A coal miner’s daughter sings her song and finds her peace in new memoir | Opinion

In national media coverage, Kentucky looks like Trump country through and through. Even locally, many believe that only an “urban tsunami” of Louisville and Lexington voters can deliver us from MAGA.

But that’s not all of us. A new memoir by Beth Howard delivers a powerful dose of hope for rural Appalachia. Howard lives in Lexington now, but she grew up in the tiny eastern Kentucky town of Blaze — part of the white, rural class of poor and working people popularly identified as Trumpsters.

In writing “Song for a Hard-Hit People: A Memoir of Antiracist Solidarity from a Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Howard offers her family, her, community, and working people generally an antidote to the idea that a wealthy businessman and his inner circle of billionaire barons will cure everyday Americans’ suffering.

Howard’s childhood was rugged, and she sugar-coats nothing in recounting the violence her womanizing, coal-miner dad brought home after a night out partying. Hair-raising tales from her youth illuminate the economic and mental-health struggles that have run rampant in her family across several generations. Yet joy also abounds. The same family members who hurt themselves and others can also be loving parents, grandparents, and neighbors whose care makes life worth living.

One of Beth Howard’s most vivid memories of growing up is sitting on the front porch hearing her grandparents tell stories. People are “hard wired for stories,” she says, and she tells hers in gripping, novel-like prose. Readers can almost hear the crunch of her mother’s arm bone when her dad comes home drunk and swinging. But we also hear the music of Patsy Cline on other, safer nights when Howard’s grandmother teaches her to waltz in the living room. She recalls in equal measure the fun and the danger of her regular trips with her dad to the liquor store, where the cashier affectionately nicknames them “Hawk and Daisy.”

This is Howard’s first book. When we discussed it recently, she acknowledged it is “difficult to talk about Appalachian memoir” in the shadow of JD Vance, whose 2016 “Hillbilly Elegy” lambasted the region’s people and culture along with his family’s misfortune. Though Vance’s book remains famous (becoming a Netflix TV series), it has been the source of too many correctives to list here.

One can read Howard’s memoir that way. Yet her project is much more than a rejoinder to Vance. Her book largely follows the memoirist’s “standard” plot path to personal redemption. Howard’s healing, however, takes place not through individual effort or pluck (which she has plenty of) but always through her relationships with others, whether it is in classrooms, community organizations, therapy groups, or in reuniting with family to help care for her father when his liver failed.

Those multiple connections make this memoir a saga of social as well as personal recovery. That’s because Howard is not only a writer, she is also an organizer who co-founded the Kentucky People’s Union and works for Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ). She first found public recognition when her online essay, “Rednecks for Black Lives,” went viral in 2020 in the wake of the police killing of Breonna Taylor.

Howard seeks to reignite the solidarity that was so clear in the region during mining union battles and in the civil rights and anti-strip mining movements. In this regard, her writing is reminiscent of earlier Kentucky author-activists such as journalist Anne Braden or songwriter Florence Reece — women she gladly claims as mentors.

“Too often,” she told me, books about Appalachia offer prescriptions for how Appalachians “need to change. But I want to call on the parts of us who are rough and ready.”

Part of Howard’s recovery came from writing, and in that sense the book itself is a triumph. She began keeping a diary at age eight, partly to process the turbulence around her. Finding refuge at school, she won a fourth-grade writing contest and had her first short story published in this newspaper. Later she earned a Master’s degree in English from Eastern Kentucky University. “But poetry wasn’t paying my bills,” she told me with a wry smile.

The second half of Howard’s book traces her journey into social and racial justice activism. She had always been critical of unfairness, but at age 26, she answered an ad for community organizer training. There she found both purpose and a living wage for the first time. Still, the traumas of her early life followed her, and the book offers a cautionary tale for anyone with a missionary zeal. Howard had to battle alcoholism, depression, and burnout before she finally realized that not every problem can be cured by simply going at it harder, especially for those who have survived violence or extreme insecurity.

The book takes readers to some dark places, but Howard remains an optimist with a deep love for Appalachia and its people. Her book begins and ends with her door knocking to talk with people in rural communities about hot-button issues—racism, immigration, economic inequality. These conversations can be tense, and Howard had to leave one of them in a hurry. But they are vital if we are to bridge our seriously divided society.

“A good organizer listens and asks questions,” she reminds me. “I try to see people with two sets of eyes—who they are and who they can become.”

For this reader of Howard’s memoir, that hopeful way of seeing ourselves and others sounds like good advice.

Catherine Fosl is a historian and the author of three books of history, including “Subversive Southerner,” an award-winning biography of the late activist Anne Braden.