I loved to hunt, to tramp through the woods with my friends, to climb the mountains far away from the coal camps and wonder which mountain my Uncle Dillon lived on. But I didn’t like to shoot the squirrels, though I was ashamed to admit it. Isom always whooped when he hit one. Sometimes I would have a squirrel in my sights and remember what it would look like dressed out, naked and long limbed like a skinny little man. I would miss on purpose and the others would tease me for being a bad shot. Then I would be mad and go out of my way to shoot another one, never wavering as I pulled the trigger, then feeling a wave of remorse when I retrieved the warm body. I dressed my squirrels quickly and cut them into pieces, for then they were not something that had lived, they were meat that would feed Mommy and put color in her cheeks.

We always ate a big supper before we went back to Winco, and we played music afterwards. I took my banjo that Uncle Dillon made me before he went off. Garmon Tackett taught me to play, and Isom learned the fiddle from Ermel. We liked especially to play “Sally Ann.” But the first song we learned was “Boil That Cabbage Down,” because it was easy. Talcott, not yet big enough for the guitar, sang along. Isom sawed the fiddle hard, elbow flying to and fro. I learned to flail and drop my thumb. Boil that cabbage down, bake that hoecake brown.

I took my banjo to school one day and picked and sang “Cripple Creek” for Miss Radcliffe. I hoped she would let me pick instead of reciting the Declaration of Independence. But she only said “How nice,” and pressed her lips tightly together.

C.J. Marcum used to come visit on Sundays, sit on the front porch with me and sip iced tea he brought up from Annadel.

“One of these days…” he was always saying. “One of these days we’ll git that land back. One of these days you’ll go off to school and come back and help your people.”

C.J. and Miss Radcliffe were the only ones who talked about “my people.” I wasn’t sure who “my people” were. Were they my kin, most of them scattered when the land was lost? Were they the old-timers who had been around before the companies came in? What of the Italians and the Poles and the Hungarians and the Negroes, hauled in by the trainload to dig the coal? Were they my people too?

I studied the Italian children in my school. They were different from me, talked different, smelled different. While we brought biscuits spread with sorghum for our dinner, they ate hard white bread soaked with olive oil. Their skin was darker, their hair shiny and thick like a groundhog’s coat. They wore garlands of garlic around their necks, instead of asaphidity bags, to ward off colds. They were bigger than we were, for their difficulty in understanding English caused them to be held back in school. Big Italian boys beat me up on several occasions.