Devonne Brown

My heart will always be in the green of Appalachian small towns. The first house I remember was a one room school house converted into a four room house with a porch, and an outhouse out back. I have a picture of my sister and I playing in its backyard in front of the outhouse in the dirt in our spotless pinafores when we were one and two years old. My family were archetypical hillbillies, undereducated, and started poor. 

They were not stupid people though. They were wise, resourceful, and intelligent folk who worked the land and made clean lives for themselves in a fertile but often unforgiving wilderness. I come from farmers who toiled in mud and dirt to feed families during the depression, and women who made clothing and quilts from feedsacks.   

I grew up outside the town of Hurricane, West Virginia, the town that boasted the first stoplight in Putnam county. The town had the only bank in the county too, with Jack Wilson as the loan officer. He controlled the county’s purse strings for sixty years or so, nearly until he died not too long ago. 

The bank sits across the street from the DP benches where the old men gather and watch the customers come, go, and gossip. Mom said the benches got their names from the old men who always sit there. “Dead pecker benches”she said are their official names. Everybody knows that.