The Song of My People

I was preparing for a speaking event in a tiny little town just north of me in Iowa when I got a text from one of my kids with a funny TikTok. I opened it and laughed and then scrolled down to the next video…I should not have done that.

The video opened with an older woman who looked a lot like my grandmother. She has been dead for a decade now. She was from Harlan, Kentucky, and though she spent most of her life in a Kansas City suburb, her mountain childhood never left her.

The woman in the video was singing. She had a younger woman standing next to her holding her hand as she swayed with her song. The older woman held an umbrella over her face and shoulders.

I could almost feel the heat rising up from the ground.

The video had a TikTok-generated search titled: Feral People of Appalachia Footage. That made me angry. Immediately.

Feral?

The woman singing was not feral and neither were the others standing near her. She was singing in front of an open grave. She was grieving for a loved one and singing a hymn in the Appalachian manner.

Acapella.

I recognized her voice, though I do not know her. I recognized her dress and her grief. She was singing the song of my people and the tears ran down my face.

My great-grandmother Suzie, husband David Ray, and their first child, Jewel. Harlan, KY.

My grandma and grandpa moved to Kansas City on the “Hillbilly Highway” in the early 50s. My dad was born in Kansas City in 1956…the first of four. Grandma and Grandpa left their families in search of jobs like so many before them.

I have written about my dad’s folks before, but it was my grandma that I was closer to. My grandpa tended to have a temper and was overly-religious and scared me often by painting the fiery hell that all others who didn’t believe like him would be sent to someday.

I remember crying myself to sleep one evening after he told me that people who listened to rock music were doomed to hell, and I prayed and prayed to a god to not send my parents to hell. I didn’t know how god could know my mom and dad listened to Led Zeppelin and The Who, but grandpa assured me, God knew alright.

My grandmother was a different story though. She was quiet and I assume she was shy, but I don’t know that for fact. She was the middle child of twelve children, so that may have had something to do with it.

Grandma was raised a Pentecostal. She wore her hair in the Pentecostal way her entire life, even though she was not religious by the time I knew her. I never saw her with her hair down unless I happened to wake very early and see her with her coffee on the couch or cooking breakfast at the stove.

She was always awake. You never caught her sleeping.

Her hair. She teased and backcombed it until she had a fluffy crown that you didn’t dare comb through and pulled it into a ponytail, and then wound it round and round pinning with Bobby pins, until it was secure. Motions she could do in her sleep and without the aid of a mirror.

I once asked grandma about her religion and her kin in Kentucky.

I was raised a Southern Baptist, but I had visited a country Pentecostal church and it scared me and then delighted me the first time I witnessed someone speaking in tongues and another dancing wildly as she was overcome by the Spirit and the preacher doing a little dancing himself while it seemed the entire congregation sprinted about the small church and sang and flailed and waved their arms in the air.

The friend who brought me was a little embarrassed afterward, but I told her it was the most fun I’d had in a long time.

I was accustomed to sitting quietly with the occasional “amen” in my own church. We didn’t even clap in our services. It was silent except for preaching or singing.

Grandma was not only familiar with the Pentecostal church, her uncle was a preacher in a snake-handling sect of the church. She told stories of folks bitten by a rattlesnake while handling the snake during service. The men bitten didn’t seek medical attention, but instead the congregation prayed over the victim knowing that God would heal those who truly believed.

Some didn’t believe enough, though — grandma told me about at least one man in her community who died from a rattlesnake bite. She said they prayed over him for hours.

I asked my grandma about the church of her youth. Why do you think there was so much jumping and dancing in a community that didn’t even let women wear pants? The Baptist churches I attended frowned on dancing but they eased up on the dresses over the years.

I’ll never forget what she told me…

“Jessie, it was the only entertainment we had. We lived on the side of a mountain and we were hungry and tired and poor. But, we got dressed up once a week and watched the adults let loose when spoken to by the Spirit. We laughed and cried and prayed and went home to fix the big supper we craved all day, every day. And then we went back to our hard lives the next day, but we always knew we had Sunday.”

I think some would say my grandma’s Sunday services in the backwoods of Kentucky were “feral” but I know better. I was also raised poor and in church, but I looked forward to being clean and presentable every Sunday and I looked forward to Sunday School — we were always served cookies and Kool-Aid and sometimes there was a baptism which was followed by lunch.

I was baptized twice, myself. The second baptism was in a country creek. I always smile when I watch that scene in O Brother Where Art Thou when the people walk into the creek, one by one, singing another song of my youth:

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the robe and crown
Good Lord, show me the way!

O brothers let's go down
Let's go down, come on down
Come on brothers let's go down
Down in the river to pray

Poor folks have poor ways, but church was always the place that I felt surrounded by community and love, and now that I think about it, the only other place I ever felt that safety was with my grandma.

I was fed and bathed and safe. Happy.

I guess that’s why I took so much offense when I saw the funeral video that was labeled “Feral People of Appalachia Footage.”

They aren’t feral, they’re poor, and if you’d have had the pleasure to meet someone like my grandma, you’d understand.

And that’s the thing, my job is to open the eyes of folks in politics. Trying to humanize the poor and rural and religious folks who may vote in a way that we don’t approve of.

These are my folks. My kin. My relations. And sometimes we judge before we understand. We put them in categories or boxes while not seeking to know them.

I don’t expect anyone not from the community to do the work in communities like mine, but I do ask for others not to poke fun at them while people like me do the work.

I’m not chastising. I am just asking for a little grace.

I can’t listen to an old hymn sung in the way of the Appalachian people without tears streaming down my face. Bluegrass brings me to my knees. A tough, backsliding Baptist reduced to a wet mess in seconds.

It is innate in me — I feel the songs and the stories and the churches coursing through my veins.

The song of my people.

~Jess