Hillbilly Gothic Read online

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  Copyright © 2006 by Adrienne Martini

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  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Scott Miller lyrics:

  Copyright © 2001 Songs of Welk and Revercomb Music

  (Administered by Yak Yak Music)

  All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Chapter 4

  Copyright © 1999 Welk Music and Unsolved Opportunity Publishing

  (Administered by Lichelle Music Company)

  All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Designed by Karolina Harris

  The Library of Congress has cataloged this edition as follows:

  Martini, Adrienne.

  Hillbilly gothic: a memoir of madness and motherhood / Adrienne Martini.

  p. cm.

  1. Martini, Adrienne—Mental health. 2. Postpartum depression—Patients—United States—Biography.

  I. Title

  RG852 .M36 2006

  362.198’760092 B—dc22

  2006042512

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9353-2

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-9353-3

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  For Maddy

  “Left my home in the valley

  put the mountains to my back

  there’s nothing wrong with where I come from

  sometimes it’s meant to be just that.”

  —SCOTT MILLER, Cross the Line

  “As for me, I’ve chosen to follow a simple course: Come clean. And wherever possible, live your life in a way that won’t leave you tempted to lie. Failing that, I’d rather be disliked for who I truly am than loved for who I am not. So I tell my story. I write it down. I even publish it. Sometimes this is a humbling experience. Sometimes it’s embarrassing. But I haul around no terrible secrets.”

  —JOYCE MAYNARD, “For Writers: Writing for Health”

  My family has a grand tradition. After a woman gives birth, she goes mad. I thought that I would be the one to escape. Given my spectacular failure, my hope is now that my daughter will be the one.

  On the day that I admit defeat, I have been crying for days and I am on my way to the emergency room of my local hospital. But of course since I’m running on empty psychologically, my car would be, too. So I pull into a gas station in the middle of the mother of all summer storms.

  No one at the gas station will look at me, which is odd considering that most people will at least give you a smile at any time of day in Knoxville, Tennessee. The July air is heavy and wet. Oily splotches and knots of old gum dot the rain-slicked asphalt. My blue tie-dyed T-shirt is soaked and clinging to my quasideflated postpartum belly, showing all of the other drivers that I am wearing maternity shorts, the kind with the stretchy nylon panel in the front—all that I could fit into two weeks after my daughter’s birth. I could have braided the hair on my legs and the hair on my head looked like a nest of live eels writhing in the rain.

  My sneakers squoosh as I fumble out my debit card and swipe it in the pump. Miraculously, my hands remain steady for the first time in a few days, but I sniff and snort constantly as tears pour typhoonlike out of my eyes.

  Three other drivers gas up and studiously ignore me, including one right next to me. While Knoxville is known for its general friendliness, I’ve also discovered that it loves a good spectacle. If a stranger appears to be on the verge of a colorful collapse, gawkers flock for front-row seats. I’d assumed that no one could tell that I’d been crying, what with the rain. I’m lying to myself. My eyes are red-rimmed after forty-eight hours of not sleeping. I’m cursed with a near-constant sorrow so deep that it would make a great bluegrass song. Ralph Stanley and I could make millions, provided I can get through the next twenty-four hours without killing myself.

  I’d also assumed that no one would care at this particular station, simply because it is in one of Knoxville’s few dicey areas. The projects, such as they are in this small southern city wrapped in Appalachia’s arms, are just across the street. The rescue ministry is a few blocks away and, from here, I could toss my car keys into Knoxville’s largest nightlife hub, where bars and dance clubs spill out their 2 a.m. drunks, then said drunks wander up to this gas station to stock up on cigarettes and six-packs. The clerks here must have strong nerves or they are researching sociology dissertations.

  Still, in the harsh light of day, I am enough of a sight that I unnerve even those who spend their nights dealing with drug-induced shootings and drive-by vomitings. Normally, I’d be proud of this. I always revel in the chance to break out of my cardigan-sweatered shell in a town full of supersized Baptist churches and Junior Leaguers. Now, I look like a freak who scares all of the other freaks. My father would be so proud.

  Once gassed up, I’ll drive myself to the emergency room, where I’ll check myself in to Tower 4, a local psych ward. I could have seen it from my gas pump if it weren’t so overcast. I’ll stay there for the better part of a week, bonding with my fellow loonies while someone else takes care of my brand-new baby because I am a failure. New moms are supposed to be joy made flesh, yet motherhood and I met like a brick meets water. I’m drowning here, not waving.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen and, yet, it was inevitable, given my past.

  During my colorful confinement, in a conversation with a ward social worker, I described the hillbilly Gothic patchwork of suicides, manic depression, and bipolar disorders that is my mother’s family and the notable suicide attempt on my father’s side. She commented that it was a wonder I hadn’t been there before. Now, I can chuckle when I say that. Then, her astute comment touched off yet another deluge of tears.

  I wasn’t the first of my generation to log some time in the loony bin. One of my cousins, in her early twenties at the time, was committed after the birth of her first child and was later diagnosed as bipolar. Her older sister has battled depression since her first child was born when she was fresh out of her teens. While most of the madness comes on postpartum, it isn’t confined to it. One of her children, who is still a teenager, has also checked in to her local Tower 4, a move that has become my family’s version of summering in the Hamptons.

  Our tale begins in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a microdot of a town buried in the hollers of the Appalachians. Driving into this part of the country is an adventure to the uninitiated. The road cuts through the mountains, creating a narrow canyon fenced on each side by rock or steep cliffs. Greenery sprouts impossibly from these stark faces. One must pay close attention when arriving in Parkersburg. The unobservant—a person folding a map, say—will miss the downtown and wonder why there are houses in such a desolate area.

  Isolation has long been the hallmark of Applachia. Before the era of reliable transportation, entire generations could be born, live, and die without ever clapping eyes on a stranger’s face. Even after the rise of Toyotas and cable TV, a deep suspicion of new faces and, to a large extent, new ideas still thrives. This wariness is warranted; rarely is a person from Appalachia portrayed in a flattering light. An Appalachian twang marks someone as a hick who should be mocked. Deliverance does not exist in a vacuum.

  My mother’s family springs from this setting. The isolation and suspicion that inform the region also inform generations. It is coded in our genes like brown hair. For decades, outside help was never sought. Nor was it even imagined to be needed. My family tree kept growing inward, as each successive batch of children convinced their spouses, who were also
from the region, to keep these matters within the family. Tighter and tighter the tree grew, and few people saw a need to thin the branches to let in a little nourishing light.

  This cautionary tale is my attempt to do a little pruning. This is my attempt to untangle my family’s history of mental illness. It is a story of mothers and daughters as well as a journey in search of absolution. It is about being at your most unbalanced when the rest of society expects you to be at your most joyful. It is about living in and with mountains, with occasional lapses into bluegrass and banjos. The past must be understood and, in some sense, loved, in order to be overcome.

  Here is where my maternal great-grandmother abandoned her three children. Here is where my maternal grandmother went quietly mad. Here is where my uncle came home from Vietnam, put his gun to his head, and killed himself. And here is where my mother met my father, and then escaped the geography but not the heredity. Years later, I would be back in the same scenery, if a few miles farther south. The irony is not lost.

  For six weeks after my birth, my mother didn’t wash her hair. Now, she claims that she was postnatally splendid, except for that one little detail. Her assurances don’t…assure. At the time of my birth, which was in the early 1970s, little was known about postpartum depression and even less could be done about it. My mother’s interior landscape has always been a mystery to me and I didn’t understand that her black moods weren’t the norm. My childhood wasn’t spent around happy families, against whom I could compare my sad home. Even in a big city, Mom and I remained more or less isolated. One of my fondest memories is of listening to my mother breathlessly sob on the other side of her bedroom door. There was nothing I could do, and, in so many ways, it was all my fault.

  I swore I would not do the same to my daughter, yet, for two weeks after her birth, I did nothing but cry and, eventually, completely came apart like a wet tissue. My mother contends that this happened because I waited until my early thirties to have a baby and, in her words, “worked for too long” before fulfilling my biological destiny. My mom has never quite come to terms with the concept of women with careers. In her eyes, jobs are just what you have before you have a baby and your life becomes bliss. We all construct our own versions of reality in order to deal with the day, but this reinvention makes my eyeballs ache. If my birth caused bliss for my mom, please let me never find it for myself.

  In many ways, my depression was the end state of an almost perversely natural progression. Not only is my family history shot through with crazy, but there had also been warning signs before I gave birth. My teen years had been full of undiagnosed fits of melancholy that went beyond what one would normally expect from a girl that age. In my early twenties, I scared the bejeezus out of a psychiatry intern by bursting into tears in her office and not being able to stop. There were signs, all right. The big red ones that signal danger.

  1

  Discovering the absolute beginning is like playing Pick Up Stix. Each object touches another. Isolating the events is impossible. And my hands have never been steady.

  But I suspect that the beginning of the story of my family’s madness lies somewhere in the landscape, like a picture of a ball of yarn hidden in a picture of Monet’s Water Lilies in Highlights magazine. My mother’s childhood landscape is harsher than my father’s, even though it begins less than two hundred miles to the south of his.

  Parkersburg, West Virginia, was built on oil, natural gas, and chemistry. Until the late 1800s, this wee settlement just over the river from Marietta, Ohio, was known more for farming than for industry. Now, the drive down Route 7, which flanks the Ohio River, passes enormous, rusty factories that squat on every vaguely flat piece of land. You can guess the plant’s output by the smells. The polymer refinement company reeks of acetone and other volatiles. The coal-fired electric station is marked by sulfur. The only ones I can’t pin down are the strange organic odors that waft from a nondescript factory that nuzzles up to a steep cliff. There is no sign to hint at what is being processed.

  Every time I’ve driven this road, it has always been full of timber trucks and the sky, overcast with a threat of rain. My dad, who met my mom in Parkersburg while he was working for DuPont, recalls that he always knew when he was close to the city because the smog from one of these outlying plants obscured the road. One of my distant great-uncles also remembers that the stinks and haze were constant until they had made it through Charleston, beyond the Union Carbide plant that continually spewed fug into the air. West Virginia has long been a state that the rest of the country feels it is okay to abuse, either through a continual rape of the natural resources and residents or by constant scorn.

  It rubs off, this feeling that the rest of the country doesn’t give a damn about you. While the EPA has made minor inroads into cleaning the air, the image of the West Virginia hillbilly—that toothless, ignorant, incestuous, pipe-smoking dumbass—is impossible to shake. In fact, members of my mother’s family still object to the title of this book. “We’re ‘mountaineers,’” they insist. “Not ‘hillbillies.’” But because I am of a different generation, I am all about reclaiming words that have been wrongly sullied. Hillbilly is a perfectly fine word, one that captures the resourceful, gritty people who settled in the southern Appalachians and made unforgiving landscapes thrive while providing for the rest of the country. Hillbilly is nothing to be ashamed of—but until the words can be said out loud and with pride, the attitude will never change. For me, words like bitch and all of the descriptors for insanity, such as crazy and lunatic, fall into the same category. They are good words and I, for one, want them back on my own terms.

  Reclaiming the word, however, is only the first step and doesn’t mean that the stereotype will fall. Witness this piece from March 2005’s Graffiti, the alternative newspaper that serves Parkersburg, Charleston, and surroundings. On the front cover is West Virginia native Morgan Spurlock and inside is a screed by one Shelley McClain, a citizen railing about a recent bill that had been introduced into the state’s legislature that will legalize public breastfeeding, a crime until then. McClain flames on abut how the bill’s sponsors should have expected the public backlash because they are “fighting for the right to go against decency and self-respect and show the world their goods.”

  The fact that thirty-nine other states have such laws matters little to McClain, who feels that the state gets enough ridicule from the rest of the country. A woman feeding a child in the most natural way will merely confirm the state’s Red State and redneck status. Also, McClain claims that tourists who see such things will insist that the state is still shackled by poverty. If parents have to rely on breast milk, clearly they are too poor to afford formula.

  “Haven’t we suffered long enough under the stereotypes and cruel jokes?” McClain asks. “We bring this crap on ourselves. No, it’s not fair. It’s not fair that other states like New York or Massachusetts or California could get away with something like this because they are stereotyped as higher class than us. But unfair doesn’t make it OK.”

  If that’s the way West Virginians perceive themselves now, imagine what it was like in the 1950s when my mother was a girl. Some things you never can quite shake and the stigma of growing up in a state stereotyped as backward is one of them. For example, when my parents married, Dad’s coworkers gave him a glass desk blotter, which all of the men had signed with congratulatory notes and doodles. Someone—whose name is lost—drew a picture of my mother as the stereotypical hillbilly gal, buxom, barefoot, and in Daisy Dukes. It was thirty years before I realized that must have been insulting to her.

  My grandfather, William Carl Tebay, was one of nine kids. The Tebay family is described in the Parkersburg papers of the time as “one of Wood County’s oldest and most prominent families.” My great-grandfather Amos is described in glowing terms, as is the dairy farm he started. The clan has been in the area near-on forever. Amos’s father came to the region after the Civil War. Which side he was on or where he was before tha
t is not remembered. My mother’s wing of the family isn’t the best at hanging on to that sort of information.

  Most of Amos’s boys went into business of some sort. The girls married well, including my aunt Donna, who was a free-spirited artist of the Georgia O’Keeffe school. Many of us in the family have at least one of her paintings, almost all of which feature flowers. Mine is from her watercolor period, a calla lily.

  My mother is one of four children, three of whom (all of the girls, interestingly) are college graduates. The youngest sister—Linda—has an advanced degree. My mom is in the middle and Irene, who has always been called Snooks, is the oldest. The youngest sibling was my uncle Bill, who would have gone to college had he not been drafted to serve in Vietnam. He didn’t live to see the end of the war, but didn’t die directly because of it.

  My grandfather William went to college and ran the Charleston branch of the Tebay family dairy for a few years, before packing up wife Nell, their son, and daughters to move to Grand Junction, Colorado, to prospect for uranium. No, really. Uranium. Apparently there was fine money to be made from radioactive elements in 1955. Ultimately, that didn’t pan out, so the family returned to Parkersburg and moved into a nice house in a nice neighborhood, where they fit in fairly well. Yet things weren’t quite right behind these closed suburban doors.

  Until I had my baby, all I knew about my mother’s mother was that her first name was Nell and that she had died of some female cancer when my mom was in college. My mother couldn’t have an enameled metal turkey roaster in her house, because that is what my grandmother spent her last days vomiting in, which my mother would have to clean up. That was all that Nell meant to me: puke and cancer.

  “I hated to come home,” my mom told me once in a moment of rare candor, and she admitted that she had spent as much time at the university in Morgantown as possible. Nonetheless, she had had to leave school for a semester to care for Nell during her demise, one of my aunts informed me. My mother was the only one home when her own mother took her last breath. Nearly forty years later, my mother still won’t discuss it.