Ouch, this hurts. What they’ve done to our people is criminal
In 1964 CBS did a special report called Christmas in Appalachia. They featured a handful of families from a small mining town in Kentucky. Poor doesn’t begin to describe their condition. They speak to a store owner named Hiram Mitchell who gives away more than he sells because he figures you can’t take money from penniless people just so that they can have some food to eat. They speak to Ollie Baker, a woman who is divorced from her husband Bob, but “he’s too broke to leave and she’s too nice to make him”, so he lives in a shack out behind the family home where Ollie sends him food three times a day because, “He won’t eat if she doesn’t feed him. So she does.’’
They also speak to a man named IB Johnson, a twenty-nine year old father who has tried to find work in and out of the hollers, with no luck.
“Little Mickey is old enough to expect something for Christmas isn’t he?”, the interviewer asks.
“Yes. He’s asked for a wagon and I told him I’d get him one if I can find work, but time’s running out and I haven’t found any work,” Mr. Johnson says.
Johnson has the most education of the fifteen children his parents had, having completed the fourth grade. Of course, he says matter of factly, there are only ten of the fifteen still living. It’s striking the way he says it; there’s no more emotion behind the statement than if he was answering what day of the week it was.
The children at the Pert Creek Schoolhouse had intended to exchange gifts but since most of them didn’t have money to buy clothes to wear to school, let alone trinkets for their classmates, Virgie Sumpter, the teacher of that one room schoolhouse, decides to forgo the tradition this year.
The interviewer asks Goldie Johnson, while she cooks for seven people with food they’re only able to afford because of the extra funds her husband’s social security brings in due to his blindness from working in the mines, if people still see the religious significance of Christmas.
“Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Johnson says. “They just live day to day. Some homes will have a dinner and the table will be blessed and some won’t. But they go to church and pray hard as they ever have…it’s going to have to get better cause it can’t get worser.”
The special ends with the man from CBS paraphrasing Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount saying, “Blessed are the poor for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; it is a promise that will be cherished by the people in these mountains because it is all that they have.”
Watching from my warm home sixty years later I can’t help but be thankful. Watching my children play with their toys and struggling to decide which coat to wear, not worrying about not having a coat at all, I wonder about Mr. Johnson’s children. I wonder about Mickey, who would be about my Daddy’s age now, and wish I could know what ever came of him.
And I wonder if he ever got that wagon he wanted. I sure hope he did.