What I Can Do

My favorite church is Keas tabernacle, the African Methodist Episcopal church on the east end of my home town.  I am moved by the warmth of the congregation, the cadence and metaphor of the preacher, the swaying choir.  I have learned some of my best lessons in that sanctuary.  One Sunday morning, we congregants filed down the red-carpeted aisles to kneel around the chancel for private prayers. As we knelt, the choir sang a hymn with the chorus “You are worthy, you are worthy.”

I know something about the lives of the African Americans in that congregation.  I know that some businesses don’t close on Martin Luther King day, that inside the hearts of some townsfolk, the rebel flag still flies.  The choir’s voices resonated inside me “you are worthy.” I believed them. And I understood how necessary it is to believe. That Sunday, the preacher ended his sermon with the directive to “do what you can.”

“You don’t have to do everything,” he said, “but you must do something. Do what you can.”

Yesterday,  I worked with a graphic designer on the jacket design for my forthcoming album Clean Coal/Big Lie. The title song describes how giant machines are knocking off the mountaintops of Appalachia. Most of us are aware that coal-fired plants are polluting the air worldwide, but not everyone knows about the environmental devastation in the communities where this coal is being extracted.

I didn’t want to put a picture of a destroyed mountain on the album cover. I didn’t want an image of a slurry pond. I wanted bluebirds. Many years ago, my mother had painted a watercolor of bluebirds taking flight.  I wanted to use that image because it corresponded to a line in the song “the bluebird flies up, but where does she go?”

I’ve been working on this album for three years. There have been many frustrations, set backs and delays. I’ll spare you the chronicle.  The jacket lists two songs that haven’t been recorded yet. But, with a lot of help from generous and talented people, I am determined that the album will be completed and released.

My old Kentucky home consists of a house and 56 acres. That might sound big to a city dweller, but it’s considered a baby farm.  My house was the first one built on the road, a Victorian cottage constructed in the 1890s. When I put the down payment on the farm in the 1960s, the whole area was farmsteads.  Now, it’s all subdivisions. My farm is the only one left.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes over the years, renting my house out unknowingly to meth producers, letting my pond go to ruin. But the past several years, I’ve been getting an education. For one, I had the pond dipped out.  The only thing alive in what had become a swamp overrun with cattails, was a snapping turtle and a granddaddy catfish bleached white from chlorine. My neighbors had been surreptitiously draining their pool’s backwash into the pond for years.

All those beautiful bushes that enclosed my house in a green cocoon? Well, they were invasive bush honeysuckle, not a good home for wildlife as I had naively assumed. Bush honeysuckle sends out a chemical that turns the soil acidic and discourages growth of anything but more invasive honeysuckle. There’s another invasive that has taken over much of the pastureland in Kentucky: fescue, a grass that was sown because it could withstand drought and poor soil. Someone even named the invasive seed Kentucky 31. When cattle graze on fescue, it overheats them, especially their feet. That’s why you see cows standing in the water during Kentucky summers.  Invasives have no natural competitors, so they are hard to kill.

This past fall, I arranged for a chemical burn of four of my fields, a total of 9.6 acres.  They were burned again last week. Herbicides are toxic chemicals, but they tell me that glysophate breaks down the fastest. I hope that’s right.   And the sound of the chainsaw is my buddy Ray, cutting down bush honeysuckle and ailanthus trees. I will plant native hardwoods in their place.

Today, spent $1,100 on one hundred pounds of seed — of tiny, fragile, native grass seed.  If the stars align, these seeds will be planted in the burned fields.  After three years, they tell me, those fields will be thick with Virginia Wild Rye, Side Oats Gamma and Little Blue Stem. Dispersed among the grasses I hope to see native flowers — Partridge pea, Indiana Bundleflower, Black-eyed Susan and Purple Coneflower.

These are high protein grasses, good for cattle, and for nesting birds and wildlife. I am trying to create a bit of habitat to contrast with its massive loss, locally and worldwide. I know how lucky I am. To own a farm, to have a chance to contribute in this way.  I cannot change the unfair history of this farmland, where I have found flint stone arrows from the Wyandot and Cherokee. I cannot burn my fields with a controlled natural fire because I’m too close to houses. I cannot even assure that these grasses will survive.

But yesterday, when my graphic designer send me a mock up of my album-to-be, I was struck by sinister quality in the deep hues of the blue cover, the birds taking wing in alarm from their exploded mountain home.  They fly up, and where will they go? I hope they fly west a few counties. I hope I am in path of their flyway. I am putting up bluebird houses. I am planting the fragile seed.

Dear Rand Paul

Dear Mr. Paul,

You are an ophthalmologist, a sight specialist. I must reveal that I question yours — sight, insight, point of view. You say, for instance, that mountaintop removal improves the land. Can you not see that this method of coal retrieval has lay to ruin a million acres of Appalachia, and buried 2,000 miles of streams? Would you not recommend that the eyes of eastern Kentuckians close at night to rest? Yet, our eyes do not rest because of harsh lights that intrude around the clock so that machines can obliterate our mountains ever faster. Do you not hear the thunder of the dynamite, the incessant noise of chain saws and bulldozers clear-cutting our forests? Have you not tasted the fouled water, polluted with coal slurry, that sicken our children? Have you not been touched by the sorrow of the people of this state who have lost their property, their jobs, their culture, their health and even their lives due to this practice?

When we refer to mountaintop removal as the rape of Appalachia, the metaphor is apt. When you say, Mr. Paul, that mountaintop removal is good for the land, your comment sounds very like the pimp who rapes and beats women into submission so they make better prostitutes. Compliant and defenseless. Nobody is going to miss a hill or two, you say.

Dear Mr. Paul, you say that Oxycontin abuse is not a pressing problem in our state. Are you not aware in Kentucky we have a generation of young people now struggling with a tenacious addiction to a pill that was promoted as non-addictive by a corporation that knew better? Do you not notice the drug-related crime statistics in the paper? Have you not read their obituaries?

Dear Rand Paul, do you believe the things you say about the need to repeal parts of the Civil Rights Act, or the lack of need for legislation to protect those who face discrimination?

Or are you, Mr. Paul, just the latest beneficiary of the sadly effective Southern Strategy implemented by Richard Nixon, which plays to our worst instincts, our prejudices and our fears? Are you just the libertarian version of the politician who snows us with lies proffered as facts by repeating them ad infinitum in their “news” programs? It goes like this: Fox News quotes Rush Limbaugh, who got his information from Sharron Angle, who’d had a conversation with Sarah Palin, who’d heard it on Fox News — a self-affirming circle of fact-free constructed realities. You are familiar with this method in your own life, Mr. Paul, certifying yourself as a qualified ophthalmologist by a board that you established yourself and populated with your family members.

Nevertheless, you have been elected to represent my state in the US Senate. Your job is to open your eyes to the reality of our beautiful and beleaguered state. Your job is to stop the destruction of our mountains, not to turn a blind eye their devastation. Your job is to help our youth struggling with bleak job prospects and pill habits, to have the vision to help them, instead of denying their existence. Your job is to represent the people, all of us.

Dear Rand Paul, Now is the time to come to your senses.

CD Collins
Native Kentuckian

Has the Cream Candy Creamed?

It’s true what they say about insecure people and downtrodden cultures. Because we feel inferior, we have a tendency to brag. When news comes from Appalachia onto the national scene, it usually involves grandmothers peddling oxycontin out of their pocketbooks or finding a philandering husband in a deep freeze with his face on backwards.

Good Lord, I think. Do they have to show that?

As an antidote, I play a game called Name That Kentuckian.

Abraham Lincoln? Diane Sawyer? George Clooney? Johnny Depp? They’re from Kentucky!!! Jeremy Sumpter, the quarterback J.D. McCoy on Friday Night Lights was raised in my hometown.

Want a Kentucky writer? Wendell Berry, bell hooks, Robert Penn Warren, Barbara Kingsolver, Frank X. Walker, just for starters.

Shall I put on some music? How about Loretta Lynn, Joan Osborne, The Judds, Patty Loveless or Bill Munroe? Kentucky born, of course.

We invent stuff, too: the mobile phone, the steamboat, gas masks, cheeseburgers, and Preparation H & BOURBON...there when you really need them.

But this piece is about a little-known and practically secret Kentucky creation: the divine confection known as cream candy.

As with many inventions, I imagine cream candy as an accident, born from creative necessity. It’s Christmas Eve, say. We live in a log cabin and there are four of us kids. Our family has spent all our money on shoes. What’s in the cupboard? Hmmm... butter, sugar, cream, oh just pour it all in the iron pot.

Let’s stir the concoction over the woodstove... but then the stove catches fire and we flee out into the snow, carrying the sweet boiling liquid. Momma trips and the contents of the pot fly into the frigid air landing on Granddad’s marble tombstone. We kids grab it up and begin a tug of war, as we pull and pull, the compound magically turns into taffy. Fascinated, we pull hand over hand until Dad hollers that the fire is out. “It was just the creosote burning inside the stove pipe!”

Inside, we notice a second transformation of our creation. It has a lighter, lustrous color. The candy rope seems to glow. Momma tells us to set it down on the kitchen table. She whips out the scissors and cuts the rope into small pieces. We pop bits of the amazing confection into our mouths and let it melt there, staggering around the warm kitchen, our ecstatic faces lifted heavenward.

The next morning, we dash into the kitchen where dad is frying bacon and discover that the candy has done its final magic trick. It has changed from chewy and dense, to a soft, artfully-textured morsel.

“It creamed!” the youngest child says and we all eat a piece and stagger mmmmmming around the kitchen once more.

This scenario is fantasy. To my knowledge, the sparse history of the sweet does not include a description of the how the first batch came about. We do know that Ruth Hunt, the founder of Hunt’s Candy Company began making this candy for her friends and, as the demand rose, began her own company in 1921. Legend has it that Ruth Hunt expanded the original recipe in an effort to cheer up her daughter by dipping slabs of it into dark chocolate. She named the candy bar, Blue Monday.

I currently divide my life between my beloved farm in Mt. Sterling and my artistic community in Greater Boston, a settlement known as Somerville, or affectionately, Slummerville, and where Marshmallow Fluff was invented.

The cultural gap between the towns is interplanetary. When I arrived back in the Boston area after the holidays, I parked my car a half a mile from my house, and draggle-tailed my feline children, over a Salvador Dalí-like melted, refrozen moonscape of grey, pocked snowdrifts. I was about to topple into well of depression.

But then...

My best friend, who’d been staying in my apartment since surviving a house fire, my traveling companion and myself, all of us born at some point along that stretch of Kentucky U.S. 60 where cream candy is still made, opened my red tin, packed full by a friend.

The three of us gathered in my Somerville kitchen, partook of the sweetness that unfurled into our senses with an almost genetic pleasure. We staggered around the kitchen our chins lifted, eyes closed.

But back for a moment, to my opening statement about culture, insecurity and pride of place. I took a friend of mine from the Northeast to Kentucky and she became enamored of our cream pies. My friend asked the chef for the recipe. She came out from the kitchen, with a smile and declined to share.

“Momma would have a fit,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. My friend produced a $20 and asked if the crust made from hot water or cold. The woman shook her head again, smiling. “Sorry,” she said. She no doubt could have used that twenty and my friend would have loved that recipe. Boston has a cream pie, but it isn’t a pie at all. It’s a cake with layers of custard. But the message was clear: Don’t come swaggering down here and think you can skim off our cream. Our recipes are not for sale.

But I’m going to contribute to the bridging of the cultural divide and I’m going to do it right now. Yes.

I am going to give you the recipe for cream candy.

Hunt’s Candy company is thriving in Mt. Sterling, Kentucky and my friends Jimmy and Debby Robinson still make tinful after tinful in the winter. It is my honor to share the recipe they use.

Uncle Hurshel's Kentucky Cream Candy Recipe

Best to Choose a Low Humidity, Cold Day in Kentucky
(Best if it is below 32 degrees with less than 50% humidity and as close to Kentucky as you can get!)
~ Chill a large piece of marble slab by placing outdoors
~ Using a medium to large cooking pot, mix 3 Cups of sugar with one cup of water
~ Cook on Medium Heat stirring with a wooden spoon
~ When mixture threads from the spoon (Forms a thread when spoon is tilted), Pour in one cup heavy whipping cream (1/2 Pint) laced with a pinch of baking soda
~ Do Not Stir
~ Using a candy thermometer, Remove mixture from heat when temperature is at 260 degrees
~ Pour directly onto the cold marble slab (after spreading a small amount of butter over the slab)
~ Work the mixture with hands until cool enough to pick up
~ Continue to "Pull" the candy hand over hand until no longer sticky and the mixture has turned white
~ Immediately pull it out into a roll and cut with scissors into bite-size pieces
~ Wait for about an hour and place in tin containers
~ Candy should "cream" overnight

Special note to the uninitiated:

This candy is meant to be nibbled and savored. Please do not place a whole piece, or even two, as I have seen done, or your stagger will be more along the lines of insulin shock than culinary joy. If the recipe overwhelms, then just come on over to my house.

By CD Collins & Billy Marshmallow

Voices from A Red State

Although, I am an agoraphobic, reluctant traveler, I decided to go on a reconnaissance mission to another planet -- Kentucky. If you recall the U.S. map on election night, the garland of blue across the top and northern flanks, then the heartland, expanded, overworked, massively enlarged. After the results of that night, those of us living in the biosphere of New England have been forced to open a window and look out:

What the heck is going on out there?
Did somebody mess with Texas?
Are you mad because we call you the fly-over people?

Kentucky is my home state. The rich food and rich culture fuel the most intimate mechanisms of my psyche. I go home as often as I can to replenish, gathering in experiences. I savor them through the New England winter like the honey bell oranges my father and I used to buy from a truck in the Kroger parking lot on Christmas Eve. The oranges had been picked ripe that morning and trucked up from Florida, their sunny flesh bursting with juice.

Southern language is as rich as its culture, full of euphemism, intricate manners and code; its accents, timing, phrasing and shades of meaning almost infinitely complex. If I’m out of practice, I lose my knack. One miscue in my tone of voice and I can come off insulting or insincere. Like any living language, Southern speech changes and evolves. If I’ve been gone too long, I have to listen hard to catch up. There are 120 counties in Kentucky; a listener with good ear can tell you which county you’re from.

In the stunned days after the election, pundits flooded national media theorizing about all that red. One hypothesis blamed abortion and gay marriage. Turns out, that false inference was based on a multiple choice question which included moral values. The theory was discredited when individuals began to articulate exactly what those values were. Obviously, every voter in the country chose based on moral values.

Speculation spewed forth.
--Southerners like Bush because he’s a redneck cowboy like them…
--Southerners think Kerry is part of the effete elite…
--Southerners are Hawks…

So, unlike John Kerry, I went there. I packed my lagoon-blue Jetta and, accompanied by my Himilayan cat, Savannah May, drove the 1,000 miles to my old Kentucky home.

I asked people who they voted for and why. So, anecdotally, non-scientifically, non-double blindedly, here is what I found:

The reason folks voted as they did are as multiple and various as the culture.

There are 120 counties in my state, thousands of people in those counties. These people are divided within social classes, within their families, even within themselves.

I have an aunt who went to the polls to vote for one candidate and voted for the other. She took the election very seriously, but when I asked her why she switched at the last minute, she replied with consternation,
“I don’t know.”

I interviewed a former exotic dancer, now turned evangelical Christian. Kerry supporter. Her church welcomes open homosexuals into their congregation.

I spoke to several Sierra Club members, an openly gay minister, an enclave of left-thinking writers, who actively canvassed for the Democrats based on their desire to protect the environment, civil liberties, the arts.

One farmer said he voted for Bush because of the estate taxes, while another, who voted for Bush in the last election, said he voted for Kerry this time around because he is “not completely uninformed.”

When I playfully accused one farmer of voting Republican, he replied in low-key Clint Eastwood whisper,

“Now, you may not have done all your homework.”

I talked at length with a lesbian couple who had recently celebrated their 17th Anniversary. They had spent the months leading up to the election canvassing door-to-door to defeat the marriage amendment. With their friends, they helped raise the NO BAN vote dramatically in their county.

At the annual Christmas dinner, thirty or so members of my mother’s extended family participated in a candle-lighting ceremony. Among those gathered -- my Uncle, a member of George Bush’s inauguration committee/ his daughter, a Washington attorney who flew to Arizona to work for the Kerry campaign/ my cousin, a corporate businessman with dollar signs in his eyes who was very pleased by the election results/ an unemployed uncle/ a cousin who cares about nothing except UK basketball/ an aunt who is a visual artist furious about the rampant government spending while cutting funding for the arts. Our host closed the prayer with a blessing for the troops fighting for “freedom.”

The mood was jovial that night, but by New Year’s Eve, our manners had flagged. I ended up in a fight with two of my uncles, one of whom called me a fool and stormed out, slamming the door of my grandmother’s house where I’d spent most of my childhood. I opened the door and yelled, “We’ll never understand each if we don’t listen.” I then added, and this was uncalled for, “Why don’t you turn off the sports channel and read a decent newspaper?” When I closed the door, my other uncle lit into me, attacking me personally for nearly an hour while his wife silently looked on. We had veered from a political discussion, to a disturbing repetition of the pathology in my familyæ strong women who marry weak men whose egos they protect. I had broken a code, questioned the men. I was alone.

At another gathering, I found myself in a stand-up argument with my best friend from high school. “Do you really believe what you’re saying?” she asked me incredulous. When I asked her the same question, I saw the realization spread over her face. “Well, yes I do,” she said. If she believed, then I must, too.

I learned that the liberals I talked to in Kentucky are far more left than any liberals I know in New England.

My own mother reminds me of Shirley Chisholm, unbought and unbossed. Yet, I find her list of favorites, which include Dennis Kucinich, Jerry Falwell, the Ayatollah Khomeni completely mind-boggling.

I found a total of one person who said they actually liked Bush.

I found no one who just loved Kerry.

Within my tiny sample, I found only one person who didn’t vote.

“It don’t make no difference,” he explained. “If I had of voted, it would have been for the other guy.”

Despite the complexity and inner conflict, these folks did their best with the two choices they had. Kentucky is a state which recently lost its price support for raising tobacco. Many who do not live there applaud this ruling, with a shallow understanding of the history behind it and how many farmers will lose their land because of it.

From my travels, I observe that the people of Kentucky are engaged in a bloodless (so far) civil war.

I have no firsthand info on what’s going on in Georgia or Arizona. If you live in California or Connecticut, you can’t see all the way to Arkansas. You can’t see what a factory worker, a farmer, a day laborer faces in her daily life. You can’t hear the music in their voices, you can’t smell the barbecue. If you want to know first hand, I encourage you to go on your own scouting mission. I recommend you ask. I recommend you listen.

We can read our newspaper and ricochet around cyberspace, but let’s trust your own eyes too, these sources may not be independent, and they may not have done their homework.