The Best American Essays 2017 by Leslie Jamison

Author:Leslie Jamison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I am a Married Man and have a family.  God / knows if they can do anything for me / it will be appreciated / if you can do anything for me / let me know soon

I left Fayetteville and followed Route 60 over Gauley Mountain, crossing the tunnel’s path three times. I came into Gauley Bridge, the first community off the mountain and the first one you come to on Rukeyser’s map. It’s equal parts bucolic river town and postindustrial shell. I stopped at a thrift store, one of the only open businesses in the downtown core, and bought a copy of Conley and Stutler’s West Virginia Yesterday and Today for thirty-five cents. Adopted officially into the public school curriculum in 1958 but used widely in classrooms since its publication in 1931, it’s literally a textbook case of white people’s amnesia. The index does not list “Slavery.” The existence of “Negroes” is acknowledged six times, most often in relation to their “education.” It’s mute on the lost lives at Hawk’s Nest, offering instead a description of an engineering marvel and a scenic overlook.

Back out on the street, I heard a sweet voice call out: “Diamond, are you working today?” I looked up and saw a frail man with pale blue eyes, rubbing his nose with a tissue. I told him I was Catherine but that I wished my name were Diamond, and he said, “You favor her. She just started working down at the nursing home.”

He turned out to be Pastor Charles Blankenship, the preacher at Brownsville Holiness Church and the proprietor of the New River Lodge, formerly the Conley Hotel, where I planned to stay the night. What looked to me now like three shabby stories of grayish-yellow brick was a swanky stop for travelers when it was built in 1932, something I could imagine on the backstreets of Miami Beach. I believed Charles when he told me that Hank Williams had stayed at the Conley on many occasions. There’s strong evidence that Rukeyser had stayed here too; her son Bill remembers a black-and-white postcard of it among her keepsakes.

In 2016 I found the lobby a friendly clutter of dusty MoonPies, hurricane lamps, and old panoramic photos that lit up for me the Gauley Bridge of 1936: its busy bus station and café, its theater and filling stations, the scenes of prior floods. A bulletin board displayed one of those optical illusions of Jesus with his eyes closed—stare at it long enough (i.e., believe) and his eyes are supposed to open. Most of the hotel’s residents today are long-term tenants, elderly or on housing assistance, but this lobby used to hum, Charles told me, recalling the thick steaks that fried on the grill at the restaurant. The Conley filled up most nights when Charles’s dad worked here as a porter, hauling luggage to the rooms of rich people passing through on their way to the East Coast. “I can picture them coming through the door,” Charles said. “He used to get calls all night.

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