In the Kentucky Diaspora

The locust trees burst into bloom in Baltimore today, and I know that on the other side of the Appalachians they are perfuming the countryside. It is the smell of home. 

I left home, Elizaville, the crossroads town in Fleming County where I grew up, in 1973 to go to graduate school in Syracuse, and from there to newspapering in Cincinnati and Baltimore. But, after nearly four decades in Maryland, I am neither a Marylander or a Baltimorean. I am a Kentuckian in self-chosen exile. 

People are mildly taken aback when they learn that. They see that I wear shoes and am not a gallus-snapping pappy, and they usually limit themselves to saying, "You don't sound like someone from Kentucky." And I don't, though my wife observed that my accent broadened slightly in the summers when we visited my mother. "Why, John Early, you sound just like somebody from up North," the mother of a classmate once told me. 

My people were there for a long time. My father's father, who died before I was born, ran a general store in Elizaville. His people were from Hilltop, a suburb of Elizaville. My father took over management, but he was soft-hearted and gave credit to impoverished farmers who were never able to pay him back. Ultimately, his mother and brother, who inherited equal shares of the store, turned him out into the street. It's a complicated heritage. In time he became an engineer with the state highway department, and I have driven on roads he helped make. 

My mother was postmaster in Elizaville for twenty-four years and from her vantage point at the crossroads observed everybody's comings and goings. When someone drove through town, she knew where he was going, what he would do there, and when he would be back. And if she didn't know that, she worked the phones until she did. The Soviet Union did not have surveillance to match that of a small town in Kentucky. 

My mother's father owned a farm that had been in the Early family since the middle of the nineteenth century. I have a property tax receipt indicating what my great-great-grandfather paid for his two hundred acres, his four horses or mules, and his six human beings. As I said, it's complicated. 

I don't know whether they realize the complication when those well-fed gentlemen in their ice-cream suits and their ladies with the architectural millinery rise at the Derby to sing "My Old Kentucky Home" -- a song about the sadness of  Black family in the Kentucky Diaspora after having been sold down the river. 

My parents and grandparents were honest, generous, unassuming people, and they were good progressive Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy Democrats. If they were with us today, they would like what Andy Beshear has done as governor.  (And I raised two Democrats, having done my duty.) My teachers were dedicated people who saw something promising in me and encouraged it. In high school, Lowell and Jean Denton, who operated a local newspaper, the Flemingsburg Gazette, hired me for what proved to be six summers of a practical education in local journalism. These people shaped who I am, or at least the better part of me. 

 The old Kentucky home has been sold, but I keep a canister of dirt from the farm on my desk, which I suppose makes me a landowner. Though it is far, far away, I am still, at seventy-four, part of it.