Family: The Fortner’s of Mingo County
I.
The night the lights went out in Barb: An Introduction to Violence
“HELP!”. “Mother, help me,” came the screams from deep in the house; so loud and primal that I woke up in a flight or fight state. My bedroom, once the bedroom of four boys, was in the back corner of the ‘L’ shaped ranch-style house. As my feet hit the floor, I heard the nightly whistle of the late-night coal trains taking the stones from the mines a few miles up the road to the processing plants in another county. As I was registering the time being late night/early morning, I heard that feral screaming and the brutal thump of something hitting the walls.
Slowly, I turned the door knob, trying to keep it from making any sounds, and even more slowly, I opened the door, just a peak at first. The living room was dark with just a glow of warm light coming from the back of the house.
As I walked around the corner, the screams grew louder, more primal if that was possible. Blood curdling is how my grandmother called them. I went into the dining room, which had been made into a temporary bedroom for my Aunt Barb. I saw her standing on top of her bed, scratching at the walls, trying to climb away from my grandfather. He would pull her ankles back towards him, causing Barb to fall hard onto the bed as her head hit the walls with that thud I’d heard, and my grandfather proceeded to punch her whole body with his bare fists; no part of her body was off-limits to his reign of punishment.
Years later, I would be watching an Instagram reel of a street drag race gone horribly wrong, and I watched as a bystander was caught under the wheels of one of the cars for a few seconds that seemed to last minutes. In those brief seconds, the bystander—whose legs were now missing—crawled away from the cars. I noticed the street lights shimmering in the pools of blood pouring out of his torso as he moved like an animal in the most primitive fashion. And it reminded me of Barb’s animalistic climbing up the wall away from brutality and violence, but going nowhere except perhaps to the River Styx like the bystander.
My grandmother told my Aunt Sissy to get me out of the room, but the damage was done. The man I looked up to as my father was now a monster I was terrified to cross.
The next morning, Barb wasn’t in the house, but there was my grandmother cooking up biscuits and gravy, bacon and sausage, fried eggs, and syrup (a sugar water and butter-based syrup that is poured over biscuits like gravy). She did this each and every morning, and this morning was no different.
There he sat— my grandfather, the Reverend man with his own church, a man of God. He sat there with a wide smile and said, “Come and get you some breakfast, Jimmy”. I sat down at the table, and my grandmother began to pile food onto my plate. “Eat up, boy, you need to get out there and help your pawpaw this morning,” she said.
I didn’t dare bring up last night for so many reasons, but mainly because that’s how we did things in our family. Suck it up and swallow it. Then shut the fuck up and move on. We were and still are an upwardly progressing family; most of my cousins are professionals, and they’ll never know the pain it took my family to go from the type of poverty highlighted by Eleanor Roosevelt’s pilgrimage through West Virginia and Appalachia into the family they are today.
A few years later, my pawpaw would get bored, and he and I started to build an additional house on his property. The next summer, we would take it apart, nail by nail, brick by brick, and rebuild it somewhere else on the property. ‘OMG’, I used to wail in privileged agony, “just buy more nails, why do I have to straighten them all!” The skills I learned with him in those summers have proven to be some of the most valuable skills I have, and maybe it’s the reason I’ve owned and rehabilitated so many homes of my own.
But that’s not the only lasting memory I have of him. During one of those summers, I “talked back” to him, and as I turned to walk away, with the full force and strength of more like a brown bear than a mere mortal, he took a 2x4x6 board and hit me across my spine, I was 15. Later in life, I have problems similar to Multiple Sclerosis because of that hit.
However, that’s not the only scarring I carry forward. And perhaps the thing about his violence that scared me the most was on one Sunday morning we were coming home from Sunday School at his church, where he had preached about how difficult it would be to get into heaven, something about a camel and the eye of a needle.
As the car came to a stop by the back patio, we saw that my grandmother’s dog had given birth to pups. My grandfather flew into a rage, slamming the car door shut so hard the vibration felt like someone had dropped a cinderblock on the car. He started screaming at my grandmother as she began to cry. He went into the kitchen and came out with one of those large black trash bags. As my grandmother begged him not to do it, he took the litter of about a dozen puppies and callously put them into the trash bag. He tied a knot in the top and walked across the backyard to the bluff’s edge over the Guyandotte and threw them into the river. That memory has never left me and still causes a flash of pain when recollected. It was life changing. I learned that day that people can be more evil than any demon in the bible.
Many years later, my cousin Katrina Twardy would tell me that his funeral procession was “3 miles long”. I didn’t say anything to her, let her have her sweet memories of him, but I thought to myself, would it really be that long if they knew the man I knew; a complete and disgusting contradiction between a man of God and a man of the Devil.
It wasn’t until I was myself in my 50s that I began to understand him better, which has allowed me to bestow grace upon him in my memories. He was a man, a person. And I’ve learned that people are complete and disgusting contradictions, including myself. I judged him through the lens he preached, and for nearly all my life, I’ve resented him for being flawed. And it wasn’t until I was in my 50s that I began to see the correlation between my own acts of violence, always in the name of preserving and taking care of my family. Even when it was my husband that I was violent towards.
Luckily, today, a flawed man that created his own share of pain in the world has grown into a man that most closely resembles my actual father - a man of peace and quite strength who has turned rage into love and hate into acceptance; sowing smiles each day along the way.
