All That's Unseen

Emilee Hackney grew up in Tazewell County, in the coalfields of southwest Virginia, an eighth-generation Appalachian whose family had lived within a few miles of the same mountains for more than two centuries. Her earliest memory is of standing beside her mother at age five during worship at Deliverance Christian Church, a Pentecostal congregation, part of a charismatic Christian tradition emphasizing ecstatic worship and spiritual gifts, that labeled itself nondenominational. An overwhelming, warm presence settled on her shoulders and drove her to her knees.

Hackney's maternal grandparents, Nanny and Poppaw, grew up in Grundy, Buchanan County's only real town, once prosperous from coal but hollowed out by decades of industry decline. Poppaw left for an office job in Kentucky but returned to the mountains and the mines, where he spent his working life cycling through layoffs. Hackney's paternal grandparents, Mamaw and Poppy, lived in a nearby holler, a narrow and secluded mountain valley, where Poppy's body had curled from years of work underground. Hackney's parents met on their high school bus and settled in Tazewell County as a compromise: close enough to family but with slightly better schools and a less coal-dependent economy.

The family struggled financially throughout Hackney's childhood. Her father, Tom, cycled through low-paying jobs, from car salesman to police academy trainee to overnight security guard. One night Hackney overheard him whisper to her mother that he could not keep going. Her parents came close to losing their home, secretly using Hackney's and her brother Erik's birthday money to cover groceries and bills. Tom eventually got an administrative job at a coal mine, the best-paying work he had ever had, giving the family its first taste of modest prosperity.

Poppaw's death from cancer was Hackney's first encounter with answered prayer: Nanny begged God to receive him into heaven, and he died an hour later. The event seeded in Hackney a new awareness of God's power. Mamaw died a few years later of aggressive cancer. Her funeral featured a wailing, fire-and-brimstone sermon that branded Hackney with a visceral terror of mortality and the afterlife.

At fourteen, Hackney started high school, where an eighteen-year-old senior named Sam catcalled her daily from a truck window. Despite her parents' objections, they began dating secretly. Sam broke up with her because he had a crush on a younger girl, but Hackney took him back months later. Around her sixteenth birthday, driven by apocalyptic nightmares and fear of the Rapture, the expected end-times event in which believers are taken to heaven, she prayed for salvation and was re-baptized alongside Sam.

Hackney's faith intensified rapidly. She began deferring to Sam's authority, believing the Bible dictated that men possessed God-given wisdom women lacked. She obsessively purged her room of anything she considered sinful, grew her hair long, stopped wearing makeup, and developed a relentless cycle of guilt. After a series of visions she interpreted as divine commands, Hackney and Sam considered themselves engaged. They began attending Lighthouse Worship Center, where the pastor preached a prosperity gospel, teaching that declaring desires in Jesus's name would bring them to pass. When Hackney went forward for faith healing of her chronic back pain, the prayer did not work, but she lied and said she was healed. Sam later introduced domestic discipline, a practice of physical punishment to enforce wifely submission. The spankings soon became Hackney's idea more often than Sam's; she requested punishment when she felt guilty, viewing the humiliation as spiritual purification.

Hackney got a minimum-wage job at Subway, where she met Crystal, a chaotic but warm-hearted manager, and Jeremy, a recent jail releasee who constantly tried to make her laugh. Crystal's selflessness during a hectic shift challenged Hackney's rigid moral categories of saved and unsaved. Hackney graduated as valedictorian and enrolled in community college on a scholarship, viewing it as temporary since she expected to become a pastor's wife.

The collapse came suddenly. Sam disappeared from a Wednesday youth service and was placed under investigation for possessing explicit images of a sixteen-year-old girl from their youth group. His story shifted over several days until he admitted to receiving numerous explicit photos and videos. He was arrested. Hackney scraped together bail money, logged into his Facebook, and discovered hundreds of flirtatious messages to girls and women, some as young as fourteen, spanning their entire relationship. She returned her wedding dress, sold her engagement ring, and ended the relationship.

Hackney's faith rapidly deteriorated. She sought answers from church leaders, but everyone refused to discuss Sam's behavior. At youth group, worship leader Jared told her, "God will return to you when you return to Sam" (201). Horrified, she resolved never to go back. Crystal relapsed and was fired for stealing from the store safe, then disappeared. Jeremy became Hackney's closest friend. They rode around in his battered car, visited the lake at night, and talked about God and the universe. Hackney admitted doubt about God's existence aloud for the first time.

In the months that followed, Hackney struggled with severe depression and nearly swallowed a bottle of Advil before pulling back in terror. Her attempts to find mental health care failed: one clinic rejected her, and another turned out to be staffed by people from her former church who offered Bible tracts about Jesus curing depression. On the night of the application deadline, she impulsively applied to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Brown. She was wait-listed at Harvard, accepted by Columbia, and then unexpectedly offered admission to Harvard with near-full financial aid.

At Harvard, Hackney was overwhelmed. She scored the lowest grade in her biology class and dropped her science courses. Socially isolated, she began a relationship with Patrick, a fellow transfer student who became her emotional anchor and urged her to see a psychiatrist, who prescribed antidepressants. In her deepest spiral, she began having sex with strangers for money and contemplated stepping in front of a car. She texted Patrick instead.

Patrick's companionship stabilized her. She pulled her grades up and finished the semester with A minuses. A world religions class opened her to the idea that no single religious truth exists. In a personal essay workshop taught by Michael Pollan, she began writing about home: tomatoes from her father's garden, Sam, Jeremy, speaking in tongues. Pollan asked, "In what world is it okay for an eighteen-year-old to date a fourteen-year-old?" (320). Hackney realized she had never questioned the norms that shaped her life.

She broke up with Patrick impulsively and spent the summer trying to reclaim her Appalachian identity through bonfires and four-wheeling, but a local farmer she dated saw through the performance. During her senior year, she wrote a thesis of personal essays and took a graduate seminar on evangelicalism that helped her view her former faith with more nuance, recognizing both its harms and its healing power. In March 2020, COVID-19 sent students home. Hackney graduated virtually from her parents' living room.

Back in Tazewell, Hackney worked at a coffee shop. One rainy evening, she spotted Jeremy walking down the street. He had been through a gunshot wound, heroin addiction, and a near-fatal overdose. They encouraged each other to leave. Hackney applied to Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs and was accepted at Vanderbilt University. The night before she left, she picked tomatoes with her father in his garden, savoring the mountains even as she prepared to leave them again.

Four months after Hackney moved to Nashville, Tom had a heart attack in his sleep at age 53. He was buried in the cemetery on Home Creek, the remote Buchanan County holler where he grew up, near generations of family. Hackney reflects on the constant push and pull of her bond with Appalachia, recognizing that her relationship with home is not a choice between staying and leaving but an ongoing, cyclical return. She affirms that Appalachia has endured despite everything done to exploit and diminish it, and resolves that she will endure, too.