LITMIR.BIZ

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worker born and raised in hillbilly West Virginia (“West-by-God-Virginia,” she calls it), the proverbial coal miner’s daughter, minus the coal and the redemptive sparkly career in Nashville.

      “I was born depressed,” she often says, only half-joking. Depression isn’t exactly rare these days in West-by-God-Virginia, as a quick drive through Grandmother’s old neighborhood confirms. Nearly everyone you see is overweight, stuffed full of triple burgers and seasoned fries, living on junk because junk is cheaper than a head of lettuce in most of West Virginia, and when you make shit money at the factory or the mine, you stretch your dollar as much as you can. Besides, a triple burger sure feels better in the belly than a head of lettuce, and most rural West Virginians take what comfort they can get.

      Which is why they drink. And smoke. And sit very still on their porches, rickety slices of wood so worn, the nails snag your feet as you shuffle across. They sit very still in their folding chairs, the kind with the itchy plastic-fabric seat you buy at Wal-Mart for $1.99. They sit and they smoke and they pop beers with one hand, pushing down the tab with an index finger so the beer drains quicker from the hole and the cigarette butts drop in more easily once the beer is gone. They sit and wait until they forget what they’re waiting for, and more often than not, they fall asleep in those itchy chairs, the plastic pressing into their doughy legs and arms like cookie cutters.

      Sometimes they sing:

       Oh, the West Virginia hills, the West Virginia hills, Tho other scenes and other joys may come, I can ne’er forget the love that now my bosom thrills, Within my humble mountain home.

      It wasn’t always so bad as now, but West Virginia has never really had it good. It is a hard place, founded on hard land—“The only thing it’s good for is to hold the world together,” goes the joke—and the folks who live there don’t expect any different. Those who do enter into a losing battle with Providence and go mad with the trying, as surely as rocks roll down the mountain.

      “I ended up with my nerves,” says Grandmother, describing how her home state shaped her. My grandmother’s nerves are legendary, like Judy Garland’s.

      “Bring me a Xanax, would you, dear? Bring me a couple.”

      Time was, no one worked a room like my grandmother, Aneita Jean Blair. A slinky redhead with a knowing smile, she sailed through every doorway as if on a wave, ruffling each man and sending them sniffing after her like hounds in heat. In seconds, she would be surrounded. Drinks were brought to her. Cigarettes were lighted by a convoy of matches. She was fanned or draped with sweaters as the climate required. When she rose, all eyes stretched to watch her walk away, hypnotized by the tick-tock swing of her hips. My grandmother always found a reason to look back, and it filled her with a torrid joy to discover the men’s eyes focused on places they shouldn’t have been.

      As a child, I lived with my grandmother now and again when my mother needed a break, which was often, being as she was in college and broke and rearing me alone in an attic apartment short on lightbulbs and food. A few hours’ drive through the mountains brought me to my grandmother’s house, a small white vinyl-sided two-story with a cement front porch big enough for a glider and a backyard big enough for a game of horseshoes, but not much else. I would run inside to see her, and she would grab my chin, tell me to stand up straight, then push me into the kitchen, where she’d prepared graham crackers and honey on a heavy white plate that felt cool when I licked up the crumbs.

      “That’s low-rent, little girl,” she’d say as I tongued the plate.

      “But I’m hungry,” I’d whine.

      “Fine to be hungry. Not fine to act like it.”

      I must have been around ten years old when I realized that my grandmother was not like other grandmothers. Men would call—plumbers, pastors, Boy Scouts—and she would work them into a lather. “Oh my! My robe seems to have fallen open. How embarrassing.”

      When the other town ladies dropped by the house in their elastic-waist pants and plastic shoes, my grandmother greeted them in suede go-go boots and a miniskirt.

      “Great color on you, Dottie,” she’d say as her neighbors stood speechless, eyeing her naked legs and chunky turquoise pendant, no doubt wondering why in heaven’s name she’d bought that.

      “I swanee,” they’d cluck as they left the house.

      “Bless their hearts,” Grandmother would say as the screen door slammed.

      Her golden years changed her little. Grandmother stayed chic. She did not wear her hair in a bun (she preferred to cut hers in the impish style of a French ingenue). She did not coo at babies. She did not dress in housecoats and slippers. She did not fatten up and sit in a rocker, patting her ample lap, and rasp in a warm, creaky voice, “Come up here and let Grandma read you a story.” She did not, in fact, allow us to call her “Grandma” or “Granny” or anything as pedestrian as “Memaw.” She permitted “Grandmother” and only that, and that is about where her grandmotherly qualities started and stopped. That’s not entirely true. She baked.

      She was an expert baker, and she swore that the day she used a box mix for a cake was the day they might as well put her away. She also baked pies, splicing the butter into the flour with two knives, instead of using a mixer. While she baked, my grandmother sang. Her voice was lilting and sweet, which nearly overcame the raunch of the lyrics, songs of her own creation, which inevitably referenced the scatological.

      “Ah lasagne, piss on ya, shit on ya,” she’d wail in full-on opera mode. I was young, but I was pretty certain that the other grandmothers I knew never sang phony arias about elimination while kneading pie dough.

      No, my grandmother was different, had always been different, and, though she had paid dearly for it, had chosen to remain different, if one can choose those things.

      Aneita Jean Blair was born and raised in Hancock County, West Virginia, same as me, until my mother found herself a decent fellow (from Kentucky), remarried, and moved us to North Florida, a dog’s piss away from the Georgia border. (In predictable hillbilly fashion, my birth father flew the coop when I was a toddler, leaving my mother and me to scrap for ourselves.) Although Florida offered more amusement for a child—The beach! Orange trees! Alligators!—I preferred West Virginia, in no small part because my grandmother lived there and she was amusing enough for anyone.

      I begged to go back, and my mother was happy to comply, shipping me off every summer until I was in high school and the lure of West Virginia gave way to other, more hormonal yens.

      I remember the drive to West Virginia from the Pittsburgh airport, the impossible corkscrew of the roads and the dented iron railings that lined them. I remember how dense the leaves of August were, how dark it could look in the holler even at noon. I remember the metallic scent of land raped by industry and how it rattled your teeth. I remember bony dogs running free down the highway, clotheslines strung heavy with overalls, the sound of gravel under the tires, the cool of the air, the supple dapple of the light, and how my grandmother’s voice rose and rang like a bell above it all as she sang on the drive home, the piercing white clarity of her song lending the whole worn scene a delicious flavor, a purpose.

      “What’ll I do with just a memory to tell my secrets to?” she’d sing as the road rumbled by. “What’ll I do?”

      Her voice sailed out the window, a stream of silk. Ka-chump, ka-chump went the road, and I would feel my body loosen with each mile, stretched open by her song and the exquisite melt of coming home.

      As a child, West Virginia was my world. More specifically, Newell, West Virginia, a sad hump of a town paralyzed by poverty. I loved Newell with an inexplicable ferocity, the way a mother loves a screaming baby.

      “You want to go where?”

      Well, I wanted to go anywhere my grandmother was, because my grandmother sang songs and made men blush and fed me graham crackers with honey and showed me how to walk in heels and how to braid my hair and how to be more than I thought I was in the world.

      “Grandmother,

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