My People: A Sense of Community in Rural America

My mother spent a lifetime in an effort to raise herself above the poverty of her youth. However, she still fondly recalls her childhood with schoolgirl enthusiasm. She laughs when she recalls how Sam and Tiddle, two local widows, would burst through the door every time it would “come a storm”. Mom and her sisters would be piled into beds on the second floor of their small home only to be awakened by one or the other of the ladies saying “Is this where I shleep”.

The girls could hear the muffled prayers of Tiddle during the storm. Once during a particularly bad storm Tiddle woke up Sam and said “Get up and pray Sam, I’m not doing a bit of good”

Once when in fear Tiddle peeked out from under the covers long enough to ask “Is it getting any better?” they lied and said, “Oh no it’s worse”. Tiddle, quaking in fear would pull the covers back over her head while the girls giggled at their mischief.

They never turned them away. I don’t even think they were relation.

Mom speaks about how it is her belief that people loved each other more back then. How they would help one another and how they would grieve at the passing of one of their own.

They certainly depended upon one another more.

Mom said that there were times when she only owned two dresses and how she had to pick blackberries in the summer to pay the fee to ride the school bus to Wurtland High School in the fall. When the blackberries weren’t ripe enough to pick she was awakened at sunrise to hoe spindly hillside corn, breaking only at mealtime. But even at that she speaks fondly of her father who would often come over to help her finish off her winding row of corn.

As a subsistence farmer, her father seldom had two nickels to rub together. However, she had the comfort of knowing that if she would ask, she could have one of them.

I never noticed it in my youth but now I savor the moment every time my mother evokes the phrase “My People”. She uses the term sparingly and it is never used to speak about material things. This is a term used almost exclusively when describing the virtues of “Her People”. When she acknowledges some wrongdoing she’ll say “My people wouldn’t do that” or “My people aren’t like that” or even “We weren’t raised that way”.

But the interesting thing is in her since of community. Her people are not limited only to immediate family. She generously includes distant relations and almost anyone in the old families that live alongside of Brush Creek in Greenup County. Most all are represented annually at our family’s annual Cousins Reunion.

It is there where you could observe old men who speak slowly with carefully weighed words. It is there where you would see older women fussing over pies and dumplings. And it is there where you would see overdue warm embraces from once close cousins separated too long by the demands of daily life.

These are her people. No they are not movie stars or heads of state. But what they are, they are in abundance, and that is a people full of a character that seems to be so sorely missing in a harsh and unforgiving outside world.

So when I turn my truck up either Daniel’s Fork or Brush Creek, I have a feeling of wellness. No longer must I worry if the old truck makes the rest of the way. Flat tires or an empty gas tank is of no great concern because I have entered into the world of her people, and through her, they are my people too.