MEIGHAN HACKETT, THE DAUGHTER OF Nancy Santomero’s sister Jeanne, was born eleven months after her aunt’s death to a family reeling from loss. As she grew up in Long Island, everyone saw Nancy in her—in the hippie outfits she wore, the way she braided her hair, her hunger to walk and sleep outside, and the way she was always moving and looking around. She was camping in upstate New York, or she was taking TGV trains through Italy, or she was moving to San Francisco and driving into the mountains on the weekends. Her aunt Patricia worried about her—they could never have watched their own kids take such adventures. In addition to Patricia losing Nancy, Patricia’s husband, Paul, had lost his brother in a car accident. “I think we held onto our kids a little too tight,” Patricia said. “We made them afraid. They got it from both sides.” One time Jeanne came to pick Patricia’s kids up in a little Honda. “You can have a nice ride by yourself,” Paul told her, “but you’re not taking our kids in that.” The following year, he bought Jeanne a Chevy Suburban.
For her college admissions essay, Hackett wrote about her aunt who had been murdered. She said that she experienced Nancy as a spectral presence in her life, one not of grief but of unconditional love, similar to how some people describe God. There was a wild weeping willow tree in Caumsett State Park on Long Island that everyone called Nancy’s tree because she had gone there often when in junior high and high school. Later, Hackett went there too.
Hackett had grown up in a family shaped by women—her mother and two aunts, as well as her grandmother—and the family shared openly with each other everything they knew about Nancy’s death, but the Durian family was different. Brittney Durian, who is studying social work at the University of Iowa, said that she and her cousin Victoria Lynn Durian grew up knowing that their aunt had been murdered but little else. No one in their family would talk about it. To obtain admission to the social work major, Brittney, too, wrote an essay about her aunt Vicki’s murder and the ripples it began across her life and the others in her generation. “I would love for you to read it,” she wrote to me, “so maybe then you can understand why it is so important to me and my siblings/cousins that we know the truth about what happened.”
“Instead of coping with grief, my family failed to acknowledge the pain,” her essay continues. “They believed that if you ignore it, the pain will disappear. Consequently, my father’s side of the family never received the full closure they deserved. They were never able to properly heal, or open up to each other. After I took ‘Death and Dying: Issues Across the Lifespan,’ I learned about the concerns of death, dying, and the grieving process. I realized my family struggled with accepting death. Additionally, I discovered more about myself by witnessing my family’s unhealthy way of coping. I aspire to help others recognize that death is ‘okay.’”
The Mountain Views student with the scar is a trans man named Jordan. He, too, left southern West Virginia for college but stayed in the state, finding a school he liked in the eastern panhandle near Washington, DC. There, despite the college ignoring the fact that he had checked the box marked “transgender” on his housing placement form and a six-foot penis spewing sperm that was graffitied on his dorm room door, he thrived, finding queer friends and mentors, majoring in psychology and minoring in Appalachian studies and catalyzing the implementation of a policy to better serve transgender students as well as the founding of the institution’s first LGBTQ center.
Upon graduation, Jordan had several job offers in the Maryland area and had gotten accepted to a five-year doctorate program in DC. But his mother, back home in southern West Virginia, had recently been diagnosed with a brain aneurysm, and his stepfather had little to offer in terms of her care. Plus, “a lot of my heart and soul is here,” he said. “There is something in me that needs to be here, in the mountains, in a place that is familiar. It was hard, hard to explain what it felt like to be away from home. Just existing in a world that I didn’t recognize felt very hard.”
So he came back. He found a job with a health care company that provides physical and mental health care services to the people of Pocahontas County. Every Sunday he drove more than an hour to see his mother in the house she lived in with his stepfather to refill her medications, restock her groceries, and leave cash for her to give to the woman he had hired to clean her house. Sometimes her illness meant she became nearly fully paralyzed, so Jordan began paying out of pocket for a home health aide. Then one of his male colleagues at work refused to use the same bathroom that he did, so the company gave Jordan a private bathroom, but across the building from his desk. “If he has a problem peeing in the same room as me,” Jordan told the company, “he can use that bathroom in the boonies.”
During the nine months that Jordan was unemployed, he looked diligently for another job, the kind of job that would value his education and experience and compensate him appropriately, but it simply did not exist within two hours’ driving distance. His college degree meant he was told time and time again by restaurants and gas stations that he was overqualified. Many times he wondered why he had bothered to go to college at all.
In June 2016, southern and central West Virginia were hit by a rainstorm that quickly became a catastrophic flood that killed twenty-three people; destroyed homes, schools, infrastructure, and businesses; and left five hundred thousand US citizens without power. The event barely registered in the national media, and it took bureaucratic channels nearly two years to release the funds that would drastically improve the lives of survivors and repair the damage. I was working at Mountain Views that summer and was the person on call the night the storm rolled in. The rain on the tin roof of the staff shelter made a sound so intense and continuous it felt physical, as did my anxiety over the well-being of the minors under my charge in that campground. Then there was a sound in the sky that I knew was thunder but could best be described as a gun put to my ear and then fired.
Somehow we made it through the night. In the morning we took our students down to the sturdier Mountain Views office building and built a fire. All of our roads were washed away; the area by the mailboxes and the culvert there had become a rushing river. But this was nothing, we would learn, compared to the state of affairs in the counties neighboring Pocahontas to the south and west. In Nicholas County, the county to which I had been assigned to make those calls, their middle school and high school, their Mountaineer Mart, many homes—gone. Someone in Greenbrier County posted a video to Facebook of their neighbor’s house catching fire and floating down the river.
Jordan was living with a friend at the time of the 2016 flood, a young woman who had also been a Mountain Views student. They watched the water approach their house and then submerge it up to the second story. Both Jordan’s and his roommate’s cars were fully underwater.
“We thought the house was gonna go,” Jordan remembered. “The house was shifting—I could see it rocking on the foundation. So we made the decision to leave.”
They tied a rope to the back porch, then threw it to a nearby tree, and by pulling themselves on the rope were able to reach dryer ground on the high side of a nearby mountain. They had taken shovels from the house and were able to use them as walking sticks as they shimmied across the side of a rock wall. At one point, Jordan fell in the water, and his friend pulled him out. They did a first-aid assessment to make sure Jordan could go on—he had hurt his knee in the fall but was otherwise unharmed.
“How did you know to do all that?” I asked, incredulous.
“Mountain Views, man!” Jordan said, laughing. But he was serious. “If you all hadn’t thrown us out into the woods and taught us how to get back, we would have died that day, I feel sure.”
He lived now with his best friend, another trans man who had also gone to Mountain Views and his friend’s wife and four beautiful cats in a neat trailer on some land in Greenbrier County. The steps leading up to their house were lined with rocks and crystals that his roommate had found on his hikes all over southern West Virginia. Even as a Mountain Views kid, that student loved rocks—all he wanted to talk about at lunch was his rock collection and how much it would be worth someday. The two friends liked to hike together or walk the river trail and talk or go to flea markets. Jordan did eventually find another job at a company that provides services to adults with developmental disabilities in crisis, which means his days are spent talking to and touching the bodies of people experiencing some of the most difficult moments of their lives. But he was proud of the work. “I know the people. I know that this Dollar General has peanut butter and that one doesn’t like our clients. I know this place.”
Romantic love was something he would like in his life eventually, he said, but he was not in any rush. Jordan was still somewhat guarded when it came to his body and being trans in Greenbrier County, but he found he felt comfortable wearing fewer layers of clothing than he thought he would—“just a T-shirt is fine, no need for the seven sweatshirts. I’m not hiding here nearly as much as I thought I would be,” he told me. In a fact that shocks many of my friends when I tell them, West Virginia has the most transgender teenagers per capita of any American state.
“I have found a lot of acceptance,” Jordan said. “I’ve been able to share my story and be out there in the community here in ways I didn’t expect.…Greenbrier County has opened up a lot. It’s a mix between the old life and the new—it has that farm life still, and agriculture, and familial culture. But we are also seeing this surge of cultural diversity. We have a Jamaican restaurant now, and a fry bread restaurant is coming in. Our access to technology is changing. The high school gives their students netbooks and laptops now.”
But, he acknowledges, the price of living at home is sometimes high.
“The bad side of coming back is that you’re consistently fighting those Appalachian values of closed-mindedness, man and woman, God is the word.…No matter how much women work, they’re still expected to come home and take care of the kids. Men do the physical labor, and that’s considered enough.”
It was Jordan who, super in love with his high school girlfriend at the time, changed Greenbrier East High School’s policy on queer couples attending prom together. He considers himself a natural-born fighter with a knack for standing out but understands that not everyone wants to live like that. The questions Appalachian young people must ask themselves, he said, are these: “Are you willing to put your heart and your soul into changing a place that you love? Are you strong enough to withstand the barricades that you will come up against?”