Before the mid-1800s, the people of eastern Kentucky lived in isolation except for visits from peddlers and preachers. The Appalachians mined timber and coal, survived off the land, hunted, farmed, and raised livestock. Then came missionaries, churches, government, and coal companies, pushing their ideologies and buying up the Kentucky man’s land at dirt-cheap prices, only to leave it destroyed. Many Kentuckians were wary, as well as weary of their new ideas and agendas—especially any ideas modernism might shove on them.
By the time the Pack Horse initiative arrived in 1935, eastern Kentucky was in the midst of its most violent era: the bloody coal-mine wars and the crushing Depression.
The WPA paid the Pack Horse librarians $28 a month. But Roosevelt refused to provide any books and reading materials, or the mounts needed to deliver books, or any housing for the materials.
However, the Pack Horse librarians were clever, and the program flourished when they developed ingenious ways to get the reading material for their routes. Homemade scrapbooks and penny funds were established, and solicitations went out widely to women’s clubs, Boy Scouts, and the PTAs in big cities.
I’m grateful for the generosity and dedicated work of Kentuckian Jason Vance, a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, and for his extensive research documenting and photographing many historical scrapbooks during his trips to the FDR Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, NY—where they are held and can be seen today.
The Pack Horse Library Project became an important bridge to education for many who had no access to schools. Literacy offered a break in the cycle of debilitating poverty. More importantly, it gave empowerment and freedom.
The beloved program ran from 1935 until 1943 when funding ceased, more accessible roads were built, and bookmobiles were introduced. Many of the Pack Horse librarians returned to farming, while some sought college to obtain their librarianship and others worked in libraries and for the effort of literacy.
It’s been an honor to meet relatives of the Kentucky Pack Horse librarians, their children and grandchildren, and a privilege and joy to know the unique Blue-skinned inhabitants of my home. But any skin color not alabaster-white or farmer-tan brown, or anyone different than most, whether in Appalachia or Anytown USA, suffered harder in an already hard life. And if that skin color was blue brought on by a strange blood disorder, a medical anomaly, families who had it were shunned, shamed, ridiculed, and hunted by news media, pushing them into the darkest holler of Appalachia. The Blues are intelligent, kind, and gracious folks who came over from France and first settled in Kentucky around 1820 when a French orphan claimed a land grant here.
Instead of being lifted up for their uniqueness, the Blues suffered prejudices and isolation and were treated unfairly because of a rare gene. Because I grew up in poverty, spending my first decade in a rural Kentucky orphanage and going on to endure homelessness and other sufferings, it’s not hard for me to feel pain deeply. And maybe that is true for anyone who has gone through hardships of their own. It’s always my hope to honor, lift up others, and dispel the fear and ignorance that breeds hate and toxicity into cultures.
Congenital methemoglobinemia, a non-life-threatening condition, is due to a deficiency leading to higher-than-normal levels of methemoglobin in the blood—a form of hemoglobin—that overwhelms the normal hemoglobin, which reduces oxygen capacity. Less oxygen in the blood makes it a chocolate-brown color instead of red, causing the skin to appear blue. Doctors can easily diagnose congenital methemoglobinemia because the color of the blood provides the unique clue. The mutation is hereditary and carried in a recessive gene, whereas acquired methemoglobinemia is life-threatening and derives from heart disease, airway obstruction, or taking too much of certain drugs.
Once again, I researched fire towers and some of the courageous women who became the country’s first lookouts, daring to run these intimidating forest towers while suffering storms, fires, wild creatures, extreme isolation, and more.
Although all my characters are fictional, and events are only inspired by history, I had the pleasure of interviewing several female coal miners. It was an honor to speak with Sara Vance, one young coal miner from West Virginia. Ms. Vance is not related to Professor Vance mentioned above. Sara, a brave, fierce third-generation coal miner, is the daughter of the late Brenda Vance, one of the first female coal miners in the country. Proud of her trade and fellow male colleagues, Sara enjoys her job and for a while worked alongside her mother in the mines. When pregnant and just weeks away from having a baby, Sara continued to work under the watchful eyes of the male miners who worried about her safety working 1,200 feet below the surface.