For the past 25 years, Iโve lived in North Carolina โ minus a 15-month sojourn to the Mississippi Delta, where I believe I rediscovered the writer living within me.
Prior to my move to Gaston County (NC) that last week of September 1999, Iโd lived my entire life — now counting 58 years — in Kentucky. Western Kentucky to be exact.
Thereโs a town within Union County, not far from the Ohio River, and surrounded by coal fields and corn and soybeans, where I grew up and spent a good portion of my early career in newspapers.
Morganfield is my hometown and my maternal grandparents lived across the road and my uncles and cousins are sewn along Highway 130, which we called Grove Center Road for most of my childhood.
I attended college at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green and spent nearly two years working at a newspaper in Murray, Ky., and another in Calhoun, Ky.
I know that part of Kentucky โ its topography (rolling hills interspersed with fields of grain) and its people. Oh, the people.
Iโve done a bit of looking into the Banks and Robinson family trees and discovered, for the most part, my people came to Kentucky in the late 1700s and early 1800s from Virginia and North Carolina. Maybe that notched wedge of land — not far from where the Wabash River dumps into the Ohio — was their very own land of milk and honey as not many of my relatives have left.
I’ve discovered those woods and creek beds and thickets of my youth often find their way into the stories of that I write today. The ballfields, taverns and courthouses of my later years also linger and serve as background in those same stories.
Itโs the same with the people that Iโve interacted with during my time on earth. There are bits and pieces of many of them mashed together to create delightful and, often, confounding characters who fill my scenes. Their dialogue and the tales they spin are the ones Iโve heard from the lips of others or imagined so.
Iโm every bit Kentuckian.
Outside my window, the redbuds are in their early stages, heavy with purple. Mockingbirds, searching for a mate, squawk and defend their turf. The days are longer and I stay seated when the morning sun slants through the window and its warmth lands on my shoulders.
I think of the first Saturday in May and the crash of the starting gate and hooves hitting the dirt as they near the first turn at Churchill.
โHave you got your Derby horse,โ theyโll ask.
โSoon. Very soon,โ I reply.
When the 20 horses and their riders take the track, the band plays โMy Old Kentucky Homeโ and New Yorkers and Californians and Texans in their pastels and linen will tear up and raise their frosted glasses and toast that โold Kentucky home, far, far away.โ
But for us, who truly know Kentucky, itโs a lot more personal.
Itโs spring and pulling up old barn wood and digging up fat earth worms and flinging them into country ponds lined with green moss and waiting for the smallmouth to strike.
Itโs walking the first rows of a corn field in late July, enduring the slice of a sharp leaf, to find the sweet corn and how it will taste when its boiled and the butter and salt will stick to your lips.
Itโs the sounds of old hymns sung by others before us and incantations of the traveling preacher man filling the pews at Bethel Baptist, the harmonies and spirit pouring from the open window and weaving among the headstones covered in autumnโs rust.
Itโs winter and it’s dark and the hawk — that brutal wind — roars from the north and we gather by fires and sip bourbon and tell stories from days warmer and know that more await.ย
Editor’s Note: Work continues on my novel, tentatively titled “Bend In the River,” that includes many of the places and characters compiled from my days and nights spent in Kentucky.
Michael Banks 360 