Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America Page 6

  Although Stacey’s parents were poor, they were well respected. Money mattered much less than reputation, and her parents and their parents before them were admired for their integrity. On Stacey’s mother’s side, they traced their history in Washington County back to Stacey’s great-grandfather Oliver Mankey, the grandson of a German immigrant by the name of Mannchen. Oliver Mankey was born near the town of Nineveh, ten miles from Amity, in 1865, and moved to Prosperity to farm. He lived on land that the Delaware had once called Anawanna, the path of the water. Now the land belonged to a Boy Scout camp and the Anawanna Club, which Stacey called “a redneck country club.” Although the club was little more than a muddy pond stocked with catfish and a soda machine stocked with beer, members voted on prospective members by placing white or black balls in a box. One black ball and you were out.

  Stacey’s father’s family also lived in Washington County, but most of the Hillberrys, who were also originally from Germany, had settled in West Virginia. This was the original Hoopy country, where during the last century hill people wove hoops out of saplings and carried them down to West Virginian ceramics makers to fashion into barrels for shipping plates and cups. In West Virginia, people still joked that the initials of the Homer Laughlin China Company stood for “Hoopies’ Last Chance.” And now the word “Hoopy” had come to mean anything related to hill culture. “Going down Hoopy to hunt,” for instance, meant going to West Virginia.

  The nurses at work started teasingly calling Stacey a Hoopy after her mother called the ward one day in 2003 and told Stacey to switch on one of the TVs in the recovery ward. There, on-screen, the nurses watched federal agents raid the farm of David Wayne Hull, an Imperial Wizard of the White Knights, the KKK’s most violent paramilitary wing. Hull was a fellow Hillberry and Stacey’s second cousin. A hospital aide who happened to be an African American man said Hull was a monster. Stacey told him Hull was her cousin. The aide apologized; he’d never thought people like that had any family, he told her. No, Stacey said, I’m sorry. Hull was sentenced to twelve years in federal prison for tampering with a witness, along with building, transporting, and detonating IEDs. Stacey wasn’t surprised. Out hunting at his farm, she’d seen cut-out human targets for shooting practice, and a stack of wooden crosses waiting to be burned.

  As an adult, Stacey had reclaimed being a Hoopy as a source of pride. It had been hard when she was younger. In high school, she was teased for being a poor country kid from Amity with the name Hillberry, synonymous with hillbilly. Stacey had attended Trinity High School in the city of Washington, which since childhood she had associated with wealth. After Pappy lost his job, Linda often took the girls along when she went to clean a thirty-two-room mansion in Washington. The mansion had a pool, where Stacey and Shelly were allowed to swim in the summer while their mother worked. In reality, the town’s dwindling fortunes reflected those of the county: Washington was in the midst of an economic exodus, which has cut the town’s population in half since the 1950s, from a high of 27,000 to 13,500 today. But Washington still meant money in Stacey’s eyes, and when she reached high school, the city kids, as Stacey called them, had things like Nintendo and Jordache jeans, and Stacey felt ashamed of all she lacked. She sat in the back of the classroom and never raised her hand. The only extracurricular activity she participated in was rifle club. She was the team’s best shot and was awarded MVP. Even rifle club embarrassed her, though, since Pappy couldn’t afford to buy Stacey her own gun and she had to borrow one from the school.

  Stacey was a senior in high school when she learned that college existed, and she told her mother she wanted to go, but, as Stacey recalled, Linda told her that poor kids from places like Amity didn’t go to college. She’d be better served forgetting about it. This happened sometimes between them: Linda thinking that she was setting Stacey straight, helping to spare her daughter future disappointment by facing a humbling truth; Stacey feeling defeated, squashed. So she’d left home for beauty school and a life with her then boyfriend, Larry Haney. She told no one she was leaving, and when she went back for her things, Pappy told her that Larry would always love his truck more than her, which made Stacey furious at the time but turned out, she thought, to be true.

  To Stacey, home ownership was the next rung up the middle-class ladder. With Larry managing inventory at a nearby plastics plant and Stacey working as a nurse, they had enough money to buy a house with good water. When Stacey found the farm on McAdams Road, she loved the fact that it had once belonged to her great-grandfather. This happened often in Amity. Due to scant inventory and financial struggles, houses passed in and out of families. On McAdams, the quality of its water was the farm’s best feature. She cherished the well, supplying water to her parents and sister, as well as to the Lower Ten Mile Presbyterian Church. The house, which cost $82,000, required a gut-job: a new roof and vinyl siding, along with work on the foundation. They also added a new kitchen, bathroom, and porch, salvaging what they could—“to keep the history,” Stacey said.

  She collected old things to fill the house where she planned to live forever: an antique sewing machine, her grandmother’s Shaker rocker. Larry, like her, was meticulous about his surroundings. Together, they invested all they had in the house, installing a porcelain wood-burning stove in the kitchen that cost about two thousand dollars. They couldn’t afford oil. They relied on the woodstove to warm most of the house. Around the stove, they installed a wooden mantel that Pappy made from a walnut tree on the farm and built a hearth with stone. She hand-plastered the parlor ceiling with careful swirls, stenciled ivy up the stairs and the animal tracks over Harley’s walls, painted Paige’s room with bunnies and tufts of grass, and hung pink valances decorated with John Deere tractors in her windows.

  Beneath this veneer of rustic perfection, however, Larry and Stacey were struggling. At first, when Harley had colic, Larry would walk him for hours. But when the kids grew old enough to make messes—Paige leaving around her piles of Polly Pocket dolls—he grew impatient. Paige was afraid to ask him for anything, even a glass of water, in case he yelled at her. He preferred order and being outside washing his truck. By the time he left in 2007, Stacey was happy to see the back of him. Although in her mind she cast his departure as his fault, the product of his losing interest in the kids, she’d lost interest in the marriage too. She worked hard at convincing the kids that they were better-off without him, and Larry felt cast as a bad guy, pushed out of their lives. Harley and Paige saw him only occasionally when he took them for awkward dinners at the nearby tavern, Ye Olde Kopper Kettle, which had served as a stagecoach inn a century ago along the National Road.

  Stacey met Chris Rush at the Kettle in 2009. She stopped in for a rare drink after working a catering gig to make extra money. She was self-conscious about the strong smell of the chicken and gravy she’d spilled down her white blouse. Chris, who frequented the Kettle for burgers and scratch-off lottery tickets sold out of a vending machine, saw her come into the bar and approached her. He knew who she was and was already infatuated. They talked about the kids, and he offered to take Harley on a turkey hunt. Turkey hunting is hard: the hunter has to imitate the female’s call. But Chris was a master. Turkey season, however, was still months away, so Chris asked if she might be free one night for dinner. As a hunter, he couldn’t resist her smelling of chicken, he liked teasing her later.

  “That’s a Hoopy mating call,” she told me later, laughing.

  Chris was much closer than Larry was to the ideal partner that Stacey hoped for. At thirty-four, Chris was still a bachelor and stiff and wary around strangers. After half a dozen Bud Lights, he loosened up, became funny and rambunctious, full of boyish hijinks, rapping fluent Lil Wayne or Snoop Dogg from the unlikely mouth of a burly Hoopy. Each loved the strong country identity the other possessed, and part of that involved maintaining an old-fashioned distance. Stacey was proud of being self-reliant and not calling Chris every time she blew a tire on the rutted road.

  “There’
s a difference in Amity women than most women,” she said. “We don’t have to have a man in our lives.” Stacey was perfectly happy about, or at least resigned to, chopping a winter’s worth of firewood on her own, with the help of her family. As she saw it, that’s what real frontierswomen did. The ringtone that Stacey picked for Harley and Chris—the tribute to Bo and Luke Duke—reflected her tastes. When Paige called, Stacey’s phone whinnied. Chris held on to his bungalow bachelor pad in a nearby town known as Eighty Four, but he spent as much time as he could with Stacey in Amity, doing odd chores and watching Pirates and Steelers games.

  Although Stacey and Chris saw being country as being different from the mainstream, the truth was that rural populism was trendy. On television, Duck Dynasty, hosted by the irascible duck hunter Phil Robertson, was the number-one show in America until Robertson’s racist comments drove him off the air. Duck Dynasty and other reality shows, like Honey Boo Boo and Buckwild, portrayed crusty and outrageous characters who appealed to rural Americans as well as urban viewers. The broad jokes and small mishaps of country living seemed quaint, a throwback to a life that was disappearing. The disenfranchisement wasn’t always economic—the Robertsons wore $150 Realtree camouflage boots and their pickups could cost more than a BMW—but it did signal a strong political pushback against the progressive values regarding race and sexuality that were ascendant during the Obama years. Soon, with the election of Donald Trump, urban Americans would learn that the pointed humor of these shows was popular not because it was exotic but because it was so widespread.

  7 | “ONE HEAD & ONE HEART, & LIVE IN TRUE FRIENDSHIP & AMITY AS ONE PEOPLE”

  On Sundays, Stacey filled milk jugs with water and drove them to the Lower Ten Mile Presbyterian Church, where her kids and Shelly’s were the fifth generation of their family to be baptized. The church’s well was contaminated with formaldehyde leached from the bodies of the former parishioners. In the graveyard, thin slabs of granite told a story about Amity over ten generations. For the past 250 years, its residents had once belonged to a community where people relied on one another, grumbling as they might about familial or communal obligations while chopping wood, or mowing, or butchering the season’s hogs. These stories belied the myth of the individual frontiersman. No one could’ve made it here alone.

  Among the parishioners buried in the graveyard was the Reverend Thaddeus Dod, his tombstone encrusted with lichen. A descendant of Puritans and an ardent Presbyterian, Dod arrived in 1777 out of Princeton. Suffering from rheumatism, he made six difficult trips over the Alleghenies from New Jersey, bringing his wife and an infant son, in order to found the church and minister to the embattled settlers. Most had arrived only four years earlier, in 1773, when a group of fifteen to twenty families came from New Jersey. They joined a handful of European settlers and five brothers named Bane at the Ten Mile Creek settlement, which would later become Amity and Prosperity.

  Ten Mile wasn’t undiscovered; it was a busy byway along Mingo Path, part of an ancient east–west route that would later become America’s federal highway, the National Road. Ten Mile Creek was also a dangerous place. The frontier was at war with Native inhabitants. In these forests, Shawnee and Delaware hunted for bear, buffalo, elk, turkey, and deer. There was a Delaware village about half a mile west of the settlement, Dod noted in his journal. It was called Anawanna.

  Almost immediately after the settlers arrived in 1773, the Delaware attacked and drove them off the land. They soon returned to build log forts with gun sites and spiked wooden fences to guard against the Native American raids that would begin each year with the spring thaw.

  The besieged community was in desperate need of spiritual guidance. Dod baptized babies and preached in forts about the need for personal salvation. He called for the renunciation of sin, and evoked hell’s fiery travails in vivid color. Dod was a fervent advocate of the Great Awakening, the Protestant movement that swept through Europe and the colonies beginning in the 1740s. The need for salvation, with its promise of heaven, was immediate. Violent death surrounded them. The Great Awakening also contained a moral and spiritual imperative that justified settlers’ claims on Native land. Expansion was God’s will.

  The conflict over frontier land also divided colonists from one another. This was part of the legacy of William Penn, the Quaker and pacifist who’d been given twenty-nine million acres of land by King Charles II in 1681. Penn saw this new world as a holy experiment to build a peaceable kingdom. As part of this divine contract, he believed that land had to be bought, rather than stolen, from Native Americans. For their part, the Native Americans didn’t necessarily believe that individuals could own land. Nevertheless, Penn signed a land treaty with the Conestogas, which read that both parties “shall forever hereafter be as one Head & One Heart, & live in true Friendship & Amity as one People.”

  Tensions rose between the Quaker elite in Philadelphia and the land-hungry “back inhabitants” moving west. In December 1763, a group of frontiersmen, the Paxton Boys, slaughtered Conestoga men, women, and children, then marched east to Philadelphia to demand the right to land and representation, as well as retribution against Native Americans. When the Paxton Boys arrived at the city’s edge, Benjamin Franklin listened to their grievances, eventually succeeding in sending them back to the frontier without violence in the streets of Philadelphia.

  However, violence along the frontier proliferated. Despite Quaker disapproval, the back inhabitants kept pressing westward, cutting their initials into trees, establishing by “tomahawk rights” ownership over land that the powerful Six Nations believed they held in collective trust for future generations. John Penn, William’s grandson and now the colonial governor, sought to contain the settlers. In February 1768, he issued a “most terrifying law,” according to colonial records. Penn proclaimed that “if any Person or Persons, settled upon any Lands within the Boundaries of this Province, not purchased of the Indians by the Proprietaries thereof, shall neglect or refuse to remove themselves and Families … [they] shall suffer death without the Benefit of Clergy.”

  That winter, Penn sent colonial authorities out to illegal settlements to enforce the new law. But the squatters ignored the threats of death and refused to leave. That spring, when they kept seizing land, Tohonissagarrawa, chief of the Six Nations, complained to Penn: “Brother: It is not without grief that we see our Country settled by You without our knowledge or consent.”

  By the time Dod arrived at Ten Mile Creek almost a decade later, the law had changed, and settlers were finally allowed to own plots along the frontier. As they flowed westward in greater and greater numbers, skirmishes intensified. The Revolutionary War made things even worse between settlers and Native Americans; many of the latter hoped that the British might prove better neighbors than the violent colonials. King George III went so far as to promise Native peoples that England would safeguard their claims to the land after the war, and many decided to fight on his behalf. The western frontier was one of the war’s bloodiest theaters. One Native chief said that if his people had the means of broadcasting what the settlers had done to women and children, the settlers, rather than the Native Americans, would be called savages.

  The Revolutionary War left the frontier in devastation. Many frontiersmen, poor to begin with, were already deeply in debt for the cost of building their homesteads. They’d served as soldiers both in the war and in an ongoing border dispute between Pennsylvania and neighboring Virginia that was finally settled in 1780. When they returned to their homes in Washington County, these veterans, already in hock, often found that their homesteads had been burned by Native Americans.

  In response, the men from Washington County conducted a spate of reprisal killings. In 1782, David Williamson, soon to be elected sheriff of Washington County, led a band of men across the Ohio River, where, in a village established by Moravian Christian missionaries, they bludgeoned ninety-six Native converts to death, including thirty-nine children. Some of the militiamen opposed
the massacre. Others, like Nathan Rollins, who’d lost a father and an uncle in Native American raids, led the attack. After taking a tomahawk to nineteen people, Rollins “sat down & cried,” an observer wrote. Rollins “said it was no satisfaction for the loss of his father & uncle after all.”

  Against this blood-soaked background, Thaddeus Dod attempted to civilize the community at Ten Mile. He opened the Log Academy to teach Latin and the classics to boys. In addition to constructing the school and the church, the Dods also built an elegant log cabin, unique in that it had two stories and three fireplaces: one for cooking, one for heating, and yet a third in the basement. In 1785 they dug a communal well next to the cabin, which still sits there beneath a round wooden cover. The well provided the community water, and also security, since women and children didn’t need to wander down to the creek alone, risking attack. But the well fulfilled a spiritual vision as well as a practical need. On September 7 of that year, Reverend Thaddeus Dod preached from the book of Isaiah 41:17: “When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue faileth for thirst, I the Lord will hear them.”

  When frontier veterans tried to rebuild their homesteads, they found that the salaries they’d been expecting for their military service were either never paid or paid in paper scrip rather than coin. The scrip arrived late, and when it did, it was practically devoid of value, plunging the frontier deeper into economic crisis.

  Whiskey, instead, served as the most useful currency. Most farms had small stills, and the liquor could be used to pay for rent or labor. Whiskey could also be sent east over the Alleghenies to Philadelphia and New York. Transporting grain through the mountains was so unwieldy and expensive as to be hardly worth the effort. Whiskey, on the other hand, turned a tidy profit.

  In 1791, under the auspices of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, the federal government imposed a Whiskey Tax intended to help repay the young republic’s debts. Hamilton also hoped it would drive small rural producers out of business in the favor of larger ones. It was one of Hamilton’s less laudable ideas, and the residents of Washington County reacted. When federal agents attempted to collect taxes on stills, the Whiskey Rebels tarred and feathered them and destroyed the stills of those who cooperated, until President Washington himself mustered nearly thirteen thousand troops and rode west.