1. In April 1964, President Johnson surprised the small Appalachian town of Inez, Kentucky, and the world by declaring his historical War on Poverty. How did this program to feed, educate, and house the poor help or hinder the poverty-ridden towns? Fifty years later, why is this area still steeped in poverty?
2. Gunnar pushes his strict moral code onto RubyLyn and uses his coined phrase GodPretty to keep her in line. He insists she must not only toil in his tobacco field, but keep a “GodPretty” soul while doing so. Does Gunnar believe that RubyLyn must be pretty in the eyes of God in order for his home and crops and land to be blessed? What does GodPretty mean?
3. Discuss Rainey and RubyLyn’s relationship. Discuss marriages and relationships in the sixties and now.
4. How do you think the Labor Department’s 1960s “Happy Pappy” work program would do today if paid, on-the-job training was widely available?
5. Throughout history, extended families, clans, and tribes tended to allow marriage of relatives—sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of convenience. In 1943, Kentucky banned first-cousin marriages. Today, “Twenty-five states prohibit marriages between first cousins. Six states allow first cousin marriage under certain circumstances, and North Carolina allows first cousin marriage but prohibits double-cousin marriage,” cited the National Conference of State Legislatures. Discuss.
6. As beautifully chronicled in Sharyn McCrumb’s novel, later made into a movie,
The Songcatcher, the people of Appalachia are born to music, much of it still lost to time’s passing. I was fortunate enough to find the 1915 song “Sweet Kentucky Lady” and its original sheet music, along with many other treasures, and the recording on the Library of Congress Web site where they have painstakingly preserved more than 10,000 historical sound recordings for free on their online National Jukebox section. Listen to “Sweet Kentucky Lady” here:
http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/id/913.
What items from your past deserve to be found again, preserved, and shared with younger generations and loved ones?
7. Thinking about the lives and actions of Ada, Baby Jane, Lena, and Henny and the rest of the women of Nameless, how does abject poverty affect learning, habits, choices, and notions of self-worth on life’s journey? Discuss crushing poverty’s oppression on women.
8. In 1958, Freddy (also known as Freddy Farm Bureau), the eighteen-foot wooden doll of the Kentucky State Fair, was introduced and still sits proudly on his bale of hay at the State Fair. Share your icons of events that have stuck with you.
9. For decades, Future Farmers of America was strictly a boys’ club. In 1969, Future Farmers of America allowed female membership. How do gender-based restrictions harm society? How does inclusion of all strengthen?
10. Discuss the Future Farmers of America creed.
11. We hardly think of the soil, oftentimes avoid treading in it, brushing it off when it sticks to us, yet it is the core of existence. Novelist, environmentalist, and farmer Wendell Berry says:
The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.
How we nurture the soil is how we live and survive. Discuss erosion—the earth, its climate, planting, our ways of farming, our ways of harming, today versus decades ago.