#5 Politics and The Hereafter
Dash and Beck explore a range of topics from personal academic challenges and the impact of loss to reflections on Pride Month and cultural identities. They share stories about family dynamics, the influence of weather on life, and delve into the complexities of the prison industrial complex. The discussion also touches on ghost stories and personal experiences with loss, culminating in a historical overview of the Hatfield-McCoy feud and its implications for Appalachian identity.
Takeaways
Navigating academic challenges can be deeply personal and complex.
Personal loss can significantly impact one's motivation and mental health.
Pride Month serves as a time for reflection and celebration of identity.
Cultural identities are shaped by regional differences and personal experiences.
Family dynamics often reveal generational stories and histories.
Weather and environment can profoundly affect daily life and mental well-being.
The prison industrial complex is a significant issue in American society.
Ghost stories often reflect personal experiences with loss and memory.
The Hatfield-McCoy feud illustrates the complexities of Appalachian history and identity.
Community and connection are vital in navigating personal and societal challenges.
Chapters
00:00 Pride Month Reflections and Personal Stories
02:05 Cultural Identities and Regional Differences
06:01 Family Dynamics and Generational Stories
08:06 The Impact of Weather and Environment on Life
11:08 The Prison Industrial Complex and Its Implications
13:55 Ghost Stories and Personal Experiences with Loss
16:45 The Hatfield-McCoy Feud: History and Legacy
01:08:13 New Chapter
tags:
academic challenges, personal loss, Pride Month, cultural identities, family dynamics, weather impact, prison industrial complex, ghost stories, Hatfield-McCoy feud
Transcript
we are uploading cool.
Vern Cooper (:we sound like.
Vern Cooper (:just sound like just a couple of old gazers.
Beck (:Yeah, like we've been smoking, chain smoking marble rids. You know, I quit when I started the doctoral program in 2015. So it's been 10 years since we quit smoking.
Vern Cooper (:you
Vern Cooper (:It's been 10 years since we started that program. Yeah.
Beck (:12 for you.
Vern Cooper (:Gonna finish in like four months, allegedly.
Beck (:Yeah. I want to. just, I... Dude, losing all three of my parents and then that whole thing is just... I just don't know if I can get my brain back to a place of academic...
Vern Cooper (:I felt the same way just after transitioning and just what that does to, think my motivations, what it did to what I even saw myself as pursuing. After a while, when I came back, I was like, what was I even doing?
What were my interests? What did I think was important? And basically I just had to come up with something new. Like the answer was, I don't know. Pick something else.
Beck (:I know what else to... I mean, I don't think my chapters... I don't think... If I go through the chapters that I had planned, it's gonna take me years to write it. So I think that totally needs to be changed. I didn't know that you can write a dissertation without going through IRB. If you're not doing any kind of... Yeah, yeah. But I thought that was a requirement. And that's where I of got stuck at one point because they kept sending my shit back to me.
Vern Cooper (:yeah, you're not doing human research.
Beck (:because they wanted me to address sexual assault and it's like that is not what my shit is about. So Montana Miller... Yeah. She held me up for a long time and I didn't want to have to go through that whole fucking process again because mine expired and right when my mom died and I just didn't have it in me to deal with that. So my IRB died or it expired over three years ago. But then I learned you don't have to use IRB if you're not going to do any human...
Vern Cooper (:Mm-mm.
Vern Cooper (:No.
Beck (:subject research. that really
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, HSRB, it's only for like humans and even if like, you know, know, there's like levels. So there's more vulnerable populations that have a higher degree of scrutiny for HSRB and then there's some or it's literally just checking a box. Yeah, do the textual, do archival, do anything other than human and just get it done.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:I need to do that. I'll never have another time like this again where I don't have shit to do.
Vern Cooper (:Well, let's talk about it. Like, you know, when we're, sometime when we're not, you know, working, let's talk about it. It's doable. All right, let's get going, shall we?
Beck (:Okay.
Vern Cooper (:Mark. Welcome back to Queernecks, the show about being queer in central Appalachia. I am your host, Ash.
Beck (:I am your other host, Beck.
Vern Cooper (:And we are joining you from what will be the last day of Pride Month 2025. I've been calling this the year of ol' ol' ol' ol' ol' ol' ol' ol' ol' ol' ol' ol' ol' ol' ol' ol' ol' ol' ol' ol'
Beck (:Hehehehehe
Beck (:We just put our flag out like two days ago. We were kind of late to the party. Yeah. We have a little patio and my wife keeps a little different. She changes it with the seasons. We've had goose on there a couple of times because we have a, I meant to buy her a porch duck or a porch goose for Christmas, but I ended up somehow buying a porch duck. So we have a porch duck that we dress up in little outfits.
Vern Cooper (:Really? I don't have a flag.
Vern Cooper (:How large is this duck?
Beck (:well, I mean...
The size of a small dog. It's still wearing a scarf right now. We have a tie for it coming and some sunglasses coming from Amazon soon. Do you know about the Porch geese On Facebook, there's a group for the Porch geese of America and all the old ladies post their Porch geese and all that. You can buy outfits for them on Amazon. It's a whole little cottage industry.
Vern Cooper (:No.
Vern Cooper (:So I had a feeling I was missing an important piece of information and apparently is a culture of...
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Like, have you ever drove by and somebody had an outfit on a goose sitting on their porch?
Vern Cooper (:I don't know, I mean it's likely.
Beck (:You should pay attention because you'll see it. It's out there. When I lived over by the high school in BG, there was a lady that changed it. She had rain boots for it. She had a slicker for it. She had a different outfit. She had a St. Patrick's Day outfit for it. She had the Fourth of July. Like whatever the season is, they put different outfits on them. We're not that crazy. We're not that crazy yet. Give us time.
Vern Cooper (:Alright.
I'm gonna go- I'm gonna google Porch geese. wow, there's a little Santa Claus. And...
Beck (:People come up with really funny names for him. Like somebody put it in a Reds uniform and the hottest player with the Reds right now is a guy named Ellie De La Cruz and they named it Ellie De La Goose.
Vern Cooper (:Did real geese ever come up and be like what the fuck? Yeah, boy they got some geese here just
Beck (:don't think so, not that I know of, because they're mean.
Beck (:We've got two ponds on the property where we're living right now. And there's constantly geese and things like that because we're pretty close to Canada.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, you're almost as... Well, technically I think we're at the same latitude, is that what it is? one that... yeah. But we are further from the border than you. Because the border isn't level.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, yeah, we're under the jurisdiction of Border Patrol here.
Vern Cooper (:Dang, we aren't in any jurisdiction here. I've never seen a cop. I see sheriffs going around, but I've never seen anything that said police, except for on campus.
Beck (:Wow. Wow. We have a cop that drives around our parking lot like eight times a day. You constantly see him out there just doing rounds. But I'm living in a real swanky apartment complex. It's brand new. We're the first people to ever have lived in this apartment. Like our showers had never been used, that kind of thing when we moved in. And we pay a lot for it. But like it's all the resin coated floors, the...
Vern Cooper (:you
Vern Cooper (:Mm.
Beck (:The laminate, they're like wood, but it's plastic. like you can't stain them. They're perfect floors. And with three dogs, you know, accidents happen. Yeah. So no, that's why these floors are perfect. Cause baby we brought in, she had been outside her whole life. My dad would let her in once in a while if there was a really bad storm, cause she's really afraid of storms. She would like bust down the door trying to get in.
Vern Cooper (:damn. I'd be a nervous wreck the whole time.
Beck (:But she was an outside dog for 11 years of her life. She hunted for all of her food. My dad gave her a hot dog a night and then she had to forage for anything else she wanted to eat, right? And she did, she went from that to being a full-time household inside dog. And so there was a learning curve. Like we had to learn her bladder and she has to go every five to six hours. So we have to get up in the middle of the night and everything to take her. It's like I'm having a baby. She is...
Vern Cooper (:Hmm.
Vern Cooper (:Is he old?
Beck (:A 2012 baby, so she's 13. My dogs are 14, 13, and 12. Wenda's 14.
Vern Cooper (:Oscar's 13, Felix is 12, and I got two babies there, two and three years old, the kittens. I did not want all of these. That's the thing about being, I think that's a country thing, like animals will just show up. Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, we don't need any more animals at all. Yeah.
Beck (:You just acquire them. There's a committee out there that just hands them out. Like I never thought Baby would be my dog, you know, that was my mom's dog. And you know, she lived her whole life out there. When we moved out there, there were still two of them. She still had her brother, Big Head, and Big Head passed away a few months after we lived there. So yeah, we could have had two.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, I you know, talk to people who they adopt their pets, you know, like they decide when to have a pet. And I have never known that experience. It's always just something's here. It's mine now.
Beck (:Yeah. Wenda we went and got from a rescue organization, but PETA showed up and Baby we acquired through inheritance. So, but yeah, we went to pick Wenda. Wenda kind of picked us. She was there with a horde of dogs and she kind of just came up to zap beside me. And I was like, well, how about this one? And we were like, all right, we brought her home. And we couldn't have picked a better dog. She's a perfect baby angel.
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm.
Vern Cooper (:You
Vern Cooper (:Yeah. Yeah, Linda's sweet. I think that if it wasn't for my cats, I would be a mentally unwell person. Yeah. Well, what's the weather like there?
Beck (:Same with my dogs.
Beck (:It was sunny and beautiful this morning and then it rained like thunderstormed for a couple of hours and now it's like 72 degrees and blue skies. But it's been hot hot hot hot hot the last few days. Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:We had a heat advisory out here, which it was hot, it was not like what these folks think is hot is not hot. And I've been trying to like figure out the, like why here does it reach 95 degrees and they send out a heat advisory, but it'd be 115 in Kentucky.
Beck (:It's the same reason that when it snows in Texas, nobody knows how to drive. You know what I mean? You get to 40 degrees in Texas and they all think it's a blizzard, you know?
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, maybe they just are not used to being safe in conditions like that.
Beck (:Somebody asked me a question the other day, would you prefer 32 degrees or this 107 bullshit? Which would you prefer? And I said at 32 degrees, that's still t-shirt weather where I live. at negative 47, which would you take? Negative 47 or 107? Like, which is worse? I would take the 107. Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Absolutely, yeah, I absolutely would take 100 degrees is totally doable Just you know around that that You're right like 32 degrees. That's still I mean, I've not put on a hoodie But if like cold cold like it gets here
Beck (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, I would much rather it be hot, humid, know, glasses steam up, the air, you have to chew it before you can get it down your lungs. I mean, I'd rather have that than anything below zero.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, well, I like it cool. If it would say 72 and sunny all year, I'm a California weather kind of girl. That would be ideal for me. You know, lot of, well, yeah, a lot of people have told me that I should end up in California. Yeah, so who knows what the future holds.
Vern Cooper (:That's because you're California sober.
Vern Cooper (:I've considered it.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, I've been thinking about this idea or this kind of reality of I guess diaspora in the US now because we are so politically Both divided and then also
Some folks are just heavily impacted by things that are happening now and need to relocate. And what that's gonna do to our, like some people's sense of, if you have an identity that is tied to region or location or something like that, that's gonna fuck with you. Cause I have felt pretty fucked with moving out here because it has felt like, it's not that I didn't make the decision to do it, but it did feel like my hand was forced.
to find a place where I would be able to get medical care as a trans person and be able to depend on, or at least bank on this state being one of the last holdouts for civil rights for trans people. So for instance, living in Kentucky,
Beck (:Right.
Vern Cooper (:the workplace protections for transgender people were taken away. And so that meant that like I could be, they could, anybody could fire me and say it's because you're transgender. Like we just do not like that you are transgender. And...
Beck (:Yeah.
You can do that being gay in Ohio and transgender. You can be fired for any reason. It's an at-will state.
Vern Cooper (:You can sue though if they fire you for being gay. If they fire you for what they call a protected identity, yeah, they can still do it, but you can sue for discrimination because discrimination is still illegal.
Beck (:My wife has been fired three different times because she was gay.
Vern Cooper (:She needs to sue them.
Beck (:Yeah, one of them, was top of it was a, it was a tell call center and they were selling siding or roofing or some random bullshit. And she was like top of her class. She's cause she's very kind and she can sell things. You know, she has a very trustworthy voice and she was making a lot of appointments and that kind of stuff. And then she said something about her girlfriend and the next day she got fired.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, I got fired from Pizza Hut for changing my gender presentation. Didn't say anything about, I was simply just identifying as queer at the time. And this is when I was in high school or I had just graduated and I cut my hair off and they...
said, and I had been in a server and like I said, I was really good at it. That's the only reason I worked there. It's like the only way to make money at a place like Pizza Hut is as a server and to be fucking incredible at it. So they said, no, you can't serve tables anymore. This is a family institution. and so I was like, okay, so places will do it. Not just assuming that we won't sue because most of the time we don't. and I think a lot of
Beck (:Right.
Vern Cooper (:places also don't realize that sexuality is a protected class at the federal level. When they would probably know even if they still don't care that race is a protected class.
ve order that Biden signed in:So that went away and because it had appeared and then disappeared, everybody was laser focused on it. They were fire and trans people left and fucking right. And then they outlawed my job. And so I was like, I just had to make a very quick exit and it disappeared. And I was like, I can do it. And I have friends here and I'm very fortunate to have all of these things, but I am so homesick.
And like, just, the way home, was thinking like, God, I want to go home. I don't even really like home that much, but like, you know, I'm in the family group chat. My parents are still alive and I'm out here. What's going to happen to my brain if something happens to them and I'm stuck out here? It just feels like I'm flirting with disaster in that way.
Beck (:Yeah.
I understand that. I also feel homesick, but in a different way. My home no longer exists. The people of my family no longer exist. All I have left, I started with 19 aunts and uncles, and that was before you counted spouses. Those were the brothers and sisters of my parents, 19 of them. So I had over 40 cousins, you know, and there was always a lot of family left. And I've got a lot of cousins left, but a lot of them are Trumpers and we're just not very close.
I've got one, my dad's half sister, and then I've got my mom's full sister. And they both live several hours away. Aunt Jenny is too old to drive anymore. And my other aunt, she can't see very well. So, you know, that's, and I haven't seen her since I was like three years old. Aunt Jenny, I, mom, she was down there when mom died. That's the last time I saw her. No, that's not true. I went and saw her like last year or the year before. Anyway.
Vern Cooper (:I have an Aunt Ginny too. I don't know what mine's short for actually.
Beck (:Yeah, sure for Genevieve.
I had a Genevieve and a Geneva in my family. Genevieve was my great grandmother's name as well. A lot of fun old names.
Vern Cooper (:I know, I love the old names and stuff. I love hearing people talking about the old names of my family.
Beck (:There was, so, McLaughlin County, Kentucky, I probably said this already, did the complete historical rundown of My Family Tree, right? They did, it's a five volume thing, it's several thousand pages long. What were we just talking about? yeah, so I took it to show my sister we were at a baseball game, right? And so we sat around and laughed at some of the names. One of my favorite, there was America Texas Reisner.
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm.
Vern Cooper (:Names, weird names.
Vern Cooper (:HAHAHAHA
Beck (:And then there was the family name, the first name Skid. And we laughed so hard because my dad's name was Mark and we said we should name it Skid Mark.
Vern Cooper (:Mmm.
wow, those are...
Beck (:I have my, like, seven times great grandfather was Archibald. There's a lot of good fun names in that whole line.
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm.
Vern Cooper (:A lot of the escaped slaves and servants, they would just pick names out of the Bible. So there's a lot of real religious names in my family. Like churchy first names and then made up last name like Smith or whatever. But there were some though that would just sound almost like onomatopoeia. There was this one guy named Clem. I actually have several Uncle Clems.
Beck (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:My papaw had a twin brother named Wirt and had two granny ions.
Beck (:My grandmother, her name was Osi Cordelia. And my other, my grandfather, the two of them, I had Virgil with no middle name, Virgil. And Arlene was my mamaw, Virgil and Arlene. They were my mamaw and papaw. And then Virginia was my mom's mom. And Osi Cordelia was my grandmother. So a lot of unusual names. There's several Christine's in my family, but if you,
Vern Cooper (:you
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm.
Beck (:If you... this is... I will win this game. Because I've got a cousin named Bebo. There is Merle and Cliff. And then there's my grandmother Arlene. There's Marlene. There's Tharlene. There's Eileen. There's Starlene. There's Annalene. Et cetera. Every kind of lean you can think of is in that family. All kinds of different fun names. Through that whole family.
Vern Cooper (:You
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm.
Beck (:Did I tell you that my mom was in same book twice?
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, because she was our own cousin. No, because she married. Yeah.
Beck (:Yeah, no, my dads were cousins. Yeah, my dads were cousins. So yeah. I've only got nine stories, so I'll tell you those repeatedly.
Vern Cooper (:funny. That's just like what Trixie and Katja do on their show. Just tell the same stories to each other over and over again. Yeah, I had my grandmother's or my granny's name. My mom's mom was Opal and her middle name was Columbia because she was first generation so she was Scotch-Irish like off she was flat book. And they were like...
Beck (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:You know when they named their kids they would try to be all like we love America and so they named her after Columbus which I guess they thought you know discovered America So but yeah, so she had a real and she fucking I couldn't understand a word she said
Beck (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Like our dialect was strong, but hers was so different to ours and because she had this strong like Scotch-Irish Like that is literally it's not an accent. That's literally a different language and then she was also she what but she was trying to speak English sometimes but she had diabetes and had lost the
the nerve, she had neuropathy in her tongue. And so she slurred her words. I was like, I never knew what the hell she was saying. She was a terrifying person to me. But she was also like, I don't know, she was kind of cool. Like she would just appear with food and you wouldn't know why or what she was doing, but she would just be there with food. And I never did feel like I was in trouble, but I also never understood what the hell was happening.
Beck (:that's so scary.
Beck (:Right?
Vern Cooper (:And Papaw would translate, but he was tongue-tied. Because tongue-tie runs in my family, I'm tongue-tied too. so his tongue didn't even reach his teeth. Yeah, so he also had a real weird way of talking.
Beck (:wow.
Vern Cooper (:I think that's one reason why my mom is obsessed with, she was obsessed with elocution. Like she was obsessed with learning correct grammar, with learning the correct way to speech, like way to speak.
Beck (:Not in my family.
Vern Cooper (:Both of my parents actually, I think that's one of the reasons why I was able to pick up code switching, even though it was so late in life, because both of my parents really, they were communicators. My dad actually was a radio DJ. There was a radio station for a while in Jellicoe, and that's what he wanted to go into. He would be so thrilled to know that I was doing this, or to know that this was even something that people do do. He probably doesn't know about podcasting.
Beck (:You said doodoo.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, did. What if we interviewed him one day? If we get a thousand subscribers, we'll interview my dad. But no, they both were invested in communicating, I guess, to the best of their abilities and modeling that for us. And I definitely benefited from that.
Beck (:hahahahah
Beck (:Sounds like a plan, Stan.
Vern Cooper (:But because the rest of their, my home dialect is so fucking strong, you would not be able to understand it.
Beck (:My grandparents had very thick accents and they still used a lot of old language like calling a bag a poke and things like that. Sometimes they would have to translate for me.
Vern Cooper (:Do know what it means when somebody, you say he kindly favors him?
Beck (:He looks like him? Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah. Yeah. I realized one day that that is not something that like majority culture English speakers, they don't understand what that means. Kindly favor. Yeah.
Beck (:well. Yeah. Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Sometimes you don't find that stuff until you get to talking to them for a while and they go like what the fuck are you saying?
Beck (:When I wrote my master's thesis, people were so confused by the first sentence because I used the word bucolic and that apparently was too high brow for several people. Yeah, that's what I said too. Yeah. My dad, the only book he had, but God bless him, my biological father.
Vern Cooper (:Read a book.
Beck (:The only book that man ever read cover-to-cover was the Walmart guy Sam Walton, his autobiography. Because he wanted to be a billionaire, I guess. But God love him, he read my thesis cover-to-cover and that called and asked me questions. My mom didn't care at all about any of that shit. Yeah. But my dad, he read it and called and asked questions and, you know, it was cool.
Vern Cooper (:Hmm
Vern Cooper (:Hmm.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:I think my mom, well my mom and my sister read my thesis, but my thesis wasn't particularly good.
Beck (:Well, mine either, because my advisor didn't advise. But it was still interesting. It local history to Southern Ohio, you know.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, mine was like, because I was in a pedagogy, like comp rep program. It was all high theory and it was clunky. But it was a topic that I was really passionate about. And it actually is the reason I went into the program we were in instead of continuing to do English. Because it was a cultural studies approach. yeah, I think they read it, but they just, you know.
I don't think my mom liked it much. At the time she was, that time when I was in grad school, was so, my mom was very politically reactive after David was killed in Iraq and had some really regressive opinions about people who were not Americans, probably about people of color, even if she didn't dare tell me.
Beck (:Yeah. My mom would never.
Beck (:How's she doing with the news right now?
Vern Cooper (:She is an entirely different person. she... Well, I think that you mean with Iran? With... We just don't talk about it.
Beck (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:but she is upset. I know that and she's just so fucking angry at Trump. She wants to take it. She wants it to only be Trump's fault. She doesn't want it to be the level of fuckery that it actually is, right? She doesn't want it to be systemic because she doesn't want it to be a problem that could, could stick around and ruin the lives of her grandkids or of, know, she just doesn't want that. And so I think she's really, really hoping and wishing that it's all just him.
And so we'll kind of just let her do that and say, God damn it, just fucking Trump. hadn't been for him, this or that. And it's like, okay, sure, mom. Because what does it matter if some 70 something year old hill jack fully comprehends systemic, you know, the political landscape that brought this populist monster?
to where he is, right? She's always, she's gonna do her part. She's gonna vote to oppose him and people like him until the day she dies. She doesn't need to do any more work than that, in my opinion.
Beck (:Yeah, my dad had started going down the alt-right highway a bit there in the last year of his life. And that was, it was scary to see it happening so fast to somebody I thought was so smart. You know, I always looked up to him because I thought he was so smart and so reasonable.
Vern Cooper (:yeah.
Vern Cooper (:I was reading some of my research today was about social identity development and like, like, in, in relation to mediation, mass mediation in particular. And I read this theory called, the third body.
Beck (:Problem.
Vern Cooper (:No, the third person effect, third person effect. And it is essentially that most people believe that everybody else is more susceptible to manipulation by mass mediation than they themselves are. And how that manifests is we reserve our sharpest criticality, our sharpest criticisms and lens for people other than ourselves, instead of starting with examining our own reactions.
to mediation or selection. That's a whole other thing. Media selection is already biased because we seek out whatever it is that is going to, it's called uses and gratifications theory. For the most part, we seek out things that will give us gratification. We're not seeking out things that disagree with us.
And I think people want to reduce that to, you just want to be an echo chamber. It's a lot more complicated than that. A person's self-esteem is at stake. Their identity is at stake. There's more to engaging, to having the reserves, the emotional labor to give to constant critical evaluation of your own lens. And we're talking about folks who are already running full tilt 24 seven, trying to feed themselves.
Vern Cooper (:And it's not that I don't think they can do it. Of course they can do it. Plenty of people do do it. Again, I said do do.
Beck (:I was gonna let it slide that time.
Vern Cooper (:Plenty of folks accomplish it just fine. Well, accomplish it with considered effort. But there also is a level of invest, somebody has to invest in them in order to tell them, here's how you can make this happen, here's some ways that you can do this, and there are some incremental changes that can help you. And then who is that? Like who are we to say, I can help you be a better person? Often, I mean, a person has good reason to be suspicious of someone with that message.
Beck (:Right. For sure.
Vern Cooper (:my god, we're just preaching the word today. Maybe we should spin this here wheel of what have you. I had to make a new one listeners because the last app crashed and so I don't know how this one works. Let's see. Spinny, spinny, spin. lord. Can you guess what we landed on Beck It's jail!
Beck (:do do do do do do do
Beck (:jail
Vern Cooper (:Jail! Goodness gracious! A hallowed central Appalachian institution.
Beck (:Yeah, I've never been to jail unless it was to pick up my brother or for the Girl Scouts. I've never been, not called would, thank the Lord. But I don't drink, so I don't drink and drive or do any kind of that kind of stuff, you know.
Vern Cooper (:Ain't it funny how drinking is a thing? It'll send you to jail quicker than anything.
Beck (:Yeah, that's what got my brother. My brother told me a story about one time he was in front of the judge and they had, had, they had. He was, he had a resisting arrest was one of them. And one of the charges that he had, and he was like, judge, I swear this time I didn't resist. And the judge said, but the other 143 times you did, you know what I mean? Like pointing out that he had been arrested over 140 times.
for drunken disorderly, those kinds of things.
Vern Cooper (:Like the one, like I'm turning myself, I'm turning my life around. I'm turning over a new leaf. I didn't swing this time.
Beck (:Yeah, no. Yeah, my brother, whoo. I would hate to know how much he drank in his 31 years. He started drinking when he was 10 years old.
Vern Cooper (:for fun. We took corn liquor medicinally because they may have had cough medicine stuff. They probably did have cough medicine the time, but not In Jellico And so we would get hoarhound rock candy and a spoonful of corn whiskey when we sick.
Beck (:did not like whorehound, but I don't like licorice, I don't like any of that kind of flavor. I don't like root beer.
Vern Cooper (:yeah, well, you know, and we've already covered that I have been to jail, but I think in the scheme of things, I should have gone more often. the
Beck (:There's also the fact that I grew up in a town with a prison, with a pretty serious prison. They had the death row there for many years. I think they finally moved it back to Columbus a few years ago, but we had death row there. And so the worst criminals, it was like the prison within the prison system, right? If you got in trouble, you went to Lucasville. And a lot of my friends' dads were guards or the warden even.
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm.
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm.
Beck (:There was the prison riot that happened there in 1993. One guard died and I think 13 prisoners ended up dying and that whole thing. It was the longest prison riot in American history, in modern American history.
Vern Cooper (:Do they know what caused it? Was it just random?
Beck (:It was over the treatment from the guards, they said. And that was one of the unusual things because they, the black prisoners and the white prisoners banded together and overtook the guards. And that's kind of how it happened. On Netflix, there's a show called Captive and it's the first episode. They do different places. There were captives and things. Yeah. So if you're ever interested in learning more about the Lucasville prison riots,
Vern Cooper (:cool.
Beck (:There was a lot of footage I had never seen before. But everybody I knew was on CNN that week because there's only so many people in Lucasville, you know? And every media outlet in the world was there. They were lining the streets and we were moving into a new high school and the high school was literally across the street. Well, it was more of a road. But across the road from the high school, were like, you could...
Vern Cooper (:Definitely. Suddenly y'all was famous as hell.
Hmm.
Beck (:look out in English class and look across the street and see it, you know? And it was something eerie about knowing all those rifles and all those secluded people like, what would have happened if one of them did get out? They had two schools, the elementary school and the high school right in front of them. They would have had hostages galore, you know? It's wild when you think about that kind of thing. But it was a maximum security prison. Stuff still got in, you know?
I've never heard of anybody getting out of there though.
Vern Cooper (:I'm sure it's harder than it sounds. There was a place in, I never went to jail in Jellico. I never went to jail until I went to college. But they called it the Madison Radisson. And they killed people in there. Like people have died in there just from the treatment, from neglect, from, and it was,
Beck (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Like I was only in for a total of, wasn't two weeks total, both times. But it was enough for me to be like, no, fuck this shit.
Vern Cooper (:But it's also kind of interesting because like you were talking about with people, like allegiances begin to form instantly when you're in any kind of captivity situation. There's also different kinds of jail, know, there's jail, there's population, which is a different kind of jail that's like jail squared, and then there's prison, and then there's different kinds of releases, there's different kinds of things that you can, so there's, for instance, like community service.
a half dozen ways to be caught in this system. And you can also be somebody who just gets shifted around between them. But when I was in jail both times, I was in the exact same room. Because it was...
Beck (:wow.
Vern Cooper (:Okay, so you can't get put in population until you've been arraigned. And I hadn't even been charged yet. Because they arrested me and I don't think, they actually never did charge me with anything the first time. But they just kept me for two days. And so they had to figure out where to put me and they put me in the drunk tank. They just left me there. And the drunk tank is all genders. And they just threw.
fucking hammered men over the weekend in there. I don't know why, but it is mostly dudes who get violent DUIs or at least they're... And so it was like, there was one other person in there who was assigned female at birth and we were just like huddled together in the corner and they had, was, it's a big, it actually looks kind of like a swimming pool because they have to be able to hose it out and there's drains in the floor and they give you these mats that...
Beck (:Right. Right.
Vern Cooper (:are kind of waterproof, they're kind of water resistant, and you put them on the floor and that's what you sleep on. No blanket, I was on my period, wouldn't let me have, they wouldn't let me have menstrual supplies, and I was like, why? I had them with me and they took them away, and they're like, you could injure yourself or someone with them, and I was like, have you never seen these before?
Can I walk you through something real quick? Do you have a minute? But they're like, no, just deal with it. So it was an increasingly dehumanizing situation that just materialized out of nobody giving a fuck. They didn't even have to try. They didn't even have to put effort into decreasing my safety by the hour or decreasing my, you know.
basic needs or whatever. That's one of the scariest things to me about institution, like carceral institutions, is that when they are functioning as they're intended to, people suffer the most because they are just perpetual motion punishment machines.
Beck (:The entire prison industrial complex is, it's all designed to do that. They're not making money unless they have people in beds, you know what I mean?
Vern Cooper (:And of course, it is well documented that the prison industrial complex is simply a replacement for slavery.
Beck (:yeah, it's written right into the Constitution. Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, right, like we'll get rid of slaves unless you can convince somebody that they did a crime and then put them to work in exchange for committing the crime.
Beck (:Unless... Unless...
Beck (:I teach this every semester and my students are just blown away that prison labor is still a thing. I'm like, have you ever enjoyed, I don't know, Victoria's Secret, McDonald's French fries, et cetera, et cetera, so many things that are made with prison labor.
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm.
Vern Cooper (:Recycling. The recycling lobby in a lot of states, that shit is simply just pre-sorted garbage on its way to a landfill that has to be run through prison labor first. And they do it so that they can get that, what is it, the rebate, that green energy grant to contribute to the cost of running the prison.
Beck (:Right.
Beck (:What does it say about me that my two main exes are both cops now? They were not cops when I dated them. I would like to point that out.
Vern Cooper (:I don't know if it says anything about you. dang.
Beck (:One of them is a prison warden and one of them is a sergeant in the sheriff's department in Kentucky.
Vern Cooper (:I mean, you know, ACAB and Fuck Ice and all that, but that is kind of hot though. Like a woman in uniform is... there's still something to that, even if the uniform is representative of something fucked.
Beck (:Right. They were both bullies, though. They were both big, tall, strong bullies.
Vern Cooper (:That makes sense. If it says anything about you, it just says that you have a thing for tall drinks of water that like to push you around. How do they?
Beck (:But then I married the opposite of that, you know what I mean? Shannon's about the same height as I am, we're about the same size in most general ways, and she is not pushy or bullying at all. She's the, and we've been together for 21, 21 years now, so.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Could you imagine Shana as like a prison warden? She would just get everybody high and then open the doors.
Beck (:No, I genuinely can't.
Yeah, that's exactly what would happen. She'd be the one coming up with like the prison like recipes and she'd be cooking for everybody and
Vern Cooper (:Dang.
Beck (:She'd make everything nice too, she'd decorate the cells and...
all kinds of girl shit.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, I think jail or just, you know, like we said, that carceral system is so American. Like that right there.
Beck (:We have the highest number of people in prison of anywhere in the world. Yeah, because we treat it like a business. Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:it
Vern Cooper (:Absolutely. It is a business and it's not only a business, it's a big part of our labor.
It is American capitalism to the core. we, like, you will maybe know the day when we are finally beginning to take liberation and equity and, like, a person's right to pursue any kind of actual happiness seriously when we begin to dismantle the prison industrial complex. Until then, we're lying through our teeth about whether we actually care about that.
Beck (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:And you know where you'll find that shit is the places nobody looks, like the South, like black communities, like those isolated areas in central Appalachia.
Beck (:Why do think there's so many prisons in Ohio and small little towns all over the place? Because the towns benefit economically from those and so do the politicians. You know what I mean? And they make hand over fist, they make so much money.
And it's all violence. Some of the people that I know now that were like my age that are prison guards, I'm thinking of one guy in particular, he got picked on and bullied and all that kind of stuff in high school and now he's a prison guard. He also has like eight kids, which I find really weird. I guess he proved he was a man. Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Hmm.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:You're right, yeah.
Beck (:But yeah, it's weird how people like that turn the other cheek in a way, you know, to the angry side.
Vern Cooper (:The other.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, I'm thinking about finding, I mean, the number of people who went into law enforcement from my high school, a good chunk of the people I went to school with are dead. The rest are fucking cops or sheriff or something. And I'm like, I knew you back then. What is this? There's an adorable dog waving at me, listeners. She has one snaggletooth.
Beck (:It's all she's got left. That and you can see that it's on the other side. She's got this tooth here and then on the other side she has one on the top. she's an old lady. She's an old lady. She's an old lady. She's a perfect baby angel.
Vern Cooper (:She's embarrassed, look at her. She's saying, stop pointing out my teeth.
Vern Cooper (:Did anybody besides your brother, are there any fantastic tales of reasons people went to jail? Not just the general fuckery, like legit criminals.
Beck (:Well, I've got plenty of cousins that were in jail for marijuana grows and things like that. And I had a cousin that did some pretty heinous sexual assault type things. I'm not proud to know him.
Beck (:I know like seven people who have been murdered in my life. And I think that's an excessive number. A lot of people are like, I've never known anyone. I'm like, I literally know like seven people that have been murdered. Both my mom's best friend and my dad's best friend got murdered when I was a kid. One by the guy by his wife and the girl by her stepson.
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm.
Vern Cooper (:You
Vern Cooper (:There is an inordinate amount of murder and also just crazy accidents in like, hill jack places. My coworkers sometimes can't believe the stories I've got.
Beck (:Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:You know, like here we had a tornado. Uh, was a really large tornado in North Dakota and it tore a town apart. It's, it's real rough and it killed three folks and they are going through it out here because, and I've learned that things like that don't happen here. Like they're not.
constantly inundated with life ending weather events here. And I find that interesting. Cause I was like, oh my God, yeah, all the tornadoes I've been in and they're like, you've been in tornadoes? And I was like, yeah, I'm from Kentucky. And then, you know, the hurricanes and it's like the more I'm outside of where I'm from, the more I noticed that like some, there really is, it almost looks like bad luck, except it's so,
It's just constant. Look about the fact that North Carolina, West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky are underwater three quarters of the year. It's not that much. Once a year, something floods so bad that a whole ass highway needs to be replaced.
Beck (:Right. Yeah, absolutely.
Vern Cooper (:And so I think there's something a little mythical about people from where we're from to folks who haven't been or lived in a place where the whole world is actually out to get you. Like the weather is trying to wipe you off the side of this mountain.
Beck (:right? Or if not that, the overgrowth of the weeds. That was something that I had to deal with when I moved back to my mom's. We had 17 acres and I was responsible for the grass cutting of that. And at least around the houses, you know what I mean, to keep the snakes back and stuff like that. And the very first estimate, guess how much they wanted to charge me to to mow the lawn? The first person I called to ask. 2,500 American dollars.
Vern Cooper (:6,000.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, I got... Yeah, somebody tried to get me with some shit like that when I bought my place in Kentucky. They charged, they quoted me $5,900 and I said, no, this is two fucking acres. But it's sideways. Okay, whatever. I'll turn sideways and mow it then. I don't care.
Beck (:I literally said American dollars.
Beck (:Mm-hmm.
Beck (:Yeah, I ended up getting somebody to mow it. One of my dad's friends, he came up and mowed it twice for me and it cost me a car trailer. But I got it done. So you do what you gotta do.
Vern Cooper (:Hmm.
Vern Cooper (:Some folks just ain't built for it.
Beck (:Yeah, I am not built for home ownership. I need to be able to call somebody else and be like, fix this immediately. So I need it be not my responsibility. Cause Lord knows I rarely ever have $5,000 sitting around to replace a heating unit or something, you know?
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:I never can tell if anything's any good. Just growing up in trailers and whatnot, like I can't, I don't have an eye for whether something is quality.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:Right. Yeah, like this apartment I live in should be really nice, but they cheaped out on all the details. Like, it's all crap.
Vern Cooper (:Hmm.
Beck (:Like you've touched the wall and it leaves fingerprints on it. Yeah. Yeah. But they charged me an arm and a fucking leg and I just re-upped my lease for another year. We're gonna stay here instead of moving. And they upped my rent by $110.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, that's some slumlord shit.
Vern Cooper (:sons of bitches.
Beck (:Yeah. But in the long run, it'll, we'll have to move in like a year anyway, because my job will no longer exist and we'll have to go wherever I can find, you know, work.
So knowing that we decided instead of having to move now and then move again in another year instead of that cost we'll just eat the cost of the extra rent and move in a year.
Vern Cooper (:You ready to do the sponsor?
Beck (:Yes!
Beck (:Now I have the hiccups, hold on.
Vern Cooper (:You
Beck (:Okay, I think I got it.
All right, you ready for me?
Vern Cooper (:Do it to it.
Beck (:Alright gang, this segment of Queernecks is brought to you by the Porch. Not a porch, not your porch. We're talking about THE porch. Capital T, capital P. The unofficial town hall, the runway, the therapist's office, and the weather station of Appalachia. In these parts, the porch isn't just a place to sit. It's a sacred space. It's where life's biggest announcements are made. Things like engagements, pregnancies, divorced, who got whooped, and who finally got their four-wheeler out the creek.
Vern Cooper (:You
Beck (:It's also where you pretend you didn't hear any of that while snapping beans with Mammal. For queer folks like me, the porch is versatile. It's a social place and a hideout. It's a stage for big confessions and a perfect escape hatch when Cousin Dale starts talking politics again. I've come out on a porch. I've made out on a porch. I've smoked on many porches. I've ghosted people from a porch without ever standing up. It's multipurpose. Some of the year-round gay features include summer sweating with a sweet tea and existential dread,
Fall brooding and flannel while judging everyone's pumpkin decor. That's especially for the lesbians. Springtime azalea surveillance with light gossip on the breeze. And winter, well, it's mostly frozen but still emotionally available. So whether you're having a moment, avoiding one, or just need to sit somewhere that knows too much, try the porch. It's not just lumber, it's a legacy. A queer Appalachian classic with seating for whomever you're becoming.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Beck (:Side effects may include mild euphoria, unsolicited neighborly advice, and knowing exactly when it's going to rain without checking your phone. Big thanks to the porch for keeping us grounded and slightly elevated with a good cross breeze. Now, back to the show.
Vern Cooper (:you
Vern Cooper (:how about that? Yeah. Porches, many of porches. Was your porch painted in hank blue? Do know what that is? You know what hank blue is? Yeah.
Beck (:No, mine was black. I do. It's the, they paint the ceiling. Yeah. Yeah. I know people who had those ceilings, so I know exactly what you're talking about. But my mom painted most everything gold, mauve, or black. so our porch was completely... Yeah. Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, those were big those were big colors in for my grandmother too. No, they was they was haint blue on my mom's parents porch And I guess we should say what haint blue is but so in in Appalachia in the hills there are there are things called haints and they're
They're not ghosts, but they're kinda like ghosts. It probably used to be haunt, and we just said haint, but there are beings that can come and getcha if you're not careful. They're usually riding around on the night air. If you go out on the night air, a haint might getcha. Yeah. The night air, yeah, it's cursed. It'll getcha.
Beck (:Night Air. My mom was so weary of the Night Air.
Oh, would fight. That's one of the fights me and my mom had many a time. I got the chicken pox the summer of my high school graduation. Like six weeks after graduation, I came down with a chicken pox. And like two weeks in, all I wanted to do was leave my house and go mail a letter. Just drive to the post office and put a letter in a box. That's all I wanted to do. And my mom made me put a whole towel system around my face and like drive there like that. I took it off as immediately as soon as I was out of the driveway. But yeah.
Vern Cooper (:laughter
Beck (:Night Air. Whoo, that was a big one for my mom. But anyway, hate blue.
Vern Cooper (:Vern Cooper (53:42.778)
Yeah, so it actually originated in South Carolina and Georgia, which is where my granny was from. They were Tidewaters coming up from Virginia and South Carolina. so yeah, haint blue, if you paint, it's a pale blue color. And if you paint the ceiling of your porch this color, it'll keep the haints away. They can't cross over the threshold. So it's kind of like a...
Maybe like vampire rules. It's supposed to, cause it looks like the water, they can't come across it cause everybody knows haints can't cross water.
That was EO.
Beck (:Have you ever seen a ghost?
Beck (:I saw two ghost horses.
Vern Cooper (:That's cool.
Beck (:So the area that I'm from, there's a lot of Native American history in those hills, specifically the Shawnee. There's a lot there.
One day I was going out to my car and from school and I had to be at school at like 730 or whatever. So it was early and I was 16. I had my driver's license and I walked outside and there were two horses playing like they're my house, like the lawn, there was hills to it. and they were kind of down on the flat spot down in front of the garage and these two horses, they were both black. They both had reins and they were just playing these two horses. And I was like, what the fuck? And I went in to get a camera.
Vern Cooper (:Mm.
Beck (:Right? Because I knew nobody was going to believe me and I came out and there was nothing. And I walked down there and it was softer. It was early in the morning. So it was dewy. There would have been marks if there had been two stallions sitting there playing in that grass. Right? There would have been evidence of it somewhere. There would have been something disturbed. Nothing. Nothing. So I got made fun of. I told everybody. I told my friends at school. I told my dad. They made fun of me. Then it happened again a few weeks later. I walked out and that time I ran in to get Mark, my dad, and
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
That's cool.
Beck (:When he came out, they were gone again. But twice I have seen black horses as ghosts. I would swear, may the Lord strike me down this instant if I am lying. I saw them with my own two eyes.
Vern Cooper (:I don't... I don't know if I have seen any and I'm not sure...
It could be that since I don't fully, I don't know if I actually believe in them, maybe I wouldn't see them, maybe there's something there. But there are times when I feel something and there have been extreme moments of just fear and terror when, I have been in like the really old parts of the mountain we lived on, that's all old. One of the things about Appalachia is it is the oldest part of...
this continent. used to be Pangea. It used to be in India. It's the ocean floor from 240 million years ago. And there is just something kind of powerful or something just emanates from it sometimes. And so there have, I don't know that I have seen ghosts, but there have been times when I have wondered if I saw creatures.
like creatures with people faces and stuff. got lost. Me and my brother decided to go up the mountain one time and see the sunshine or the sunset, which is fucking stupid, but we were children because we didn't think about the fact that the sun would have set. Hence coming down the mountain in the dark.
Beck (:Right.
Vern Cooper (:And so we realized this in a panic and we just, it was one of the scariest moments, honestly, of living on that mountainside. And I saw all kinds of shit come out in that twilight. And he was terrified and I was terrified and we basically just went up rolling down the hill. We didn't even make it back to our trailer. We wound up in the quarry of the mine.
Beck (:wow.
Vern Cooper (:because it wasn't a straight shot down. It was kind of a jog to go up. So that was pretty scary. But I did think I saw something there.
Beck (:Yeah. And then, so I don't know what happens when we die, right? I don't know where our soul goes. I don't know where that energy goes. That's one of the questions I have been dealing with in therapy. Where does all that energy go? You know? But when the day my mom died, my dad started acting pretty weird. He started cleaning out the closets because she died at like five o'clock in the morning. And by noon, he had her closets cleaned out and wanted us to take it to Goodwill and all that kind of stuff.
And I didn't want to be there. So I drove back to Toledo by myself. It was 200 miles and I was completely by myself and I was pretty emotionally disturbed. We'll say that. I basically screamed and cried all the way to Columbus, which was about 75 miles. And I pulled over and I made myself get some food and I calmed myself down. I cried again. Then I calmed myself down again because I knew I had to go through Columbus, right?
And so I turned on the radio and.
The last thing my mom said to me before she went into unconsciousness, she said, you're so pretty. And my mom never said that to me before in my entire existence. And the first song that came on was the Fuji's, pretty baby. That song. And the next, all the way home, the music were songs that were between me and my mom.
from there's a song by a woman named Patty Loveless. I don't know if you remember her from the country. There's, there's a song she has about a mama dying and learning how to say goodbye. That song randomly came on the radio during that time. the first concert I ever went to was Vince Gill. and the Vince Gill version of I will always love you came on.
Vern Cooper (:yeah. Yeah.
Beck (:Vince McGill and Dolly Parton. Like literally, the Boots with the Fur song came on and that was a joke that my mom, she got it stuck in her head and it was really funny. My mom was a character so she got something stuck in her head. She got it in everybody's head. But like every song that came on had something to do with me and mom. And you will never convince me that she wasn't with me for that drive. Because I don't even know how I made it home.
Vern Cooper (:No, kidding.
Beck (:So I truly believe her spirit was with me. I don't know what happens to you when you die, but I think...
I don't know.
Vern Cooper (:There was this interview where, and I don't know the context of this, but it was, I think Stephen Colbert does this thing sometimes where he'll ask his guests randomly what happens after we die. And it's resulted in a couple of fights. He got into it with Ricky Gervais actually. But.
Beck (:The Colbert questionnaire? Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:I just saw this clip of him, he asked Keanu Reeves. And he did that, he had that Keanu Reeves pause and he said, I think that the people who love us will miss us. And that just seemed like the perfect way to even think about what's, what does it even matter what happens after we die? Because what it is is someone who's lost something.
someone and like you said you lost a person and a place.
Beck (:I lost people. I lost my biological father first in 21. I lost my mom in 22 and then I lost my adopted father in 23. And then in 21, I also lost my best friend from growing up. And in the middle of all that, I lost both of my cats.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah.
Beck (:that I had had for 13, 14 years.
Vern Cooper (:Sometimes life gets to life and you're just like, what the fuck?
Beck (:Yeah.
Yeah. And then I had to give up my entire life and my job and go live where I never wanted to go back to and teach at a university I never wanted to teach at. And it was a struggle. The whole thing, it was mentally.
It put me in a dark place a couple of times, I'm very thankful for therapy. But I knew getting out of my mom's house would be a big thing, because I was just sitting like she was a heavy chain smoker. So there was tar on the walls and stuff like that. And so anything that had been moved and that my father's girlfriend that had lived in the house had moved a few things on the walls. So you could see the ghosts of where photos had hung and that kind of thing.
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm.
Vern Cooper (:Hmm.
Beck (:And sitting in my mom's, I literally would sit on the couch and it was positioned where her bed from hospice was. So I would sit at night in the exact spot where she died. Like it was too much. It was, it was way too much. getting out of there did so much for my, mental health getting, it took every resource, every trick, every dollar we had, man, but getting back into our regular lives. Do you know how many times I've had Chipotle since we've been back? It's ridiculous.
Vern Cooper (:So I have to ask do you want me to put that all in the show?
Beck (:If it's relevant, that's fine. If you think it is. Do what you think is best.
Vern Cooper (:Okay.
Vern Cooper (:Okay. Well, speaking of places and people, it's time for this week's Nouns of Interest.
And this week, actually, our noun of interest is a people, a thing, and a place all at once. Talking about that Hatfield-McCoy feud on the Tug Fork River along the border of Kentucky and West Virginia. So listeners, it is probable that you have heard of this feud. And if you have heard of it, you likely also heard that it started over a pig. Like a lot of stories told about...
people who aren't permitted to tell their own stories, that yarn's been spun a bit. The truth of the matter is that the Tug Fork Valley wasn't some forgotten holler, it was a social, cultural, and economic crossroads. Before companies of outsider industry stripped the land bare, this valley was already soaked in the blood of two Indian removal acts, several wars, including the Civil War.
The Hatfields lived on the Confederate Western Virginia side. The McCoys lived across the river in the Union side, Kentucky. The real origin of the feud was the murder of Asa McCoy shortly after being discharged from the 45th Kentucky infantry. The Hatfields claimed that it was revenge for some unrelated grievance, but Asa himself had no part in that. The most likely reason was he was targeted for his Union allegiance. The violence escalated.
The years were on, shootings, house, barn burnings, kidnappings, floggings, public execution, and yes, pork-related chicanery. But the conflict didn't grow in a vacuum. It grew in the full view and with the prompting of the national press that was hungry for a distraction in a post-war America.
Vern Cooper (:You see, when Reconstruction failed, the country craved a different story. It especially wanted one bearing no criticism of white supremacy, federal abandonment, Jim Crow, or the myth of the lost cause of the Confederacy. So Northern Press took this post-war Appalachian conflict and turned it into a parable of the insufficiency of Appalachians to steer their own destinies. The pig punchline enraptured
The Pig Punchline enraptured national majority narratives of the region, erasing the political and economic contexts, constructing in their place a caricature of toothless hillbillies feuding for fun, to ignorant, know peace. The specter of caricature bloomed over Appalachia, seeming to justify its hills being plumbed for the resources to better the lives of others. You see, Appalachia was being sold off from under their feet.
coal operators, timber speculators, and railroad barons were flooding the region, buying up land from folks who couldn't read the deeds, forcing families off generational homesteads, building company towns where your wages, your rent, your food, and even the casket that carried you to the hereafter came from the same damn company. All of this was happening on top of the Tug Fork River Valley in the Hatfields and McCoys.
This wasn't just a family squabble, it was a region under siege by the same forces that would go on to trigger the Cold Wars. The same companies who'd hire the Baldwin-Felts detectives to squash and break strikes and kill Union men. The same extractive economy that crushed labor and called it progress.
Appalachians became a useful scapegoat for the majority capital W whiteness, which benefited greatly from an example to illustrate the wrong kind of whiteness. Poor, uneducated, violent, not like us, their suffering was politically convenient, proof that some people just couldn't be saved, and it let the rest of the country wash its hands of its own unfinished war. The Hatfields and McCoys weren't just feuding, they were surviving.
Vern Cooper (:caught in a region plumbed by industry, ripped apart by war, then scapegoated by a rhetorical political machine long after their own misdeeds had been atoned for. In a skirmish like the Hatfield-McCoy feud, no one comes out clean. No one gets to be the hero. From 1890 to 1891, dozens of lives were claimed by the feud before the state governments had to step in and adjudicate. But the untold bits of the story, the context, can provide us a little hope.
You see, by the 20th century, Hatfields had become prominent figures in the Coal Wars, standing with the miners in one of the first integrated labor movements in the US history. Sheriff Smilin Sid Hatfield, the hero of the Matewan Massacre, was a member of the same Hatfield clan that seemed to fight with the McCoys to no end, though he was born in Kentucky instead of West Virginia, so that probably accounts for what corrected him. And in defeat of Pure Camp,
an episode of Family Feud in: Beck (:You
Vern Cooper (:And unsurprisingly, it has been the work solely of the people of Appalachia to attempt to clean up a mess the whole nation happily helped to make.
Beck (:Very interesting. I know my best friend is a McCoy. That's not her name, but her family is a McCoy. And I know someone who is related to Devil Anse Hatfield, one of the main players. Yeah. Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm.
Vern Cooper (:Yes, he's the one who started it all. He's the one, he like sent the people to kill Asa McCoy.
Beck (:My friend Marcella, he's a direct relative of hers. Because that area, the Tug Valley, that's, you know, big sandy, that's kind of the Kentucky West Virginia side. I'm from the Ohio side of that triangle.
Vern Cooper (:Hmm. Wow.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah. Yeah, that region. mean, it was just, that was where the economy happened in America at the time. and, and Appalachia as a whole, I really don't know how many people understand that Appalachia is the economy still largely to this day, but especially the early days of the country, early days, you know.
Beck (:Yeah. Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:But, oh shit, what was I gonna say? Oh, you remember last year, there was that sniper on I-75 down by London, Kentucky? It was a McCoy that found the body. Yeah. It was funny, and you can watch it on YouTube. They have a YouTube channel because they run the museum there that's also part of the nonprofit that is attempting to revitalize the region.
Beck (:Yeah.
Beck (:wow.
Beck (:think that they have something in Pikeville, the Hatfield and McCoy trail or something. I remember seeing that when I was down there with my girlfriend one time.
Vern Cooper (:Mm-hmm.
Vern Cooper (:Yep.
Well, that's where that smile when Sid Hatfield was born was Pikeville.
Beck (:Yeah, it's Pike-Vole. You have to say Vole. Yeah. Yeah. In Ohio, you call it like Centerville, Lucasville, but in Kentucky, it becomes Vole. Pike-Vole. Haints-Vole. Yeah.
Vern Cooper (:Do ya? I didn't know.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, and I know that Louisville's like that too. In my dialect, the first syllable gets the emphasis. Like a two-syllable word, they'll have equal emphasis. So, Pikeville, guitar. And a lot of words will become two-syllable that ain't.
Beck (:Yeah.
Amen to that.
Vern Cooper (:Well, it's the last day of Pride Month, so I don't know what to say about that, but that we're gonna keep on keeping on and talking our little queer rambles in whatever fashion we see fit. Fuck Donald Trump, fuck ICE. Yeah, and I'll just, Shannon will smuggle us in something.
Beck (:until they throw us at the camps.
Beck (:We are, yeah, we know we're all gender trader bullshit academic. I'm going, there's no way I'm not going to the camps. So I'm everything they hate the I I'm all of it. So I'll see you there.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah
Vern Cooper (:Mm. Yep.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah. Well, we're just going to keep doing this and keep talking. And we hope that more people join us and we hope that y'all talk too.
Beck (:Yeah, tell other people about us.
Vern Cooper (:Yeah, tag, remember follow us on threads and Instagram at Queernecks I also made a Facebook page that is only friends with drag queens, which is pretty awesome. Yeah, and they're just adding me and I'm like, hell yeah. So, but yeah, it's Queernecks also on Facebook. So come and find us, come and hang out.
Beck (:That's awesome.
Vern Cooper (:And we will see you next time in July and we'll just still say that it's Pride Month.
Beck (:Sounds good to me. It's always Pride Month at my house.
Vern Cooper (:Alright. Fuck yeah. Well say hi to your mom and them.
Beck (:Alright, bye!
