The Mountains We Call Home

The third installment in the Book Woman series opens in 1953 Kentucky. Cussy Mary Lovett, a woman with methemoglobinemia, a genetic blood disorder that turns the skin blue, has been arrested along with her husband, Jackson, for violating Kentucky's miscegenation laws, which criminalized interracial marriage. Before the arrest, they send their adopted daughter, Honey, into hiding in the Cumberland Forest. A deputy breaks Cussy's arm; Jackson, beaten with a club, whispers as they are separated: "I won't ever give up" (xviii).

Cussy, thirty-six, is sent to the Kentucky State Reformatory for women, where she endures invasive examinations aimed at eliminating her blue coloring. Placed beside Waldeen Parker, a sixty-two-year-old lifer who runs the prison kitchen, Cussy proves her value through careful budgeting. When the prison librarian is paroled, Cussy petitions for the position. Warden Sanders refuses and doubles her workload, but after learning of Cussy's years as a Pack Horse librarian, a Depression-era program delivering books on horseback to remote Appalachian families, she grants a temporary appointment contingent on raising literacy rates.

With help from Buttermilk Sullivan, a World War II veteran working maintenance at the men's prison, Cussy builds the neglected library. Buttermilk serves as a verbal messenger, confirming Jackson is safe. When no inmates visit, Cussy brings books directly to the wards. She reads to elderly women in the Geriatric Ward and calms disturbed inmates in the Forensic Ward. On Death Row, she teaches Sassyann Sipes, who is awaiting execution for poisoning two abusive husbands, to write so Sassyann can contact her estranged sons.

After another inmate, Regina Miles, stabs Cussy's palm with a pencil, Waldeen tends the wound and gives Cussy a sharpened toothbrush hidden in a hollowed-out book for protection. Waldeen then reveals her past as Madam Deen, operator of the Rosebranch brothel. One of her girls, Clara, had an affair with Eldon Carter, a politician from Cussy's blue-skinned family. Clara bore his son, whom Cussy recognizes as Willie Moffit, the biological father of Honey. Waldeen took the blame when Clara killed Eldon and was sentenced to life.

The warden sends Cussy to volunteer at the men's prison library, where she teaches literacy and searches each group for Jackson. Daniel Presland, a young man with visible bruises, asks her to compose a love letter. When Daniel reveals the letter is addressed to another man, Cussy recognizes his plight mirrors her own and mails it discreetly. Jackson never appears. As Cussy's transport returns through the women's prison gate, she spots Jackson loading paint supplies into a van; he volunteered to paint her library hoping to see her. Their eyes meet through the car window.

The warden promotes Cussy to full-time librarian. In a crate of donated books, she finds a Yeats poetry collection with Jackson's inscription: "I won't ever give up." Beneath their poem, "To an Isle in the Water," he has written, "My Dear Bride, Don't you give up on us either" (99). The warden reveals the men's prison is on lockdown due to a polio outbreak. Cussy discovers she is pregnant, having conceived the morning before the arrest; Waldeen confirms the prison never sterilized her as claimed. When Cussy writes Jackson about the pregnancy, Regina breaks into her footlocker, reads the letter aloud, and shreds Honey's letters. Cussy attacks Regina with the sharpened toothbrush, and both are sent to solitary.

The warden orders an abortion. Waldeen calls a doctor in Troublesome Creek, but the prison turns him away. In solitary, Cussy overhears guards discussing Daniel Presland's death by suicide at the men's prison. Inmates across the wards refuse to eat in protest of Cussy's confinement; Marigold, an elderly inmate Cussy had cared for, dies during the strike. The warden releases Cussy, recognizing the prison cannot function without her. Sassyann's sons visit after receiving her letter, but an execution warrant arrives.

The warden grants Cussy an eight-day furlough to Louisville to assist with a literacy program at the Western Colored Branch Library, warning the abortion and sterilization are merely postponed. Before Cussy leaves, Regina, softened by her own losses, apologizes and gives Cussy a handmade bookmark. In Louisville, Cussy is welcomed by Reverend Jedidiah Claxton and his wife, Effie, the seventy-one-year-old library director. Mrs. Claxton's niece, Susan Landers, a nursing director at General Hospital, examines Cussy with genuine curiosity about her condition.

Cussy proposes replicating the Moonlight Schools, an adult literacy program founded in 1911, which taught adults to read using tracing paper and beginner tablets. She and Mrs. Claxton recruit students door to door. Eight patrons attend the first evening; by the fourth night, over a hundred crowd the library. A newspaper credits Mrs. Claxton and "Mrs. Jackson Lovett" with teaching 219 adults to read in four days. On Saturday, Cussy is struck by a car on Walnut Street. At General Hospital, Susan confirms the pregnancy, and the three women devise an escape plan.

Before dawn on Sunday, Susan injects Cussy with methylene blue, a drug that temporarily turns her blue skin white, warning it is not recommended for pregnant women. Mrs. Claxton provides a red wig, money collected by local women, and forged documents in the name Angeline Mary Moffit. Susan files a death certificate for Cussy Mary Lovett; the arriving doctor, told the patient died and was cremated, signs without question. A brief obituary later appears: "On Saturday July 11th, a state inmate was struck by an automobile on Walnut Street and later succumbed to their injuries at Louisville General Hospital" (282).

Mrs. Claxton drives Cussy north through Indiana. Posing as a white woman with her Black maid, Cussy enters a whites-only diner in a sundown town, where Black people are warned not to remain after dark, while Mrs. Claxton waits in the car and nearly collapses from the heat. A man from the diner chases them and rams their bumper. Mrs. Claxton drives on, explaining the Negro Motorist Green Book, a travel guide listing safe establishments for Black motorists. She delivers Cussy to her sister Rose's boardinghouse in Defiance, Ohio, where Cussy takes the identity of Angeline Moffit.

Jackson arrives in late November 1953 after his release. On December 12, during a snowstorm, Rose delivers the baby. Elijah Jack Lovett is born healthy with no blue skin, spared both the methemoglobinemia and any effects from the methylene blue. When Jackson encounters an old Kentucky acquaintance in town, the family relocates to Detroit in early 1954. Jackson finds work in masonry; Cussy becomes a part-time library assistant. His banishment from Kentucky runs until 1978; Cussy, officially dead, can never legally return. Jackson grows restless, mourning the forests and birdsong of home.

In June 1967, the Supreme Court's ruling in Loving v. Virginia strikes down miscegenation laws nationwide. Jackson brings home flowers, declaring he is taking his bride home. Cussy reports in a letter to Mrs. Claxton that they have settled in the Carter homestead in Troublesome Creek. She runs the local public library; Honey drives a motorized bookmobile. On an October evening, Cussy and Jackson sit on the porch where she was born fifty years earlier. Cussy steps to the old hickory tree and lays a golden autumn leaf on the grave marker of Junia, the loyal mule who carried her through the mountains.