Take West Virginia out of the picture and focus on an area consisting of almost equal parts of Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee. Therein sit upward of 12,000 children with living parents who have lost custody—a big number, and every single one of them has a face, a name, a story. Let’s pull that unfathomable statistic down again by focusing on a location that is losing its coal and lumber mainstays yet filling up with foster kids, 496 at a recent count. We’ll call it Coalton, in honor of its heritage. Coalton spans two states, encompasses one large (50,000+ residents) and a few small (fewer than 5,000 people) cities, and includes parts of the Unaka, Cumberland, and Chilhowee mountain ranges, as well as the Smokies. It is where I conducted the interviews in this book.
Permit me to introduce myself next. I’m an Appalachian born outside Great Rock, a midsized town in Coalton that has been my home for the past decade. These days I own a bookstore and direct a health organization; in my earlier years, I was a journalist and then a professional storyteller. I am neither a foster parent nor a foster child.
WHO’S TELLING THESE STORIES, AND WHY?
In these pages you will meet several social workers, but four are recurring characters: Cody, the hard-talking cynical altruist; sweet, brokenhearted Beth; feisty young Barbie, half righteous indignation, half passionate hope; and wise elder statesman Dale, who has guided them all. They will be your guides for this inquiry, and they are composite characters. Their personalities are based on those of key social workers I came to know well, but the words these characters speak come from many workers interviewed during the year I spent gathering the sixty-two separate oral histories represented in this book. To protect anonymity, and also to frame the inquiry in a way that makes it flow, the social workers are combined into these four, plus a few others.
So when I say that “Dale” asked me to develop this book, I mean that a man with an amazing reputation in his community, backed by colleagues in his agency, e-mailed to ask, “Could you do for foster parents what you did for those cancer patients?”
Two years before, a regional cancer center had offered a grant to help cancer survivors shape their stories into tellable narratives for those not facing the same journey. The storytellers and I then went to various faith and community centers where these survivors, sometimes along with family members who had lost loved ones, told their personal tales to intimate audiences. One of these was the church where Dale serves as pastor. The project resulted in bittersweet tears, exchanged phone numbers, and an increase in appointments at free screening clinics. That last outcome had been the stated goal of the grant.
“Could you do that for foster parenting?” Dale asked. “I think more people would do it [become foster parents] if they understood a few things. Get us some storytellers going. And could you write a book?”
In 2012, St. Martin’s Press published my memoir describing the comedic adventures of opening a bookstore in a small Coalfields town. But St. Martin’s was a big New York City publisher with major distribution channels; a regional book would not interest them, and the opportunity to feature regional voices was what interested us. Also, as I pointed out to Dale, Little Bookstore was about running a bookshop, something I had actually done. My background included neither social work nor foster parenting.
Dale is a very persuasive guy, so we dropped the book idea and altered the live storytelling plan to an online forum. Soon we were plotting access strategies. Social workers tend to be reticent and bound by regulations—and full of untold stories roiling below their calm surface demeanors.
We settled on a regional blog as the venue. Adoption in Appalachia would provide anonymity, dignity, and a timeless forum for people who felt ready to tell their stories. It circumvented any potential exploitation of tales that really belonged to children too young to give permission for telling them. Best of all, the stories didn’t have to be cleared with “headquarters” because no one would ever know who the social workers were.
That beginning was my first clue of just how deep into the inky blackness of uncharted waters this storytelling journalism project could go. Most reporters will tell you that we are guided by an insatiable curiosity coupled with a willingness to be invasive. As I listened to foster parents, social workers, adopted and foster children, and support-service people like pastors and counselors tell their stories, I began to form questions. Questions that would not go away.
What does it mean to love someone? When is it acceptable to judge someone for how they do something that you’re not even willing to try? Who is foster care for, the children or the community around them? How long can this system sustain itself?
With information and support gathering in full swing—and with questions buzzing like angry bees inside me—Dale and I planned to launch the blog at an Appalachian Studies Association Conference held at East Tennessee State University. Shortly after the information on our session went out in the preconference program, an e-mail arrived from Gillian Berchowitz. She had read about our storytelling blog on adoption. Was there a book associated with the project? No? Would we like there to be?
Dale answered his phone on the second ring. I read him the e-mails, then added, “Dude, that was cheating, playing your minister card to ask God for a publisher.”
I could hear him grinning all the way down the phone line.
That’s how the opportunity to give voice to a group of people who rarely get such a hearing entered our lives. The goal was to make sure the stories were honest: no cotton-candy sweetness or sparkling rainbow veils.2 But the stories also depended on my access to people willing to talk to me and on how eager they were to tell of their own experiences. As a result, this book has tilts and twirls to it; I make no pretense that this is a comprehensive picture, just that it is a deeply veined one, sometimes hitting seams that have been left embedded without translation from the chaotic vernacular in which they were uncovered. If the stories told here don’t seem to make sense sometimes, or seem like they shouldn’t have happened, that’s because they don’t make sense and probably shouldn’t have happened.
Gillian was particularly interested in a book that focused on the true day-to-day tales of those inside this localized world of adoption and foster care. Thus, these stories had to deal in a fair but unequivocal manner with the years of exploitation that the mass media have laid over people’s understandings of Central Appalachia. No poverty stereotypes, no easy applications of “everybody knows,” and no apologies for not being inspirational. Although the work encompasses cultural issues that may be unique to Appalachia, the stories offer little comparison between Coalton and the rest of the country, citing only a few statistics to show how Coalfields residents stack up against the wider world. Comparisons and statistics are for the most part restricted to the endnotes.
Since you were interested enough to pick up a book on the subject, likely you already understand that foster care is an international issue with significant cultural variations. Fall or Fly examines small areas of a defined multistate region within a single country. While foster care in Coalton may differ from or bear burdens similar to how foster care functions and dysfunctions in other places, this inquiry is about a few places inside the Coalfields, representing the larger picture.
I said “no apologies,” but perhaps one is owed to Dale, who started this project in order to recruit foster parents. The more people inside this world talked, the deeper their stories became—and the more I worried that what had been intended as recruitment had morphed into exposé. Social workers are rarely given a free pass to tell tales, so it’s only natural that the negative stories came first; the reader should keep this in mind and try not to build a false picture if many of the events narrated here showcase frustration rather than inspiration. It’s good that the project offered social workers a chance to tell their side, because foster care stories are like twelve-sided dice: you never know what’s coming up, depending on who’s doing the