No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

Class Dismissed

I sent a letter of resignation to the chairman of the English Department, who was not sad to see me go. The MSU administration had never supported creative writing, and was planning to have me teach Freshman Comp instead. None of my colleagues said good-bye.

Word of my leaving spread rapidly through the county. No one local was surprised due to twenty years of familiarity with my cycles of departure and return. For a while, my decision fed Morehead’s grapevine. I fielded questions constantly.

“I hear you’re going out to Hollywood,” someone told me. “Be the next George Clooney. He’s from over here in Mason County, you know.”

“They say you got rich off your books and bought a car so fancy no one can work on it.”

“Somebody told me you’ve got in good with the governor and you’re heading up to Frankfort.”

“I heard at the video store that the college fired you. They say you ran your mouth like a motorboat.”

My response was the same to everyone. I grinned, ducked my head, and said, “Don’t reckon.”

In private, I had a difficult time with my own feelings— I wanted out of the hills for the sake of my wife and kids, while desperately wanting to stay for myself. I felt supremely comfortable in the woods, but nowhere else. The fact is, I’d essentially failed as a teacher. Most of my work was remedial, even on the graduate level, and I didn’t know how to give my students what they required. My chief difficulty was accepting that my students needed to be educated in how to be educated, and I simply wasn’t up to the chore. I had long recognized that a colossal problem here was the pervasive sense of shame. Now I felt ashamed for having failed to ease that burden in others.

My impending departure disappointed my students more than anyone but they accepted the news with typical Appalachian fatalism. After class an older student stayed to talk. She was my age, recently divorced, with a son in his twenties. She often missed class because she drove an hour to school and worked half-time out of the county.

“I don’t blame you, Chris,” she said. “But that’s More-head. If it’s something good, it don’t last long.”

“I tried,” I said. “I’m just not sure I did any good.”

“You did,” she said. “You gave us hope. This school doesn’t have a lot of that. These old hills don’t either.”

“You’re a good writer,” I said. “Stick with it.”

“No one ever told me that before. You’re somebody here even if you don’t know it.”

I nodded, unable to speak. She left and I sat in the classroom until dusk turned the air dark. I was embarrassed by my naïve dreams of return. It now seemed ridiculous that one of my long-term goals had been to run for political office. I felt like a hypocrite for abandoning home so soon. I had followed the historic path of every prior attempt to help the region — VISTA, church groups, the War on Poverty — arriving full of energy and plans, and swiftly becoming overwhelmed by the problems entrenched within the hills.

I clung to my students’ disappointment as a balm to my own sense of despair. Perhaps providing hope was better than I had imagined.