The Road Out. Deborah Hicks
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could in the trunk of a car and headed north.
The migrants from the southern mountains were typically poor; few were landowning farmers. But up north, men and women could at least find work in warehouses and on the shop floor. In their new urban homelands, the southerners formed close-knit urban villages with ties to their rural points of origin in Kentucky and West Virginia. A stretch of highway, such as old Highway 25 in Kentucky, linked particular counties in Appalachia with particular city communities to the north.
In the summers, Blair visited her one relative who still lived in Kentucky, an aunt in Hazard. Down there, Blair got pushed in a creek by her two half brothers, who were wild and always looking for fun and trouble. She let the family dog off its chain. Sometimes she dreamed of living on a farm with two kids of her own, her dogs, and a horse. But the world that Blair knew in Cincinnati was the concrete universe of the streets. It was better for her inside, especially in late winter, when the purple-gray shadows of dusk came early to the neighborhood.
In March, curtains of early spring wind and rain brought odors from a nearby creek, now a putrid dark green from industrial sewage dumped into its waters—and into the air that Blair breathed. Her asthma kicked up then; out came the inhaler. As the spring afternoons warmed, children and young mothers with baby strollers spilled out from cramped rooms in rental units, onto narrow side streets lined with cigarette butts and trash. Older adults with weathered faces sat on stoops or in rainbow-colored folding chairs, enjoying a smoke. Grown men, most of them white, worked on cars. Their faces often had tired, stressed-out expressions. The factory and warehouse jobs that once beckoned workers from poor counties in Kentucky and West Virginia had begun leaving the neighborhood in the 1980s. The old-industry side of the neighborhood, near where Blair lived, was a ghost town. Warehouse windows were boarded up or gaping. Shards of glass were ground into sidewalks that had once known the human warmth of workers going to and from their jobs.
Then summer came. Blair attended my literature and creative writing class for girls over the summer; she had already been part of my afterschool class during the school year. From my work with her over that year—and the year before, when I volunteered in her classroom—I had learned a tough lesson for a naïve teacher: unless I drove Blair, now ten years old, to summer class myself, sleep often took priority over educational opportunity. And so on the morning of June 25, 2002, I set out for Blair’s house.
It was early still, a teacher’s start to the day. The light outside was soft, with a pale-gray cloud cover that would lift by midmorning. It would be a hot day. I drove across one of the many bridges connecting Kentucky, where I lived near the river’s edge, to downtown Cincinnati. The sights were familiar from each morning’s drive. First there was the busy downtown area, with Starbucks on one corner and high rise banks on the right. Businesspeople in their two-piece suits and secretaries in their heels had begun to walk briskly on the sidewalks. Five stoplights further and I made a left turn, heading west. The road widened and the larger buildings disappeared. Then the road crossed a viaduct, with some old train tracks visible below and, scarcely visible from the road, the polluted creek where earlier generations had taken cool dips to escape the summer heat. Moments later the first of the old brick warehouses appeared to the right. I had arrived in the girls’ neighborhood.
Finally there was the intersection—the community’s geographic and emotional center. I came to a stop at the light. A few locals wandered into the Paradise Café for coffee and a smoke as I waited. A woman with a tired face and heavyset hips lit up a cigarette while she waited at the bus stop outside. It was an intersection that tended to give outsiders an uneasy feeling. As seventeen-year-old Bill Ferris, who grew up in the neighborhood, said to a reporter in the 1980s: “You’re standing there on the corner by the light, and you hear all these doors locking—click, click, click—like you’re going to come and pull them out of their cars and rob them.”2
The light changed. I turned right onto Perry Avenue, the two-lane road where Blair lived. Most of the houses on her stretch of street were of modest size and in need of repairs to their clapboard frames. Her part of the neighborhood had been dubbed Little Appalachia for its resemblance to rural hamlets in West Virginia or Kentucky. The two-story wood-frame homes sat close together, their yards spilling over with bicycle parts, discarded car tires, wrappers and cigarette butts, and young bodies at play.
Grandma Lilly had bought their home years before. She had labored to completely pay off the house in only six years. Now, at least, her grandchildren would have a roof over their heads if anything ever happened to her. But Grandma Lilly’s precarious health and the thin trickle of Social Security benefits didn’t create the conditions for upkeep on an older two-story house. From the front, it appeared to sag, the front-facing porch weighing heavily on wooden beams. The house stood across from a tall yellow billboard with black lettering that shouted its message: WE BUY UGLY HOUSES.
Most mornings it was an ordeal to get Blair into my car and to the special reading and writing class I had created for her and five other girls. I walked to the side door, past two barking chows straining against their heavy chains, and up the concrete porch that was missing its handrail. From inside came a sleepy young adult voice: “Who is it?” The voice belonged to Blair’s older half sister, still in her teens but already working the night shift at Taco Bell. Once inside, I found most of the household still in bed. Blair’s toddler niece lay curled up next to Grandma Lilly in the front bedroom, where up to four generations slept on a given night. On one of the cardboard boxes stacked next to a dresser sat Blair, sleep-deprived and growling a feeble protest. She was a night person. But once she got to my reading class, Blair usually perked up. One of the reasons was that in the summers my class always began with breakfast.
By eight that morning, I sat with Blair, still looking crusty-eyed and cranky, and five more of my students at a makeshift breakfast table—the kind of round work table you could find in any public elementary school in America. Next to me sat Miss Susan, an instructional assistant at the school who often joined the girls and me for breakfast on summer mornings. On the table, covered with a cheap paper tablecloth, were the food offerings I had brought in this morning: blueberry muffins and raspberry jam, granola, yogurt, orange juice, and a bowl of hardboiled eggs. I always fussed over my students, southern style, at our summer breakfasts, and Blair brought out my motherly instincts. She was a picky eater, and I nudged a couple of YoBaby fruit-flavored yogurts in her direction. Blair had taken home a point-and-shoot camera of mine to photograph some of the darker reaches of her house, including the attic. She was creating photographic images to go with a story she was writing.
“I live in a cave,” said Blair, the crumbs from a blueberry muffin at the sides of her mouth. “And my house is hell.”
“I’ve been to hell and your house ain’t it,” shot back Miss Susan, speaking quickly and glancing sideways at Blair. Her words were as much about delivery as content. Audience was important, and she aimed her remark at all of us around the table. Her lips parted in the faintest of smiles, revealing the gap from her two missing front teeth.
Blair snickered at Miss Susan’s in-your-face reply. These mornings felt to her more like being with family than sitting through one of the dreaded summer school classes held in other parts of the school building, for the unlucky students who couldn’t pass their end-of-year tests. She knew that here she could get in someone’s face as well as Miss Susan—or anyone else she encountered on the little section of street she was allowed to roam—could. Blair’s tiny frame made her look like a little girl, but the motor mouth on her was something altogether different. For a girl who came into the world as an underweight baby with drugs in her system, the physical world had to be subdued by verbal wit, intelligence, and bravery.
Miss Susan plopped a banana down on the table in front of me. She looked older than a woman in her late forties. Money was short, and Miss Susan had to work two jobs to make ends meet. Her black hair was pinned back, revealing the tired lines on her face. There were shadows under her steel gray eyes, though those same eyes betrayed a youthful, sassy feeling. She was a proud woman who could beat the shit out of anyone who messed with her.
“Eat this, it’s good for you,” she said in a voice made husky from smoking her Newport Lights.
“Did you work late last night?” I asked.