"Today, I painted a picture of my mama, today is the day she died...."

The following comes from BoneWoman Outsider Art. Something is lost here by not having the two images below next to one another, but I think that the text and the juxtaposition of the images carries a well-constructed story of memories, love, loss, and development. I say "well-constructed" because this can be construction site-raw and hit like bricks. There is something blue-collar here and there is something that takes up our own construction of memories and loss and what we do with them. Intended or not, all of this poses questions for me of how to define art and how art carries time and life along.

Today, I painted a picture of my mama, today is the day she died. Lots of tears mixed with paint, I never stop missing her!

1972 - Riding in the front passenger seat in our yellow dodge dart sitting by my mama in her green lime checker polyester dress she made herself a white scarf tied around her head hiding the baldness underneath - chemo colon cancer she is dying rotting on the inside - I am the last born of eight children - 15 - it was a rare moment to ever have my mama to myself - it is cold the heat is blasting in the car it smells old and moldy we arrive to the shopping center - Piggly Wiggly - a sign with a pig wearing a white hat and apron a stripe red & white shirt smiling at us welcoming us to come on in but we do not we walk behind the store where a small record store is located - it is tiny barely five people can fit into the store - my mama had asked me what I wanted for my birthday - my mama had never asked me ever what I wanted for my birthday - I said I want the single of Roberta Flack the first time I have saw your face - we went into the store and there it was a black and red 45 vinyl slipped inside a plain white cover. Next to the single was the 33 - the full album First Take - A bright yellow album cover with Roberta seating on a piano stool her hands posed over the white keys looks like she playing in a smokey bar with her musicians to the side two orange lamps over her head she is wearing a black and white dress with a white scarf that looks like the one my mama has on her bald head. Roberta head is bowed as if she is praying to the piano. I so wanted the whole album but I will not ask because I know we cannot afford it.
We return to the car, it is cold, the wind chills my bones, I am holding on to this little white package for fear the wind will take it from me - we return home I run to my bedroom the one I share with my sister Dea - bunk beds I pull out our little record player from underneath the bed - looks like a red and white small suitcase. I flip the brass clasps - fling open the record player and gently place my 45 on the turntable lifting the needle and carefully carefully placing the needle on the record so as not to scratch this precious early birthday gift. Roberta comes to life her voice in my room all mine for that moment she sings
The first time ever I saw your face
I thought the sun rose in your eyes
And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave
To the dark and the endless skies, my love
To the dark and the endless skies
And the first time ever I kissed your mouth
I felt the earth move in my hand
Like the trembling heart of a captive bird
That was there at my command, my love
That was there at my command, my love
And the first time ever I lay with you
I felt your heart so close to mine
And I knew our joy would fill the earth
And last 'til the end of time my love
And it would last 'til the end of time
The first time ever I saw your face
Your face, your face, your face
Mama is in the room next to mine, I can hear her grunting, pulling off the tight dingy white girdle, slipping out of her green polyester dress, the bra and then I hear the bed springs squeak and she is lying down in her bed.
Soon it will be time for me to go in and change the bandage that covers the oozing wound on her belly, where they removed a tumor the size of a grapefruit. She lays there and we both are listening to Roberta sing “The First time I saw your face" coming from my room. I cannot look at my mama because I know I will cry and we did not cry in front of each other in my house. All tears were hidden. Mama died two months later - January 17th -1973 Roberta Flack won a grammy award two months later 1973 for The First time I ever saw your face.

Finding Black Louisiana Folk Artist Clementine Hunter

Wash Day by Clementine Hunter, 1980. Taken from WikiArt. 

I don't know much about art and artists, but I do want to learn more about the Black Louisiana Folk Artist Clementine Hunter. It seems tragic to me that I could live into my late 60s and never learn about her or see her work. This art is a living example of the kind of beauty that I try to get out on this blog. 

I have the Black Southern Belle and the Glitter Gallery pages to thank for brining Clementine Hunter to my attention. The Gallery provided this brief introduction to Hunter and her work and the photograph below.

Remembering Our great Louisiana Folk Artist Clementine Hunter who passed away January 1, 1988 at the age 102. She was a self-taught African-American artist from the Cane River region of Louisiana. She was born on Hidden Hill Plantation, known today as Little Eva Plantation, said to be the inspiration for Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was the granddaughter of a slave and worked as a farm hand. She was never taught to read or write. In her mid Fifties, she began painting using paint brushes left by an Artist that visited Melrose Plantation where she lived and worked. Hunter's new lifestyle of artwork depicted plantation life in the early 20th Century documenting a bygone era. She first sold her paintings for as little as 25 cents. By the end of her life, her work was being displayed and exhibited in museums and sold by art dealers for thousands of dollars. Hunter was granted an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree by Northwestern State University of Louisiana in 1986. Today her artwork appears in museums and private collections all over the world and sells into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for some of her most treasured paintings. Thank you Clementine Hunter. You Inspired Us.

The beauty within us and around us

I did a post yesterday about the wonderful work done by Ms. Diane Briggs. The picture of the painted rock that appeared here caused me to meditate a bit on creation and beauty and where they come from, and the post also got many positive comments. Ms. Briggs was pleased enough with this to tell me that she lives in Western Kentucky and she sent me a photograph of another one of her great works that I am posting here. A friend of hers was kind enough to send along a picture of a painted beehive that she did as well. The beehive adds a utilitarian dimension to Ms. Briggs' work, meaning that her creativity extends in a direction that most of what we take as "art" doesn't. Some of her work has a purpose beyond being beautiful in and for itself. I believe that this is unique in these times, when "art" is given a price tag and is identified as something separate from our daily lives. Ms. Briggs is building a bridge and invites us to cross a chasm.

This post is part of an on-going series. Please click "Beauty" in the tags to see similar additional posts. 

The Great Beauty Around Us And Within Us

This post is part of a series on this blog about the beauty that is within us and around us---not what we have to turn on a television or go to a museum to see, but what we and those around us create for our joy and for the joy of those around us.

This comes from Mr. Steve Givens in Kentucky, and I picked it up from the Appalachian Americans Facebook page. Mr. Givens provided a caption that reads "My 2022 Christmas Watercolor, based upon fond memories of my old home place in Green County, Ky. *Merry Christmas to All!"

Now, I interact with many great artists who create their work for friends and families and for their communities and leave it at that. Many would not think of themselves ass artists in the first place, and many do not think of what they create as art. I think that every community or region has its own creative people whose work speaks to and for their regions. Most of these people will remain anonymous. I can see two sides to this. One side is that the work is being created for specific times and places and people and fills certain needs and that needs to be honored. And the artists have a totally justified fear of being taken advantage of by outsiders and of being misunderstood or critiqued. The other side that I can see is that we need to honor these people and save their work because there is never enough beauty in the world. We need help seeing what is right in front of our noses. I wish that we could buy cards or prints of this work but we can't. I also wish that this blog and the internet could better show this work.

Mr. Givens was kind enough to let me post this, and I'm grateful to him to allowing that. I'm sure that some of our readers will rejoice in this as I have.

Some of the beauty within us and around us...

 Hats made by M.L. Stephens to be given away

Ceramic art by Lena Skvortsova (b. 1970, Moscow)

Title: 100 years from now

The beauty around us---continuing our series

I have been trying to highlight some of the beautiful and creative work done by folks since this blog began, but just lately I have been stepping that up. Please scroll back a bit to see more.

This is a garnet and freshwater pearl and sterling silver necklace made by Eve Dedek in Oregon:

A scarf and hat made by M.L. Stephens in Salem, Oregon and intended

 for houseless friends.

Tin Man from Roderfield, West Virginia and now in Salem, Oregon

"Create in me a clean heart" spotted on a wall in Northfork, West Virginia today.

The beautiful things that people make--part of a series on this blog

 These are cut and polished rocks set in glass made by the daughter of a friend of mine.

This is the banner painted by Caroline Leigh O'Brien this year for the Nye Beach Banner Project. These are hung out on the streets of Nye Beach, Oregon from June to late October and auctioned in early November. The money is used to support the arts in the community for children. The first thing to go in in school budget cuts are the art programs and this helps fill that gap for the Newport community.

When people around us create what is beautiful...

For the last few days I have been making a conscious effort to highlight some of the beautiful things that people around me or who I have run into have created. Scroll through the blog to find these. This is today's offering.

I purchased the candle at a little roadside shop in Welch, West Virginia. The store sells mainly religious items and is run by a couple of very nice women. It's a little dark inside and very comfortable. The candle is jasmine and sweet pea and it smells great and burns very well without being overpowering. The label is stuck on with scotch tape and this is a kind of mason jar. I'm happy with it.

The piece on the right has a more complicated story to it. A dear friend who lives in welch describes it like this:

The contents in the vial are river glass from the Tug Fork River, retrieved by the Reverend Garnet Edwards Jr. To me it has this meaning: river glass starts life as trash that has been tossed in the watershed. Over time, the water and abrasion soften its edges and turns it into something more polished and beautiful. As with recovery and my spiritual beliefs being tied to God in nature, our lives have been transformed from the discarded to something far better. Our edges softened; our very beings changed. And when the light catches it, the river glass sparkles and shines.

I don't know that I could explain anything better than that.

When good people do beauty and show love...

"Beauty" and "love" and "creation" are verbs in some people's hands. This is an example of what I'm talking about.

  

Some of the art and beauty in our lives

The following photos come from the Appalachian Americans Facebook page. Many people in the coalfields have special creative abilities. They can make something beautiful and interesting out of scrap. Lots of people in the coalfields are collectors and I've been in homes and workshops that are small museums. All of that and some folks are just beautiful in their love and respect for one another. Check in with some of my posts about Virginia Lee Photography. This artistic work and the preserving of history reinforces long memories. I'm sure that someone has written a book about all of this by now.

 

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”---Dorothea Lange

Well, here I go again. I have said it before: a person can talk day and night on something they know nothing about, but ask that person to talk about something that they do know and they will run out of talk in about 15 minutes. That and I always say that experts are just people far from home. If the people that you grew up around heard you advertising as being an expert, they would just die laughing. Here I am going on.

Now, on May 4, 2022 I did two posts here about art and photography in Appalachia. They are titled "Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting---Parts One and Two.” They were not particularly well written or profound. My point in writing those posts was to talk about painting and photography, and about some painters and photographers as people who not only document or record life as it changes, but also as people who we informally appoint to tell us and others more about ourselves and our experiences. They become our representatives to a larger world.

Every time you turn on the radio or the tv you hear someone talking from a particular place and a particular viewpoint that is shaped by their experiences and who they’re representing. I’ll wager you that in a day of listening to the mainstream tv or radio you won’t hear any working-class people telling our stories the way we tell them or would like them to be told. It’s not the fault of the media; their sponsors and their mindset don’t allow for us to be much more than consumers or victims or rough people. We know that we’re more and better than that, but sorting that out is hard if we don’t have the means to do that.

That’s why the painters, photographers, singers and bands, poets and writers, carvers and whittlers, cooks, storytellers, six-time-mommas who still tell bedtime stories, and so many other creative people who come from the working-class are so important. If you can find something of yourself in their work you might be on the way to sorting out your life essentials---where you came from, where you want to go, how you want to get there, and who is coming along with you. This helps people break out of their bad sides and start getting along with others, and who knows where that will stop once it takes off?

If you know where you have been and you get a vision of where you want to go, you’re more likely than not to start loving the people around you. Most of us want for others what we want for ourselves most of the time and you can’t care for yourself without caring for others. Life doesn’t work that way. You’re more likely to put down that bottle or that joint or the meth because, well, at some point it’s either that or it’s your future and it's either that or the people who care for you.

I tried to make the point in my May 4 post that I think that Kristen Kennedy, the woman who does the photography at Virginia Lee Photography in southwestern Virginia, is one of those people who helps us sort ourselves out. Her work gives me a good push on most days because I can see myself or people who I come from in her work. You can catch up with Virginia Lee Photography on Facebook, and if you live in Central Appalachia, I hope that you will make an appointment with her and get some photography done.

But how is she documenting people, and what does her work have to say to us? Some things are subtle. You have to let them sink in over time. A photograph is usually something more than a picture. The person or place that you see when you look at a photograph is held there at a particular moment. Yesterday they were different, tomorrow they will be different. It’s good to ask yourself how they happened to get there and where they’re headed. Ask yourself those questions, too.

I’m going to focus here on Appalachia, big and diverse as it is, and certain rural areas. You can be Appalachian and be in Northeastern Pennsylvania or in parts of Alabama. You can live in a holler or a patch or in a city. You can use yellow, white, or blue cornmeal. Your family’s roots can be in any part of the world. My grandmother would say that labels are only good for cans of soup.

Once, not so long ago, we looked a lot like this:

We were mostly poor, and many of our people were undernourished. Our families lived in rural areas, coal patches and hollers, “across the tracks” in towns and cities, in segregated and “ethnic” neighborhoods. 

And many of our families lived in homes that looked like this:

And when we look at the Virginia Lee photography this is some of what we see:

Now, what changed? How is it that, with all of our troubles, many of us look healthier and happier today then we used to? Some of it is color photography. Some of it is that today people smile in the camera. Some of it is that people go to Virginia Lee Photography to have a happy occasion photographed. But it’s also true---and this is central for me---that between those old times and today lots of people stuck together, showed love to one another, and made positive change by protesting, going on strike, and fighting for better living conditions.

Freedom is a continuing struggle, but we have had victories. Most kids in the United States don’t go to work in the mines and factories now. We have mine safety laws. We have seen times in this country when we had majorities or near-majorities of people who believed in peace, civil rights, union rights, and policies that put people ahead of profits. Appalachia and many rural areas were key to those movements.

From the film "Harlan County, USA"

From the film "Harlan County, USA"

Please take another look at some of the work done by Kristen Kennedy with what you have read above in mind.

The sentimental person within me says that this love and joy did indeed fall from the skies. But another voice tells me to take a minute and reflect. Do you see an evolution here or cause-and-effect? Where do you see the evolution and the change? I see it in the means of doing photography itself and in the very bodies and faces in the photographs, but I also see it in the development of real human feelings. The protests and the movements for change have expressed something good in people, but they also helped those feelings to find expression. The proof that these movements succeeded to some extent is in the smiles that you see here and in the faith needed to have a child or graduate from school today. And Kristen Kennedy is there to capture that love and joy and represent us.

Sources:  The photographs here and other work done by Kristen Kennedy can be seen at the Virginia Lee website and on the Virginia Lee Facebook page. Some of the photographs above come from my family album. Most of the photographs here have ended up on my desktop over the years and come from sources that I can't trace. Mr. Bob Wilson and the Appalachian Americans, Scenic Harlan County, and Forgotten Coalfields of Appalachia Facebook pages are good sources. One of my best and favorite sources is the Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. If you are fortunate to find the work of Marat Moore anywhere, snap it up.   

An excellent quick presentation on art and Christian faith

What Makes an Artistic Representation of Christ True? - Chris E.W. Green

Four images of Christ that speak to me:

 Guerilla Christ, By Alfredo Rostgaard

 

"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting."---Part One

"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting."---Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is Part One. Part Two is here.

I'm going to try to write about a few people---artists, really---in the most caring way that I can. I don’t know these people, and I’m not sure that I’m up to the task of writing clearly about them in the terms that I want to use, that come most naturally to me. And I don’t want to be sentimental here, but I do want to honor them and something of their lives, their parts of something much bigger than we are that runs through their lives.

The first people who I want to mention are the Joe Mullins and the Radio Ramblers band. I don’t know how I missed them for so many years. They’re a pretty well-known bluegrass band and they do lots of bluegrass gospel, but I just found out about them last week. Their “Readin’, Writin’, Route 23” tells a story held in the hearts of the hundreds of thousands of people who left Appalachia and the South between the 1930s and the early 1970s. Many of them took U.S. Route 23 north, but they also took it south on weekends and holidays. If that was all that the band had done I would still be a fan, but the instrumental work on their ”O-Hio” and the vocals they manage in “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” touch me. I think that they will touch you, too.

Now as we go a little deeper the writing gets a little more complicated.

J.R. Shuck is a painter living in West Virginia. All I know about J.R. is what is said on J.R.’s flickr page: their hometown is Weyanoke, West Virginia in Mercer County; J.R. is a retired artist who still paints; they attended Matoaka High School, and Bluefield State College in West Virginia; J.R. has a Master of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University in New York; and, if you want J.R. to paint something or somebody you can get on a list and expect to wait.

This is his painting of Pageton, West Virginia. Pageton is in McDowell County not far from the West Virginia-Virginia state line, and you can get to North Carolina and Kentucky pretty easily from there. In fact, I think that you can get to U.S. Route 23 with a little time but not much trouble. I was surprised to find that Pageton has a Wikipedia entry and that it tells us that Pageton has less and 200 people. It’s poor, but it isn’t the poorest community in the region. 

I want to recommend that everyone visit J.R.’s flickrpage here and study what you’re looking at. Study and feel what you see there. Most of the paintings will give you insight into the lives of others and where they live. Ask yourself how you would be different if you lived in one of those places or if the people in those paintings were your kin or neighbors. What would you say to them if you ran into them at the store or at church? Can you worry a little bit about those soldiers or coal miners? Do those children make you smile, and do you worry for those old people?

I don’t know much about art. I barely know what I like in art. But I do think that good art invites you in and teaches you something about the bigger world while it also represents your lived experiences. It doesn’t so much tell you that you’re on the right track and that everything will be fine so much as it helps you see yourself and your experiences from a different point of view and helps you to make changes.

Now, there is a lot of discussion about what a “holler” is and the best place to sort this out is in the pages of The Mountain Eagle newspaper, published in Whitesburg, KY. and one of the better newspapers in the United States. According to an article that ran in the newspaper on May 23, 2018 a holler is between two mountains but “too narrow to be a valley.” And he goes on to say:

A holler has a head and a mouth. The head is as far as you can go, and the mouth is where the creek runs into a larger stream of water. 

A holler can have houses spaced out on both sides of the road. You can ‘holler’ from one house to the other to tell the latest news. It may have several branches of forks. 

A holler may have a small grocery store at its mouth, and if you see someone walking to the store, give them some money and your list and they will bring your groceries back with them. Or, let them check your mail… 

You knew everyone living in the holler. It may be a few hundred yards long, or more than a mile from the mouth to the head. 

If your girlfriend lived up in the holler, everyone knew what time you went in and what time you went out, because their dogs would bark at you as you passed their house. 

A holler is a place where you can sit on your front porch in the cool of a spring day and hear a whip-poorwill symphony. Then Old Uncle John would get out his fiddle (not to be confused with a violin) and play until he got tired, his music echoing all over the holler. 

A holler is a place where the sun comes up late and sets early. After the sun sets, it’s still a couple of hours before it gets dark. 

It’s a place where you can let your young’uns, dog, cat and chickens run loose in the yard. 

A holler is a place where the kids can build a dam in the creek and have a good place to cool off and play. 

A holler is a good place to live, raise your young’uns, and have fun. It’s a place where the mountains are your playground. 

I think that’s good poetry, and I think that you can see that and feel it in some of J.R.’s paintings. 

I never lived in a holler but I did spend lots of time in patches and patch towns. One of my great aunts lived in a coal patch and her brothers lived a short distance up the road from her. The house that my father was born in and that his grandparents both died in was across the road. Back in the 1930s there was a family fight that no one would talk about or could remember the reason for, but every day for the next 40 years or so my great-aunt and my great-uncles passed on another without speaking. And if you went to visit my great-uncles at night and stepped into their shack you just saw two glowing pipes in the dark because they didn’t have electricity. I didn’t know that my great-aunt had full indoor plumbing until after she died because everyone used the outhouse. The mine that my family worked in was there--the place where my great-aunt’s husband had been killed and where my great-grandfather became an invalid. This was where my grandmother and her brothers met hoboes while they walked the railroad tracks to school and where they got stories that they told me. 

The houses up there were split, with two families in one big house divided in the middle. The family that lived next to my great-aunt would fight a great deal and throw dishes. They would break the supposedly unbreakable Correlle dishes and get new ones from the company after they returned the pieces. The year I was born there were terrible storms and my great-uncles got out some feed corn for the deer and put it out on the road. People were so poor and hungry that they came out in the snow and picked up the corn to eat. Hollers and patches are full of stories and memories. 

My point to here is that J.R. Shuck and Joe Mullins and the Radio Ramblers are telling you stories in their different ways. I hope that we can all slow down a bit and listen to one another’s stories and tell stories of our own. You know, I don’t care if a story is true in an all of its details. What I do care about is that someone is trying to tell someone else a tale that is important to them, that has meaning to them. I put coon hunting aside a long time ago, and I would never do that again, but coon hunters had story-telling down to an art, and a good story from a coon hunter painted a picture in your mind.

Read Part Two here.

 

"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting."---Part Two

This is the second of a two-part series. Read Part One Here.

Now I want to ramp things up a little.

I don’t know Ms. Virginia Lee or that wonderful-looking couple she took photographs of recently, but I do wish that I knew them and lived close by them. There are scores of stories in her photography. Virginia Lee is self-taught---you would not know this from looking at her work---and what comes across most to me as I look at her photography is that there are real people there, that she’s standing at a line between documenting people’s lives and giving them and their families something to hold on to. She’s documenting people’s lives even when they dress up and pose because that’s part of life and there is a story behind that photograph of how they got to that point and what it means to them.

And there is more. In these photographs you see a handsome mine worker after work, a loving couple, and a beautiful woman. You also see a contrast between work and something else---but what is that “something else” that holds your gaze? There is wisdom, hope, and faith in the unknown there. Virginia Lee is showing a kind of contradiction between two forces, but she’s resolving that contradiction by showing abiding love. I friended the woman in the photographs on Facebook and I see that she is a healthcare worker in West Virginia and that she’s full of commonsense, has strong ties to her family and her community, and will stand up for what she thinks is right. So, whatever the story of romance and love that we’re seeing is, we’re also seeing a story of modern-day Appalachia that contradicts every stereotype that is out there.

Where does this self-taught art of creatively bringing forward beauty and stories come from? Ms. Lee wrote me that she lives and works “in the coalfields in SouthWest Virginia.... Tazewell County, Richlands VA......right on the border of WV.” and that she “had many coal miners in my family and I'm originally from McDowell County, WV.”. So here again we have someone creating from what they know and evidently love, treating their place and people with respect and compassion and reminding the world of our shared humanity. You can visit with her at https://www.facebook.com/vleephoto and maybe arrange for her to do some work with you. I hope that you will.

I have a box full of photographs of family members and their friends that were taken 70-110 years ago, mostly all unsmiling people who were weighed down by work and daily struggles or who just weren’t used to having their photographs taken. They’re even wearing long dresses and suits on the beach. My grandmother, her father’s favorite of 7 children, stands with her hand on her father’s shoulder, the family stiff and formal except for the impish look in my great-uncle Max’s eyes in one family photograph. My great-aunt Celeste is almost gaunt, just a slip of a girl who looks hungry and needy. What saves this photograph from being just another slightly-out-of-focus photograph of a coalfield family is that the photograph was taken after a long strike that the mine workers mostly won and that everyone in the photograph except my grandmother would have nearly impossible and difficult lives and die way too young.

A few years back I went to another country knowing that I was stepping into a dangerous political situation. A friend of mine and I went to a professional photographer before I left because I wanted to record something in case I didn’t make it back. When we look at photographs of mine workers and healthcare workers, we need to remember the dangers of their jobs and we need to celebrate the joys they’re capturing on film. I wish that a Virginia Lee had been around 100 years ago. We need the Virginia Lees. They’re a blessing to us.

I want to say a good word before I close about the Reconnecting McDowell organization because we always need people helping people in the Appalachian regions, that area where all of the good people mentioned above live and work and call home. The official description of Reconnecting McDowell is that they are “a comprehensive, long-term effort to make educational improvement in McDowell County the route to a brighter economic future. Partners from business, foundations, government, nonprofit agencies, and labor have committed, in a signed covenant, to seeking solutions to McDowell’s complex problems—poverty, underperforming schools, drug and alcohol abuse, housing shortages, limited medical services, and inadequate access to technology and transportation.” 

They have lots of projects going on: 

·         GoGrowcery—a mobile farmers market that takes local produce to various stops in this 535-square-mile food desert

·         Broader Horizons—a mentorship and experiential learning program for high school juniors that helps them navigate the post-high school world and takes them on trips to Charleston and Washington DC

·         Make it Shine McDowell—our countywide litter cleanup program with a coalition membership including everyone from Wobblies to Mormons

·         Maier Scholarships—presented to selected high school graduates so they can attend higher ed in WV

·         Early reading initiatives—book giveaways, working in schools, working with other groups to provide reading materials, especially during the summer

·         Friends of the Tug Fork River—a watershed group we helped form to improve water and make the river available for recreation and economic development

·         Music programming—hosting events at the Caffrey Arts Center featuring a combination of local and regional talent

·         Wrap-around services in schools—including Smiles, a program for dental care, and work with the Communities in Schools Initiative

·         Renaissance Village—our new building, the first commercial structure in Welch in more than 50 years

I like all of that, and I’m feeling good that I sent Reconnecting McDowell a contribution today, but I also know a guy who works there who I think is just one-half-step this side of the angels. I know that Reconnecting McDowell recently organized a trash pick-up, and I know that that may not sound like a big deal. But try thinking about it this way: people throw trash out of their cars or dump garbage by the roadsides and in the hollers because they no longer feel ownership of their place or responsibility to their people and their environment. We call this “alienation.” So, when people do the opposite and do take responsibility for their communities and environment something good is happening. Something big is taking place. A spirit is moving in the land and in the people.

Think about those folks dumping trash with this in mind:

The history that Joe Mullins and the Radio Ramblers, J.R. Shuck, Ms. Virginia Lee, and that good-looking couple above show us isn’t half-done yet, although it took 300 million years for that beautiful black coal to form. Every day we have a choice to make about going forward or backward, and I believe that Reconnecting McDowell, Appalachian Voices, the Black Lung Association, the United Mine Workers of America, radio station WMMT, the Appalachian Citizens' Law Center, The Mountain Eagle, and other similar efforts are blessing us with their work and presence and shining their headlamps in the right direction.