Snapshots of Life: Storytelling and Outlaw Culture in Eastern Kentucky

When I was about eight years old, I found a vodka bottle sitting behind a door in my great-grandmother’s old house. This wasn’t just any old house. Sometime after they were grown, Great-Grandma’s sons built her a new house maybe thirty feet from the old house they were raised in. It seemed like she just walked out of that Depression-era house one day and left an entire lifetime behind. The old house was full of furniture, dishes, patchwork quilts, and memories. Each room was still perfectly arranged but the house grew less safe each year; my father only let me go upstairs once because the steps could collapse.

Great-Grandma’s new house was full of dolls and stacks of newspapers. I found her lifeless dolls unsettling, but I loved exploring the old house, which gave me a glimpse into the untouchable past. Each time we visited Great-Grandma, I went to the old house as soon as it was polite for me to ask permission, and I spent most of the time immersed in this strange world where my family’s history was frozen in time.

I usually found one or two things that seemed particularly interesting and I would take them to Great-Grandma to see if she would let me have them. Worthless to everyone else, anything she let me take was treasure in my eyes. The day I found the vodka bottle, my father had just walked into the house so I told him about it. He picked up the bottle, opened the lid, and took a deep smell.

“That’s not vodka. That’s your great-granddaddy’s moonshine. Don’t tell your great-grandma about this.” And he put it in his coat pocket.

My father had been telling me stories about my great-grandpa, the moonshiner, for years by the time I found that bottle behind the door. My father idolized the man and therefore I did too, for a time. My great-grandpa was “a real outlaw,” my father explained with pride. He had killed a sheriff who came too close to finding his still. He sold moonshine to Al Capone and had his photo published in a newspaper next to the gangster, both of them smiling in prison in their boxer shorts. The warden gave them special treatment, my father told me, because he liked Great-Grandpa’s whiskey.

My great-grandfather was part of a long history of outlaws who were celebrated for their defiance. I grew up hearing stories about Jesse James and Bonnie and Clyde, who weren’t from Kentucky but they were like us because—as my father made very clear—we shared a common enemy, the faceless “bank” that was always threatening to take our home. The infamous robbers stole from banks and left carnage in their wake. As a child, I saw them as my father wanted me to: They were heroes, fighting against an unfair system that did nothing but take. It didn’t matter that my father had borrowed against our house and snorted all that money up his nose, trying to numb some pain that would prove to be a bottomless pit. His weakness was never part of the story. And it didn’t matter that the bank robbers weren’t motivated to give to the poor, like Robin Hood; they redistributed wealth to themselves, which was somehow noble enough.

Though my father couldn’t explain this to me, Appalachia’s outlaw culture isn’t just about a prideful (and sometimes impotent) resistance to authority. The region and its people have been failed by government agencies time and time again. As our country’s economy exploded during industrialization, robber barons exported timber and coal from Appalachia to the rest of the country. The tax structure sent the resulting wealth everywhere but here, bankrupting our public infrastructure while the people were left to contend with environmental and social devastation. In the early 1900s, state and federal forces sided with the coal mine owners in some of the most brutal attacks on Appalachian workers and their families who tried to organize for safe working conditions and fair pay. And in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson’s infamous War on Poverty directed the national gaze to Appalachia, giving rise to the distasteful allure of “poverty porn” while doing little to alleviate the persistent economic inequity here.

Historically, Appalachians were able to survive in this harsh, beautiful landscape because of their fierce resilience. Making moonshine is akin to fishing and growing a garden—it’s a skill that allows people to meet their needs or desires, and it was part of a local economy. When revenuers went to war over moonshine taxes, Appalachians didn’t just stand to lose money, but independence. Appalachians have long operated outside the law because sometimes the law threatened that independence; at other times, the law was used as a violent tool of oppression.

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My father couldn’t articulate any of that, though. I’m not even sure whether he knew it. But regardless, this cultural identity was part of him. He was a disempowered man from Eastern Kentucky, and his personal demons can never be fully separated from the larger historical context that shaped him.

This entwinement of history is one of the features of Appalachian storytelling that most endears it to me. I love to tell stories, which is surely an effect of my father’s constant storytelling. And he told rambling stories that had no moral but more importantly, they had no beginning or end. Our stories are snapshots of life, tales of sorrow and triumph that reach backward, on and on, tracing the connection between what is happening now and how that was set into motion years, even decades ago.

That is, I can’t just tell you how I watched my granny wring a chicken’s neck one day; to understand what that meant, you have to know the fullness of who she was—how she kept her house perfectly clean; how she turned so little money into bountiful meals and generous support of her wayward family; how she almost never smiled but she also didn’t cry for herself—only for us. And when I make chicken and dumplings for my daughter’s birthday meal, like Granny did for mine, her story lives on through me and my children.

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After my mother finally left father, he told me how one night, he took that bottle of Great-Grandpa’s moonshine into the woods that surrounded our house and wandered the hills all night long, heartbroken over losing her. Abusive and addicted, he was a terrible husband and perhaps even worse as a father. He didn’t try to make amends or change. He dealt with his loss by drinking all that moonshine—maybe half a fifth or so—and stumbling through one of the many steep and beautiful forests of Eastern Kentucky.

I wonder now as I wondered then: What did he do out there in the woods? Did he cry, or scream, or hit a tree in impotent rage? Or did he mostly sit, enjoying the rare pleasure of twenty-year-old moonshine? Most of all, I wonder if he felt any regret for anything he had done to her. To any of us.

Those details don’t matter if I tell the story well, though. It’s enough to envision this wild man, full of conflict and pain, even if it’s of his own making, traipsing through the dark hills of Eastern Kentucky half-mad, completely drunk on moonshine that sat behind an open door for twenty years, waiting for a curious child to find it.

And that’s the best thing my father ever did for me: He taught me about storytelling. Not because he knew anything about plot or character development or arcs. He didn’t know about unreliable narrators or that he was one, himself. He didn’t even know the difference between a hero and a villain.

But he knew how to tell a good story because he grew up in Appalachia, where life is rich with history and the best storytellers are both born and made. His heroes were flawed and broken men who carried tradition and refused to cooperate with a hostile system. Most of them were also cruel and created a legacy of destruction that we’re still grappling with, generations later. But many of them were also trying to escape destructive forces, too. Whose faults were worse, and whose transgressions are we to blame? It depends on who tells the story.

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In the Shadow of the Valley by Bobi Conn is available from Little A.