Free Footloose in America: Dixie to New England by Bud Kenny

mechanization of farming for the demise of their little towns. A visitor to our camp in Grubbs said, “One man on a tractor can do the work of dozens of people with hoes.”
    But tobacco was a hands-on crop. It still had to be planted and harvested by people. And the one’s we saw wielding those machetes were mostly Mexican. Short, brown-skinned men, with jet black hair, who luggedthe floppy crops on their shoulders across the fields to trailers. While we walked through rural Kentucky several small green school buses, packed with Mexicans, passed us. On the driver’s door was usually the name of a corporate farm. And most of those buses had brown arms stuck out their windows waving.
    “That’s what happened to the jobs here. The Mexicans got ‘em.”
    James Robert invited us to camp in the vacant lot across the street from his house in Crayne, Kentucky. He was born in 1926, and lived in the same house he grew up in. When John Robert asked us to stay in his lot, it was more like he insisted. He was a pasty little man who spoke in short nervous sentences. “The Trail Of Tears wagon train camped here in 1988. You heard of it? It was the 150 th anniversary. They followed the Indian’s route. They camped here. You should too. It’s part of history.”
    Crayne had a few buildings that looked like they must have had a business in them at some time. But it had been quite a while and most were boarded up. It had a couple dozen homes, some were in good repair but others were not. And there were ruins. Concrete foundations with tall weeds and saplings growing in and around them.
    “It used to be different,” James Robert said. “We had three stores, a hotel and a train station. But they closed the mine.”
    Up until the mid 1980’s, Crayne had a fluorspar mine. Fluorspar was a fluorite crystal used in making steel. “Still plenty of it in the ground around here. But they found some in Mexico. So the company closed the mine here.” James Robert shook his head. “Mexicans work cheaper than folks in Crayne.”
    The train quit coming to town in 1990. Then, the hotel shut down and eventually so did the other businesses. James Robert said, “I kept thinking they’d start running the train again. Then the town would come back.” He sighed. “But they pulled up the tracks. That was two years ago. Now we’re done for.”
    Most of the ruins in Crayne were the result of a tornado that ravaged it in 2000–a year after they pulled up the tracks.
    Lots of folks paid us a visit in James Robert’s lot, and nearly all of them had a story about the storm. But it was the twins, Bonnie and Connie, who really put that storm and the fate of the town in perspective.
    I figured the twins to be in their late forties. They, too, had lived in Crayne all their lives, and both had worked at the same factory for thirty years. TYCO made electronic relays, and the plant was just three miles away. When the tornado hit they were at work. It was Bonnie who said, “Nearly half the families in Crayne had someone working there. We all had our faces pressed to the windows watching that storm.”
    Not only did the women look alike, their voices were the same. They both dripped with that honey-sweet y’all sort of accent. The kind you’d expect from a woman born and bred in Kentucky. It was Connie who said. “It was terrible. We couldn’t see what was going on. All we knew was that it was coming right through here, and there was nothing we could do about it. We were stuck in that plant just watching and praying.”
    Bonnie said, “I swear the worst part was the drive home. Remember that?”
    “Oh lord! How could I ever forget it?” Connie turned to us and said, “Y’all just can’t imagine what it was like. Usually, it takes five minutes to drive home. That night it took more than four hours. So many trees and power lines were down on the highway, we couldn’t go anywhere. We had to wait for them to clear the way. It took forever.”
    Bonnie