The Appalachian children are heartbreakingly beautiful. They start out all fat and chubby with apple cheeks and soon turn into little towheaded imps with wide snaggletooth smiles and baby lisps. It’s not surprising to me that there is still such an active private adoption market here. The paper usually has at least one ad for couples looking for babies from this area.
Growing as an Appalachian child and how you experience your childhood, very much depends on the family you grow up in. So in that, they are no different from the rest of us. But you can almost always be assured of having a large extended family surrounding you.
The old women have an odd contracted non-gendered pronoun that they use for infants. They use it more often than not when a child is sick or poorly. They will say, “Bless h’it’s heart, h’it were eat up with cradle cap.”
I’m not sure if contracting “it” into a non-gendered pronoun is a throwback from days when infant mortality was exceedingly high, but that would be my guess.
I know a great deal more about girls’ lives in the past than I do about the present. Things have changed here dramatically over the past two generations. The girls I have observed seem much loved and valued by their families. Discipline is still strict and often corporal, but the boys seem to bear the brunt of that.
Bad things can and do happen to children here. All of the nightmares of the outside world are here too. Domestic violence, molestation and incest, alcohol and drug abuse…it’s all here. But I don’t find it proportionately at a higher rate than in any other demographic. It is true that cousins marry cousins, but that is more because it is very difficult to find someone to whom one is not related. This is very different from incest, but very often confused in the stereotypes of Appalachians.
The children in my community attend a local K-8 school before going to one of the larger high schools in town. The entire community is involved in the small local school. I myself, though childless, have attended many a basketball or baseball game to cheer my neighbor’s kids. They are very, very proud of their children.
I do have a perception that boys are encouraged more to excel in scholastics more so than the girls. This may be because the boys do need a bit of pushing and most families see the girls as being cared for by the family or their husbands later in life. But the girls in my community do not seem to be held back by traditional roles. Even in recreation, girls seem free to engage in traditionally male pastimes. I know one girl bear hunter and one who raises and fights game fowl.
Discipline problems usually arise when the children leave the community to attend high school with the somewhat more world aware townsfolk. Further problems arise when the brighter kids go to college. They are so sheltered here that the sudden rush of the real world is too much.
I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, I’m delighted that there is a place where children can be children well into their mid-teens. Their world is not one of My Space pages, video games and Britney Spears. Instead, they catch salamanders, fish, ride horses, hunt and catch fireflies. They like country music. Their courtship rituals are still very innocent. But this does not seem to give them the life skills they need to survive outside the community.
In the community, childhood is very clearly defined. Once one reaches 18, you are expected to pull your own weight. Children often live at home past 18, even after marriage, but it is expected that they don the mantle of adulthood and share in the responsibilities of the home.
Their lives are much different and in many ways better than the childhoods their mothers and grandmothers had. The current crop of children enjoy far more leisure time than their predecessors did.
One woman and her sisters (current ages ranging from 30’s to late 40’s) often talk about how hard they worked as children. They lived on a family farm and were working in the tomato and tobacco fields by age 8. Everyone in the family contributed as soon as they were able. This family was very well off by the standards of the community, but they were that way because they worked so hard.
Their mother scoffs at this since she was actually working even harder at an even earlier age.
“They make it sound like all they did was work, work, work and I didn’t do nothin’!” she says.
But the skills the mother learned as a child, she was able to put into practice in her adult life. Milking a cow, tending chickens, making butter and buttermilk, canning on a large scale, smoking and preserving meat…all of these skills she passed on to her daughters. But the daughters no longer have need of most of these skills and do not practice them. So their daughters will most likely not have these skills.
And this is the way of the world. My own mother was fond of relating a tale of how her mother had forced her, at age 12, to learn to kill and dress a chicken. Grandmother kept telling her she was going to need to know how to do this in her adult life. My mother loved to tell the story with malicious glee as she was ripping into a prepackaged fryer.
So, I had to learn how to kill and dress a chicken all by myself.
I’m about storied out for this week. So I’ve got a photo essay on Appalachian Children for you today.
I do have many stories in my archives if you are looking for more stories. I recommend the “Easter Story” story cycle, which is about Friend Scott, my 6 foot 9 gay hillbilly friend and his struggle to reconcile his old time mountain religious beliefs and his family with his sexual identity. “Tycie’s Story” was my contribution to the Naral Pro Choice Blogging for Choice.