Appalachia Project: Back Roads, 2000

Back Roads, by Tawni O'Dell

SPOILER ALERT: Spoilers contained herein.

Back Roads is the story of Harley, a 20-year-old boy-man coping with becoming head-of-household because of the murder of his father and his mother's conviction for it. He is nominally in charge of his three sisters. All four of the siblings struggle with the losses they have sustained and the secrets they individually carry. The book is told first person from Harley's point of view and presents his psychological process in harrowing detail. Harrowing is the word I keep using for this book. It's a great book, but harrowing.

O'Dell makes no claim that this is a book of Appalachia. Facebook friend Katrinka Walker recommended it based on its setting and perhaps on its content of extreme family disruption. The book is set in the current day (of 2000) and takes place in western Pennsylvania, where abandoned coal mines are a major feature of the landscape. When the coal was deemed too dirty and the coal-mining process too hazardous, companies just walked away from their operations. Key scenes of the book take place in an abandoned mining office. The old people in the town remember the heyday of the mines as they cough up coal dust laced phlegm and die off from black lung.

I hear all the time where I live this longing for the coal. It supported families even as it killed them off. It's a regional obsession, rather like the obsession with farming in children's literature, which I've commented on before. If only we went back to family farms, we'd all be alright again. No mention of the stink and the severed limbs and the debt and the sheer crushing labor of it!

Harrowing. I'm only on the third book of my Appalachia reading project and the bane of Appalachia has come upon the scene: incest. Although O'Dell doesn't identify this book as Appalachian, she sure hit the nail on the head. I swear that incest is no more frequent in Appalachia than it is in the general population (and any incident is tragic). I think in Appalachia it is both easier and harder to hide--easier because of isolation but harder because everybody knows everybody's business. We all know who the "baby daddy" is. Maybe Appalachians are just more frank about it. Life is often pretty crappy for everybody. 

Anyway, unraveling the truth about his father's murder leads Harley to unraveling the thread of incest that inhabits his family and grieves him to his breakdown. As the story gets grimmer for Harley, it gets grimmer for the reader. I felt at times like I could not get my breath. I put the book down suddenly and walked around the house. A couple of times Harley vomits before he sobs, and I felt that. The worst thing for me was the heaviness of grief that families ever suffer in this way.

Books like A Boy Named It I think sensationalize the experiences of abused children and teenagers. They get off on it, to a degree. It's not a genre I care for. In Back Roads, O'Dell puts you right into Harley's shoes and into his head, into his confusion and delusion and fear. It is one of the most real portrayals of psychic pain I have ever read. I long to reach out and take away the suffering...but I can't. People just have to work their own way out of it. Offering material help is about the only way to demonstrate caring. One woman in the book brings food. That means something. Harley's court-ordered therapist offers patience and helps cut through red tape. At one point, she offers a safe place to sleep. That means something.

There is sex in this book, and not just incest. Harley is just experiencing his sexual awakening and thinks and talks about sex a lot. There are scenes of masturbation and sexual violence. There are scenes of incest. A part of me is truly sorry I had to read those scenes, but for another part of me, this book allowed me to process this experience vicariously in a way that I hadn't before.

And, as with all behavior, the incest behavior makes sense in the context within which it occurs. That doesn't make it right, but you can see how it happens. Here's an exchange between Harley and his therapist Betty. In her responses, she describes the various paths taken by Harley and his siblings. Harley has cut his hands.

          "Okay, there's something I want to talk about," I said to get her mind off my hands.
          She gave me a look of surprise like she had discovered a bud on a plant she expected to die. "Go on," she said.
          "How can a kid like someone who beats them up? You know. How can they like hanging out with them?"
          "Well," she began... "every child reacts to abuse differently. Some become withdrawn. Some openly hostile. Some self-destructive. But some embrace the abuse. They thrive on it. It's what they get from their abusive parent instead of love and they come to need it."
          "So you're saying a kid can actually want to get hit?"
          "In a sense."
          "Can they think that it's Okay? Morally okay?"
          "Did you think it was okay for your father to hit you?"
          "I didn't think it was okay," I said bluntly, "but I thought it was normal."

That's when I start crying. Nobody should endure it. But really nobody should think it's normal.

Blighted hope turned into mindless violence. Mindless violence turns into blighted hope. The cycle goes round and round. Maybe the murder in this book was the murderer's way of stopping the cycle, making something different happen. I wish for every child to have better choices than that.


Catcher in the Rye
Back Roads made me think about the classic adolescent novel Catcher in the Rye. Both Holden and Harley are on lonely journeys through their home turf, reassessing, realizing, recognizing. Harley lacks Holden's sardonicism, but his self-mockery is just as brutal. Both boys end up in mental institutions. In both books, the reader is engaged by the hero and then taken along through his disintegration.

When I read Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, it was so cool. Holden's self-mockery was so cool. His cursing was so cool. His self-destruction was cool. When I read the book as an adult, I felt mostly that Holden was sad. As sad as Harley is. Just sad.

And please don't tell me that boys like Holden and Harley will come out of their mental illness, that it will make them more valuable adults. I deal with Holdens and Harleys all the time. They are damaged and they most often stay damaged. The magic constituents of resilience elude us and them. If you know the recipe, please post it. Our kids need it and those of us who work with them need it.