Creative Nonfiction: Kentucky Outlaw (Life in Southeastern Kentucky)

By Hugh Blanton

When I was seventeen years old I ran off from the home of my father and that neurotic hateful woman that was his wife. In proper parlance that woman would be referred to as a stepmother, but such a term would be according her too much humanity. Spiteful, backstabbing, religious zealot—her constant screaming, wailing, and haranguing became unbearable. I didn't think that meeting her demands of how a proper non-drinking, non-smoking, heterosexual Christian boy should behave would actually improve anything, so leaving was my best option. Fleeing brought me freedom but it also brought on another problem: where to live.

 

At first it was charity that saved me—the family of a school friend allowed me to stay with them. To earn my keep I tried working as a thief. Shoplifting brought in candy bars and cassettes. Stealing gasoline (a siphon hose/milk jug combo was referred to as a Kentucky Credit Card) was lucrative but dangerous in heavily armed Southeastern Kentucky. My biggest heist was swiping a carton of cigarettes from the dashboard of a pickup truck parked at a roadside diner on US Highway 119. However, I was unable to repeat such a feat and in due time was told that my welcome had been worn out. It was time to move on again.

 

Much like Jean Genet wandered Europe as a vagabond after being kicked out of the French Army, I wandered the Tri-State area of Kentucky/Tennessee/Virginia. It was becoming apparent that I lacked the skills and daring to be a successful thief so I took jobs from time to time to avoid any further stints of homelessness. In the summer of '83 I worked as a construction laborer. A little later as a fish fryer. The wages helped pay the rent for a camping trailer in the backyard of my landlady's home in Middlesboro, Kentucky. I had given up thievery but the Rose's Department Store PA system still announced "Security, line three" whenever I walked in the door. Being a social and sexual deviate (also like Genet), I was realizing I could never make a home of Southeastern Kentucky.

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I don't really recognize much in the writings about Appalachia today. The writings seem to be molding themselves to a stereotype that doesn't really exist. The Appalachian people are being infantilized, as if they are having their hair tousled and being encouraged to "get out there and try your best little fella!" The stories mostly seem to be about "resilient" oppressed people who are constantly being failed by government agencies. (Has anybody not been failed by government agencies?) And don't forget "rich in history." Rich in culture, too, whatever that may be. I never heard the word "revenuer" while in Kentucky, but the writings about Kentucky abound with it. Outlaws are characterized as defiant and noble Robin Hoods, but I never saw thieves redistributing loot to anyone but themselves.

 

When writer Edmund Wilson and his fellow communists visited Pineville, Kentucky in the 1930's to support striking miners they were not well received. The town's residents escorted them to the state line at point of gun and sent them on their way with a kick in the ass. Theodore Dreiser recounted the events in his book Tragic America, venting his displeasure with the gun-toting mountain hicks and naming names—including the Straight Creek Coal Company's lawyer Cleon Calvert. Dreiser perhaps thought he was handing the anti-communism Kentuckians their comeuppance with his polemic, but it's unlikely any of them gave a second thought to what some out-of-town city slicker thought of them (if they even read the thing in the first place).

 

The genre of "poverty porn" was born in April of '64 when President Lyndon B. Johnson visited two Eastern Kentucky towns, Paintsville and Inez, as part of his War on Poverty. He showcased two Martin County families whose combined income in 1963 was two thousand dollars. Before departing in his helicopter President Johnson said, "We're not going to be satisfied until we've driven poverty underground." Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz gushed, "They have so little to build with, but they seem to determined to be self-reliant." That was over a half-century ago. Today Martin County, Kentucky is economically ranked 2,874 out of 3,141 US counties.

 

When my novel Kentucky Outlaw came out I was asked a few times if it was autobiographical. Author Jonathan Franzen once said in an interview that he's insulted by that particular question; he feels that the reader is telling him that he is incapable of creating fiction from raw ideas that were never actually experienced. Of course that's just part of Franzen's tortured artist shtick. The reader who asks that question is really saying that the story impressed them as so real and vivid that it must have been lived first. My novel was not autobiographical, but I did borrow heavily from my own life's experiences in writing it. Stealing from oneself to create a story is another way of putting it.

 

I did not run from Kentucky. I ran to a new life, wanting to remake myself—but not knowing what to remake myself into. That was part of the joy of it—the world was wide open to me, and it started with a dubious decision to set sail for a six-year stint on a US Navy destroyer. I didn't want to remake myself into an anti-aircraft missile system operator, but while I was engaged in that particular endeavor I could get a steady paycheck until I figured out what it was I did want to be. (Things like heavy metal guitarist, poet, and picaro were at the top of the list.) As much of an autodidact in stock speculation as in writing, I was eventually able to break free of the bonds of W2 wage employment, though I did not create an extreme amount (or even a lot), of wealth. Perhaps not quite picaresque, but still several degrees apart from the masses of wage slaves.

 

Looking back across all those decades I can't say that I miss it now, or that I'm even sentimental about it. I still don't even know whether to classify myself as a runaway or reject—there was never anybody out there looking for me. It's common to hear of reunions years after a family implosion; adult children returning to reconcile with aging parents. However, not only did I not do that, I didn't even return for the funerals. I did not discover a "found family" either. I embraced my solitude free of the obligations of sustained friendship—one of the exemplary wretched of the earth.

 

 

 

 

 

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5