York, they have malls, and they can go out places. They have a lot more things to do. But out here, we go outside, we kind of make up our own things to do. We can run around. We have the stars. We can see the stars. They can’t see the stars. We just have more freedom, and places to run around. There’s more outdoors activities that we can do, like going to the lake, and going hunting, and fishing. 

We are kind of behind. You know they have taxis, and they have more updated technology. [In] our schools, we all have our own iPads to take home. They probably had that since they first came out. It’s just that we are a little bit behind, I guess you could say. We’re not really as dependent on it. 

I’m planning on going to college here, and then I’m going into the Air Force, so I’ll be deployed around places. But until then, I’m staying here. (Why the Air Force?) All my uncles have been in the military, and they’ll pay for college. [I like the] discipline [and] the history they have behind it.

I want to be in criminal justice [and] do forensics. You know, be like Sherlock Holmes, and solve mysteries. 

My Grandpa’s been to Germany, and England, and Africa, and all around in America, and as far as I’ve been, I’ve been to New York. I want to go out of the country, at least once. I want to go to Amsterdam [for] the history. I want to go see the Anne Frank House.

(Are you a hillbilly?) I don’t know. I’m wearing boots. Do you consider me a hillbilly? (Laughs) It’s no different than anybody else. There are people that are like, ‘Oh, hillbillies, going outside to use the bathroom.’ But, you know, we have a Wal-Mart like everybody else.

Some people see us as people, but others see us as stupid. But you know? They should probably come up here, and see for themselves.

I just want to say I’m living. I’m making it, like everybody else.”

Keith Adams

Keith Adams, Magistrate for District 4 of the Letcher County Fiscal Court; Blackey, Kentucky:

“We come from a family that my mother and father both worked. We didn’t have what we pointed our finger at, but if our mother and father could see to get us something, then they would get us like a bicycle, or later on in life, maybe we got an old, used motorcycle. 

I don’t never remember going hungry, and I never remember water pouring into the house, or us having to gather up beside of a fireplace, and about freeze to death or nothing. We didn’t have running water. We had cold water, but we didn’t have hot water. When we was little, we had chores to do, such as pack wash water. We put water on a heatin’ stove to heat it. We didn’t have a tub; we bathed in what I called a watering trough. We didn’t have indoor plumbing, and we didn’t have a bathroom. We had a toilet. I dug a many a toilet hole, moving the toilet around. 

I had a happy childhood. We had bicycles, when we could keep ‘em together. And the road wasn’t blacktopped then, it was red-dog. And you didn’t want to have no more collisions, than you absolutely could keep from, because that red-dog was hard to dig out. [Red-dog was a byproduct of burning coal in coke ovens and used like gravel on mountain roads].

We built us some box cars. We’d find us four old tires, and build us a wooden structure, and put them tires on there. We’d steer it with our feet, or tie strings to it. The holler was full of kids. They was ten or twelve of us. What one done, ever body done, and if somebody couldn’t afford to do it we’d pitch in, and try to help somebody do it. 

We had a basketball goal. Everybody played basketball. There was an Old Regular Baptist Church right up the road from where we lived. We’d go up there, if we could con somebody out of a set of skates or something ‘nother. We’d try to skate on that blacktop. They had little concrete pads out there, and we’d skate around on them. 

We had a little country store, up in the holler, right up from Black Bottom. I lived in Black Bottom. They was a little country store, up in Blair Branch. Boy, you could take a quarter up there, and just come back with a bag full. I mean, a big bag full [of candy]. (Laughs) That was back in the day. 

I landed a job when I was in high school. If you had a job, you didn’t need but so many credits to graduate. If your parents would sign a paper, you could go to work. I had a job, and after my lunch period, I’d come to the homeroom, check out, and go to work.

I worked at the Pic Pac. It’s IGA now. I was a grocery packer, and a stock boy. I worked there till I was out of high school. I went from there [and] worked in a garage. After I left the garage, I went to work for a railroad company called Queen City, out of Nashville, Tennessee. They wanted me to travel with them, and I didn’t want to travel. 

I worked about six months in the mines, and we was shooting off the solid, and it just wasn’t me. They drilled a bunch of holes in the face of the coal, like a seam of coal. They’d stick the dynamite back in there, actual dynamite. Then, they’d run that wire around there to that, Fire in the Hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! They’d put the plunger to the bottom, and she’d blow up. 

There was no seeing, I mean, a mining light wasn’t worth the light it was lit with. (Talking about loadout) Well, it was a little bit more convenient, because they had what they called scoops. They picked it up with the scoops. They’d run in and out of there, and pick it up with the scoops. My job was down on the tailpiece, making sure that all the coal hit the beltline, and then what didn’t hit the beltline, I had to pick it up. 

Them fellers, they loved a greenhorn. They’d bring me up there, and they’d be a-talking to me, and they’d let them shots off. I’d just [reel]. I’d try to run, but you know, you can’t see. You don’t know where you’re going. 

I worked about right at six months, and I made good money. I ain’t gonna lie. That was probably some of the best money I ever made, but I just couldn’t handle it. My mother got really upset with me over it, I’ll never forget that. She said, ‘Are you going to work this morning?’ I said, ‘No, you can go.’ She said, ‘Well, I’ve got a job.’ I said, ‘Well here, we can trade jobs. (Laughs) I’ll go cook for all these little kids, and you go mine some coal.’ So, I quit. 

I struck a job with the county under the Reuben Watts administration, and my first job for the county was helping a mechanic at the garage. They took me out of the garage, and they put me on the bridge crew. Then they took me off the bridge crew, and put me on a loader. They took me off the loader, and put me in a truck. Then, I run a grader, for probably sixteen, eighteen year or more. 

After that, I landed a job with the Letcher County Fiscal Court, and I worked for them for twenty-two years, and I’ve been a Magistrate now for nine years. 

I serve the people. That job [consists] of just about anything you want to talk about. It’s about bridges, roads, culverts, trees, cutting weeds, mowing parks, taking care of sidewalks, you name it. 

My philosophy of politics is, I don’t care whether you’re a Democrat. I don’t care whether you’re a Republican. I don’t care if you’re rich, poor. It don’t matter to me. I’m a person that’ll help you, if you want help, and I can help you. 

(Appalachian people) We’re slower in time. I’m not saying, that we’re backwards. I’m not saying it to be disrespectful, or nothing, but, it takes us awhile to catch up. We like our pace of living. We don’t like it fast. We just want to kinda lay back, and be left alone and just live.

I can go to Lexington, and when I get back around, down there in Powell County, I can see them mountains. I think, ‘Oh boy, I’m almost home.’ (Meaning of home) It’s a protective place you can come to, and gather your memories, and sit down and have thoughts about what went on in each place, where your family and you mingle. 

I had a heart attack, in February 2011. And believe me, I didn’t know nothing for about five days, and the other four days I stayed, all I thought about was home. If it was just to have to come home and die, that’s what I wanted. 

(About stereotypes) Maybe we choose not to cut our hair, maybe we choose not to cut our beard, maybe we choose not to have our teeth pulled. Maybe we choose to live the way we want to live. But that’s our business. That ain’t for some outsider to come in here and say, ‘Well, look here, we’re gonna help these people, ‘cause they can’t help their selves.’ We didn’t ask you to come help us no way, but we appreciate what people do for us. 

That’s the way that I was raised, and that’s what they tagged us as, a hillbilly. I don’t know what their version of a hillbilly is, but I have met very few people that didn’t like it. Everybody I ever met loved it. They love being around us. They actually want to be here. They want to live here. They want to stay here. 

I’ve seen very few people come from out of other states, and tell me, ‘Well, I didn’t like it there.’ Most of ‘em say, ‘Well, if I come back here and retire, could you find me a place to live? Could you help me find a piece of property here?’ 

As a matter of fact, I’ve got some boys that’s from New York City in right now. They live in Florida, but they’re originally from New York City. They come here, and they fell in love. They’ve got houses here. They don’t live here. They make a living in Florida, but they wanna be a hillbilly, ‘cause they love it. I was born a hillbilly, I was raised a hillbilly, and I’ll probably die as a hillbilly, and I’ll be buried as a hillbilly. I wouldn’t have it no other way.

(Happiest time) When I met her [wife]. (Laughs) She’s a sweetie. There’s a little age gap in between us, you know, about sixteen years. Ahh, but age ain’t got nothing to do with it. Love’s blind.

(Hobbies) She says I yack a lot. (Laughs uproariously.) You want the truth? You want me to tell you what she says, my wife? ‘What’d you start that project for? You never finished the last’n.’

We’ve went from building ponds, to logging, to cutting fire wood, to working building rooms on. 

I’m a craftsman. I built benches, and seats, and flowerbeds; stuff out of timber and logs. We’ve built cabins, and barns. We’ve been in the chicken [and] goat farm business. We, (laughs) we’ve done a lot. (About being bored.) Never. Never. We’ve really never give up on much neither, I mean, you know, it may have taken us awhile to finish something, but we finished it. We always come back and finished it. 

We lost our home in March of this year. A mudslide hit it, took it off of its foundation, and crumbled it. 

If you ever been on a lumber pile, jumping up and down, when you was little, and it was going clack, clack, clack, well that’s what it was doing. About five o’clock that morning, I got up out of bed and I went downstairs, ‘cause I thought it was the dogs running back and forth on it, after a cat, or something or other. 

I opened the basement door, and I didn’t see nothing, so I shut the basement door back. When I went to come upstairs, my daughter was standing upstairs, looking down the steps, going, ‘What are you doing?’ Then you could hear it going, Thump! Thump! Thump! Something just told me to stand there at the back door. I pulled that back door open, and there stood a tree. It had already come through the back porch, and it was it was a-smacking the tin. I shut the door back, and [told her], ‘Get out! Go up there [and] get your clothes on. Get your Mama up on the way out.’ 

Snow, rain; that was when the weather was right wild like. It would snow one day, and then it might snow that day, and pour the rain two hours later. 

Other than a death in the family, the next saddest thing that I’ve experienced is having to walk off from something that you’ve invested twenty years in, and you watched it crumble to the ground in probably about fifteen minutes. 

You had been covered with insurance all your life, and you paid your insurance policies up, ‘cause the bank said you had to have it, and they looked at you [afterwards], and said, ‘Sorry. Can’t help you.’ 

Well, that’s pretty sad. The morning that it happened, a state company called AML, [Abandoned Mine Lands] sent three guys in, and they told me, how they was going to help me. 

Two weeks later, they sent me back a ten-page letter telling me why they couldn’t help me.

Yeah, them’s some sad moments, when you’re sitting there, and you’ve retrieved half of what you’ve owned. I guess it’s a little better than a fire, because we did get some things. But in the long term, it would probably have been better to been a fire, because the insurance company would have paid me. 

And you see, what’s disheartening is, you still owe on what you had, and you’ve got nothing to go back to. (Reason) They didn’t write a homeowner’s policy that would cover a mudslide. But now, my insurance company also told me later on, if it had been a mobile home, they would have paid me. I don’t know why. I didn’t question that. I was already to the point, I didn’t want to know no way. 

The people of Letcher County, and probably Harlan, and Leslie, and Perry, and Knott, Michigan, and Alabama, and California, I mean. I don’t know, they was just people, just sent us money from everywhere. 

I couldn’t ask to live in no better place. Because these people, they’ve showed they care about me. They’ve proved it. They proved it, and I love each and every one of them.”

Shannon Adkins

Shannon Adkins, Owner/ Adkins Alley Thrift & Variety Shop; Oak Hill, West Virginia:

“My husband and I are self-employed. We own a store out of Oak Hill, West Virginia. It’s a thrift and variety shop. [Has been running the store] About four years now. [Before that] I worked in the medical field as a receptionist. 

I was born in Beckley, West Virginia in ’79. I spent very little time in Beckley. We moved around quite a bit, bouncing from places like Odd, West Virginia which is down the river from Ghent here, to Oak Hill, back to Beckley, Mount Hope… several places. 

We had an outdoor childhood. There wasn’t much technology, and even if there was, we really couldn’t afford it. We made our own entertainment, built tree houses and climbed trees and all of that good stuff. 

The reason that we bounced around quite a bit, was my stepfather was a jack-of-all-trades. He’d have employment for a little while, and then he would move to another area because he would lose his job. He liked the bottle a little bit too much, but that was the main reason why. He just couldn’t hang on to it. He worked in the coalmines for a few years, and once the coalmines died, I think he just kind of lost hope.

My high school days was split between Woodrow Wilson High School in Beckley, and Oak Hill High School. I was a little wild, missed a few days of school. Graduated on time in the top half of my class, but it was fun. 

I was mischievous. I did a lot of writing clubs, reading clubs, things like that. My last year of high school I traded all of that in, and was busy taking care of my sisters and getting in trouble. [Has] two sisters. 

My sister and I, she’s about a year younger than I am, she liked to borrow my clothes without my permission. It used to make me so mad. We got into a knock down, drag out fight and we broke every door in my mom’s house putting each other through them. 

She’d taken items that weren’t hers, and refused to give them back. And then she lied about it and said that, ‘I didn’t take it’ yet I found all of them packed away in her room. It ended up being quite a brawl, so my mom ended up calling the authorities. They came down and gave us quite a talkin’ to. 

I wasn’t a bad child, but boy, she could get under your skin. And, she smashed my fingers with cinder blocks when we were kids, so maybe that was my payback to her. She was rotten. 

[After high school] I went to college. I started out majoring in social work, and then changed my major to psychology and then ultimately, changed it to criminal psychology. 

I didn’t finish my degree, had lots of credits, but just couldn’t get there. I left college, went to work, got married, got divorced, got married again and that’s where I’ve been for quite some time. 

The closeness. That is what makes it [Appalachia] special. No place that I’ve ever visited in the world can you knock on the door at the neighbor’s house and still be able to borrow a cup of sugar. I think that the communities here are very close knit. If you’re an outsider, sometimes it takes a little while to be able to integrate into those neighborhoods. I think that that way of life is no longer in other societies. 

They’re [the people] are down to earth. No one is competing against each other. It’s not a rat race, it’s very laid back. Our expectations of people is that you are as good to us, as we are to you. You don’t find that anymore. 

I have family that lives in Texas, and when they come to West Virginia they’re so fast paced that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to live here. They’re just go, go, go, go, go. I think the likability of the people, the friendliness, that is what makes these residents special. 

Yes I do [consider myself a hillbilly]. What it means to me is that we’re friendly, we’re intelligent, we are still giving. You don’t find that anymore. It means that you run the mountains, and you might be barefoot. It does not mean that you’re unintelligent. It does not mean that we’re slow. It makes us a special type of person.

The media’s no one’s friend. It doesn’t matter where you’re from. When it comes to Appalachia, they portray us as hicks, ignorant. The stereotypes are mind-boggling. 

What I would tell them is that we are not ignorant. A slow dialect does not dictate that. We’re indeed intelligent, resourceful, we’re caring. We have that something that the rest of the world has lost. 

I like to sew. I like to surf the internet, spend time with my family, fish, hunt… little bit of everything. 

It’s [her store] called Adkins Alley. It’s a thrift and variety shop. We carry thrift items, we carry new items. It stemmed from the economy here in West Virginia. For every job that we had, it was downsized. 

There were layoffs, the company didn’t exist anymore, it was bought out… and we became tired of it. So we took matters into our own hands. We took $1,000 of our income tax return, we started out with a building and $1,000, and now we’ve grown to where the business can support itself, and it supports us and our family. 

My husband is a transplant from Michigan who came to West Virginia. He worked in the auto parts industry as far as selling tires, auto parts, service writer, but even those jobs were hard to hang on to. He had a son by a previous marriage. He did not want to raise his child in Michigan, so he moved to West Virginia where he had a better support system and it wasn’t quite so dangerous to raise kids here. His father is from Cabin Creek in the Summersville area. 

My paternal grandfather I never met. My grandmother is still living on that side of the family. She is a Godly woman. She now has dementia, but she raised a brood of children. All of them are military. I think there were five all together. 

My mother’s father was a coal miner. He was my pawpaw, I loved him dearly. He passed when I was age five. My grandmother was a homemaker and was wild as anything you could ever think of. She definitely had no problem bucking up against a man if he did something wrong. They divorced, and he remarried and she never did. When they passed away, they were still buried beside each other, even though they were divorced. 

He [her grandfather] was a buffer. He loved us, protected us, gave us whatever we wanted. He was just a good man and it’s hard to believe that you can remember back that far. But when someone makes that type of impact, you remember them. 

I can remember he had an LTD. We used to ride everywhere in that thing. I can remember dancing in the living room. He owned an old coalhouse and we would dance and sing and he would frequent the bars. He would just do little things, buy us candy. We never really watched a whole lot of TV, but when we did, our favorite show was Hee Haw. That was his thing. As a result, I still watch it whenever it comes on TV. 

The happiest time [in my life] was when I had my son. That was the happiest day. He’s six, thinks he knows everything. Six going on thirty. 

My best friend had a son who died of complications of leukemia and this’ll be going on the second year [since] we lost him. He was nine. I can remember when he passed ‘cause I traveled, she’s from West Virginia, we travelled to Kentucky. 

He’d been raised here for the first seven years of his life. He had made it about nine, ten months into his treatment. He’d broken out into a rash and no one knew what it was. The CDC got involved; they were trying desperately to figure out what was wrong with him. He had LCH, which is where the white blood cells attack the organ’s soft tissue and everything in the body. 

Ultimately, it killed him. He was only probably the fourth or fifth person in the world to ever have complications of LCH during the time in which he was receiving treatment. So that was hard. 

I asked her, ‘I’m going to come down and see you, what do you want me to do?’ and she said ‘Well I need you to be in the room.’ So myself and her and her husband and two of the other children that she has, were there. I said, ‘are you sure that you just don’t want it to be family?’ and she said, ‘well you are my family.’ He passed. She has good days and she has bad days. She lives in Shepherdsville [Kentucky]. 

I would have to say I was taught durability. I was taught strength. We were taught to be trusting of our family, and to be loyal and to be aware of people outside of that. I think that’s with most families in West Virginia. Perseverance. So those are the things I think that were handed to me. 

Mountain food. My grandmother used to make a thing called fried bread. It was a staple in her household and, now mind you, she was born closer to the Great Depression so they didn’t have a lot of food. So you just mix flour and water together. You fry it like a pancake and then you can put jelly and things like that on it. Deer of course is a staple. Venison is always a thing here in the mountains. Good lean meat. And squirrel. Sometimes you get squirrel. Turkey is another one. But I’m more partial to the deer and the fried bread. 

[On where things will be in 10 to 15 years] As a state, as a whole, I see [West Virginia] as a tourist attraction. That’s where it’s going. There’s been a lot of issues with closure of the coal mines. There’s been a lot of talk about our sale of shale, fracking, but even now they are having a hard time getting that type of employment into the state. The EPA is fighting them. I look for it to become a tourist destination. And it’s disheartening in a way. 

I love it here. I cannot imagine living anywhere else and I’ve visited places… Michigan, New York, Jersey, Bahamas, and this is just home. It’s comfortable. It fits like a glove. 

I feel relived [to see the mountains after being away]. I’m always happy to see home. I feel like I can slow back down and collect myself. I do, I feel relief when I come home.”