Blue Ridge Country May/June 2024 - 78

Kentucky Wisdom
'Looking' Beans, Shaking Dumplings
Despite distance, this Whitesburg area native is still inspired by the mountains of Kentucky.
TEXT BY FRED & JILL SAUCEMAN | PHOTOS COURTESY MISSY JONES
" T
he mountains are always drawing you.
They never leave you, " says Missy Jones as
she stirs a pot of soup beans. But she isn't
stirring that pot in Letcher County, Kentucky, where her
family has lived in Tan Yard " Holler " for generations.
Instead, she cooks the sacred family meal in her kitchen
in Independence, 3 ½ hours away from Whitesburg and
about as far north as you can go and still be in Kentucky.
" We thought we'd never leave Letcher County, "
Missy tells us. But she and her husband Roger had no
choice when coal mining began its downturn. Roger
could do just about anything in the mines. He specialized
in equipment repair. He loved working underground.
But in 2007, Roger and Missy and their four-year-old
daughter McKenzie left the mountains, and Roger took
a job in Independence with CSX Transportation.
It's a familiar theme in Appalachian life and literature:
the painful separation of families from their homeplace
and their out-migration to cities in the north in
search of work.
Roger's family had done exactly that in the 1960s.
In fact, Roger was born in Detroit. But his family returned
home to Eastern Kentucky in the early 1970s,
when Roger's father secured a job at the Golden Oak
Mining Company in Whitesburg. Missy's father, Gene
Fields, worked there, and that's how she and Roger met.
Gene Fields worked the mines in Kentucky and
Missy Jones presents
her homemade
chocolate cake with
buttercream frosting.
Among the recipes
Missy Jones
"
demonstrates on her
Facebook page is one
for wilted, or " killed, "
lettuce.
Missy Jones grew up
eating soup beans in
Eastern Kentucky and
still makes a pot just
about every week,
seasoned with ham
hock.
FACING PAGE, TOP TO
BOTTOM:
across the state line in Haysi, Virginia, leaving out early
in the morning and returning way past dark.
Missy and her three sisters had the job of
filling their father's dinner bucket every evening
for the next day. She remembers his affection
for souse meat, liver cheese and potted
meat sandwiches.
When she was nine, Missy baked her first
biscuits. If any were left over, they would go
into her father's dinner bucket, along with
a fried pork chop. That dinner bucket had
a spigot. To fill it, Missy had to carry water
from her grandparents' hand-dug well.
Even into the 1980s, she still collected rainwater
for the washing of clothes.
Most of the Fields family's waking hours
were consumed with work. They grew and
raised their own food. But for Missy, it was a
life of learning, too. And the lessons she absorbed
in Tan Yard Hollow have never left
her, despite distance and time.
As she tends to that pot of soup beans, she remembers
her mother Annie's admonition to always " look "
the beans carefully, to remove any stones or debris. And
she recollects the instructions of her aunt, Patty Evans,
to mix in some Great Northern beans with pintos.
78 BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM

http://www.BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM

Blue Ridge Country May/June 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Blue Ridge Country May/June 2024