Hardship and Humanity Theme Analysis

The brisk morning nipped at my face, and I buried my chin deeper into Pa’s oilskin coat and nudged the mule ahead to the home of our first library patron. We crossed over into the fog-soaked creek before sunrise, the dark waters biting at the beast’s ankles, a willingness to hurry pricking Junia’s long ears forward. Late April winds tangled into the sharp, leafy teeth of sourwoods, teasing, combing her short gray mane. Beyond the creek, hills unfolded, and tender green buds of heart-shaped beetleweed and running ivy pushed up from rotted forest graves and ancient knobby roots, climbed through the cider-brown patches of winter leaves, spilling forth from fertile earth.

Lovett’s Ridge was a spectacle, and soon I relaxed a little and soaked it up. Layers of dark-blue mountains stacked in the distance, at every turn their cuts rolling, deepening, then lightening to shades of blue-greens from the day’s passing clouds. The air blew fresh and breezy. Scents of apple blossoms lifted from a nearby tree, and honeysuckle clung to a crumbling split-rail fence as swallowtails and fat-legged bees flitted above the old timbers and dipped for nectar.

The Companion was a popular request. Mountain women were snatching up new cures and remedies from the magazine, abandoning their old ways of healing.

[…]

“Be obliged to git one. Nester Rylie’s been reading it and she told me in passing last year, she ain’t rubbed groundhog brains on her babies’ sore teeth or needed to use the hen innards on the gums of her teething ones since. And after she’d read about a good paste recipe that cured thrush, Nester said, none of her nine youn’uns ain’t ever had to drink water from a stranger’s shoe again to get the healing.”

Pa believed the mattress advertisement that promised to soothe hurt bones and give better rest would help me heal faster. Pa had credit to spend at the Company store that he used for the purchase, saying he’d had a little extra that month.

But Pa didn’t have as much as two nickels to rub together […] The Company didn’t like for the Kentucky man to feel a dollar in his pocket, and they’d pay the miners mostly in Company scrip—credit that could be used only at the Company store—to make sure of just that. The Company […] [kept] the families good ’n’ indebted to them, insisting to any that might raise a brow, it serves to smarten the miners, give the coal man a vicissitude from improper business standards, and educates them on sound business practices, on acquiring sound credit.

Pa and I had seen our share of hunger. We only had the berries, morels, squirrels, rabbits, and other life we’d pinched from the forest. Sometimes Pa’d trade the miners his kills for other foods we couldn’t get, like eggs, corn, and fruit. Rarely could we afford the expensive staples at the Company store. The Company scrip and my paycheck helped us to stay afloat a little, despite Pa using most of it to buy up the store medicines rather than a doctor’s stronger ones to fight his lung illness. Still, he stayed in debt purchasing newfangled medicines, the next sure-fix potion that the store would bring in. Like a small bandage, the store-bought medicine would hide his sickness for a little bit, so that he could go back down into the mine and make more money for newer cures the Company kept stocking and pushing on the miners.

Winnie clasped her hands. “If only we could get more outreach programs up here. If only they could send a block of cheese with every book, a loaf of bread.” She tilted her head to the sky as if telling it to God.

I wished it too. Their hunger for books could teach them of a better life free of the hunger, but without food they’d never live long enough to have the strength to find it.

“Just one damn block of cheese,” Winnie scratched out in a whisper.

I thought of the cheese Doc promised. If I could bargain with him for more food, I could give it to the schoolchildren.

For a minute I envied her, wanted to send Junia home, unlace my heavy, tight shoes, and run free with her to escape Frazier, the doc and his medical tests, and everything damning to me—to hunt and fish in the woods like I’d done as a child. To be wilded. Have a wilded heart in this black-treed land full of wilded creatures. There were notches in these hills where a stranger wouldn’t tread, dared not venture—the needle-eyed coves and skinny blinds behind rocks, the strangling parts of the blackened-green hills—but Angeline and hillfolk here were wilded and not afraid. And I longed to lift bare feet onto ancient paths and be wilded once again.

In front of the mirror, I pulled out a section of my hair, carefully wrapping the ends around a strip of fabric a couple of times, rolling it all to my scalp before tying the rags into tight knots.

When I finished I stared at myself. An old ballad spilled from my lips, and I stretched out an arm and pretended to accept a dance with a find man who’d won my pie. I twirled around the room once, twice, and again and again until I stubbed my toes on Pa’s bedpost and yelped. I winced and limped back over to the looking glass. Feeling foolish and looking it, I yanked out all the rag curls and turned my darkening face away from the mirror, untangling my damp hair, scratching at my head.

I touched the baby’s hand, my own eyes filling, my mind grappling with losses, the unbearable pain of loneliness. Nary a townsfolk, not one God-fearing soul, had welcomed me or mine into town, their churches, or homes in all my nineteen years on this earth. Instead, every hard Kentucky second they’d filled us with an emptiness from their hate and scorn. It was as if the Blues weren’t allowed to breathe the very same air their loving God had given them, not worthy of the tiniest spoonful He’d given to the smallest forest critter. I was nothing in their world. A nothingness to them. And I looked into Angeline’s dying eyes and saw my truths, and the truths that would be her daughter’s. Know’d that without love, in the end, her babe would have no one, nothing, and would be fated to die alone in her own aching embrace.

“Let me tell you, Cussy, a miner’s life is a short one.”

“Oh, Pa,” I fanned his words away.

“Daughter, they buried eight of ’em last January after the collapse. Sealed that pit with them eight poor souls trapped inside it.”

I had heard the horror of it all. How the men and young boys were trapped so far down in the midnight dust and crumbling rock, no one could reach them. Then a leak of poisonous gas put them to sleep. There weren’t anything left to do, no way to rescue them except to cover the tomb and have a preacher hold a burial service at the face of the mine.