Twelve hours into my drive from Connecticut, I knew I was nearing the site of America’s signature feud when the density of Hatfield and McCoy-themed businesses suddenly amounted to a veritable theme park of mundanity. The southwestern corner of West Virginia boasts an HVAC service, a real estate agency, a convenience store, a dentist, a moonshine distillery, a bar, a grill, a hotel, an outdoor theater, a bowling alley, an appliance store, cabin rentals, airboat tours, and personal-injury lawyers, all bearing the name of the vaunted belligerents. This is West Virginia in the wake of coal, trying its hand at tourism: the Eastern Panhandle has Harpers Ferry, and the Kentucky border has a family feud that puts Family Feud to shame.
I met Jackie “Jack” Lee Hatfield Jr. on the land where his great-great-great-grandfather, the infamous Hatfield patriarch William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield—his sobriquet, depending on the legend, was either an invention of the newspapers or bestowed in childhood to distinguish Anse from his cousin, Anderson “Preacher Anse” Hatfield—died after a lifetime of grievance. The original house Devil Anse erected on the site, long since burned down for insurance money by an uncle deep in gambling debt, was a palace of paranoia: a wooded refuge to which Hatfield and his family retreated after two decades of lethal bickering with their McCoy neighbors. The bloody back-and-forth had left at least twelve dead by 1888, when Devil Anse resettled in the unincorporated community of Sarah Ann. He chose the new site for its proximity to the rushing Island Creek, across which he built a single retractable drawbridge that could be pulled back at the first sight of danger. From the bluffs that overlook the site, Devil Anse’s sharpshooters could survey the road in either direction. Now the bluffs overlook a gravel parking lot, a midcentury prefab, and a modular memory box containing what little is left of a bygone Appalachia: the Devil Anse Hatfield Homeplace & Museum, which the prodigal Jack—formerly an insurance executive at a faraway outpost of Blue Cross and Blue Shield—has come home to build.
I drove into Sarah Ann, West Virginia, a couple of hours before Jack and I had planned to meet, thinking I would kill time wandering the museum, but there wasn’t much to see: shards of pottery, corroded coal scrip, and a handful of anonymous black-and-white photographs. The Hatfield working the front desk, Cher, told me that a big part of the homestead’s labor is debunking would-be claimants to the Hatfield legacy, who sometimes go so far as to break into Jack’s little prefab house and settle into his massage chair under the mistaken impression that this was the bona fide family home. Cher is accordingly strict with her family tree, meticulous with birth and death records. When I asked her if she knew the history of her family before they made it to America, she replied that, on her non-Hatfield mother’s side, she’s gotten all the way back to Adam and Eve.
Jack arrived at about 3 p.m., his arm bandaged around the elbow as if he’d just donated platelets to the Red Cross, and I was tempted to make a joke about the ceaseless spillage of Hatfield blood. But I had the distinct impression it would be too soon—even though the feud ended more than a century ago. Time moves slower in Appalachia, and history, like the mountain range over Island Creek, casts a long shadow. Jack and Cher talked about their long-dead family members like living friends, but when Cher was out of earshot, Jack confided that she is technically only a Hatfield by marriage—a descendant of Devil Anse’s grandfather’s children from a second marriage in the late 1700s.
There are not too many Hatfields with a direct line to Devil Anse left in Logan County, and the living are outnumbered by those at rest in the family plot uphill from the museum. But everyone wants to be a Hatfield. A Reddit post on r/West Virginia from last year seeking out members of the feuding families garnered dozens of positive responses. “We’re descendants of both families,” reads the typical comment on the thread. “We’re, like, 30th cousins,” runs a more cautious one. Other posters posit ties thicker than blood: “I had my first beer with Charlie Hatfield, Devil Anse’s nephew, when I was six months old,” claims one such poster. “It was the 1950s, so things were really different.” The fact is that, in Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, everyone is obliged to be a Hatfield, a McCoy, or both. From the outside, there is something quintessentially American about it. For the actual family members, their lineage—and inheritance—is considerably more complicated.
There is social currency to being a Hatfield but little actual cash. Jack had already been in town that morning to spar with county bureaucrats—a recurring state of affairs that has led to the early retirement of fellow Hatfields and McCoys from what another cousin calls the “feud industry.” The city of Pikeville, Kentucky, has been particularly keen to profit off yesterday’s problems, long playing host to the annual Hatfield and McCoy family reunion. But it’s been years since the last. And despite the tourism money the Hatfields and McCoys bring into the region, Jack has found it challenging to secure grant funding for the museum—largely because the surrounding parking lot remains in the private possession of a Hatfield aunt anxious to keep the land in the family. It is for that reason the building structure must be portable (so it is not technically on private land) and remains dependent on a random assemblage of youth and professional development groups for pro bono maintenance.
“I came here to preserve the history,” explained Jack. “It’s all come out of my pocket.” Repairing damage from recent flooding along Island Creek was the latest in a long line of expenses. The donation box outside the Hatfield Family Cemetery was little help, having been installed by a totally unrelated neighbor who saw, among the headstones, cheap means for collecting quick cash. Capitalizing on the dead is the name of the game: over the years, a range of Hatfields and McCoys have tried their hands at museums like the one Jack is struggling to keep afloat. The latest to fold is the Hatfield & McCoy Museum in Liberty, Kentucky, though I overheard Jack tell another visitor he thinks their “family heirlooms” were mostly forgeries by a cousin with an opioid addiction.
The feud has long since veered into postmodernity; the contemporary clash is between the Hatfields and the narrative into which they have been born. At least some of today’s many living descendants want the conflict—long a metonym for intracommunal violence—to act as a lesson in civic morality, a testimony to bilateral patriotism. And so, in 2003, live on CBS’s The Saturday Early Show, out of respect for American troops deployed for the Iraq War, the Hatfields and McCoys signed their first and only official truce. What began as a conflict in coal country between Confederate veterans thus concluded as a parable of post-9/11 American nationalism—the metanarrative almost more American than the narrative itself.
There Will Be Blood
I have yet to mention the Hatfields and McCoys to an American who has not heard of them. The feud was most recently dramatized by the History Channel’s three-part docudrama from 2012 starring Kevin Costner, but it has been retold, reimagined, and rewritten countless times, with spoofs starring everyone from Buster Keaton to Betty Boop to Bugs Bunny. The books Jack has collected for the museum include steamy midcentury pulp novels, like Harry Harrison Kroll’s Their Ancient Grudge (1956)—whose cover promises a tale of “hillbilly feuding and loving”—and contemporary literotica, like Heather Graham’s Hatfield and McCoy (1991).
I have yet to mention the Hatfields and McCoys to an American who has not heard of them.
Despite the glut of media, folks generally know the names Hatfield and McCoy in the same way they know Paul Bunyan, John Henry, or Johnny Appleseed: through the osmotic absorption of American folklore. It is via such stories that the past becomes real to us denizens of the present, and how places like Appalachia take sorry, stereotypical shape in the eyes of city slickers who refuse to leave New York. In the mainstream account, the feud is a fable about the backwardness of the backcountry: a fight over a stolen hog that resulted in a decade of bumblefuck warfare until the government intervened to restore peace to the Tug River Valley. But history rarely bequeaths us so straightforward a story.
To recount the history of the feud is also to produce the history of the feud, whose participants—mostly illiterate—left little record. The few extant academic works debunk and deconstruct what little else remains. The one Jack cited most often was Altina L. Waller’s 1988 stripped-down social history, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860–1900, which locates the conflict’s impetus in economic inequality and opportunism. But far outnumbering the academic texts are the lurid potboilers. Dean King’s particularly maximalist 2013 account opens with a description of the people of the Tug River Valley as having “bloodthirst in their veins” and an “inescapable urge to behold a man hang by his neck.” Two distinct camps of writers emerge: those who believe the tall tales and those who doubt a single, coherent feud occurred at all.
Feud or not, trouble started when the Tug River Valley was still the frontier—which remains in evidence if one squints past the Taco Bells and Little Caesars that clutter Logan today. The steep mountains block out most of the midday sunlight, making agriculture impossible in all but a few narrow strips of creek-side flatland. In the early 1800s, when the Hatfield and McCoy families arrived in Pike County, Kentucky, and Logan County, land could be purchased for as little as 2.5 cents an acre because only about a third was arable. They hunkered down one family per holler. By 1840, westward-bound settlers began taking routes that bypassed the mountains, and Pike and Logan Counties became increasingly insular. “A remarkable homogeneity developed,” writes Waller. “There was little reason to fear—or to hope for—any change in the physical, economic, or social environment.”
As the country arced toward the Civil War, that inertia became apparent. Logan County was rechristened part of the Union-aligned West Virginia in 1863; in practice, it remained sympathetic to the South. But more than anything, the locals were loyal to their little neck of the woods: the Hatfields deserted the Confederate States of America almost as quickly as they enlisted, returning home to a Tug River Valley in the crosshairs of combat. In 1865, a Confederate guerrilla group known as the Logan Wildcats targeted Asa Harmon McCoy—brother of the McCoy family patriarch, Randolph “Old Ranel” McCoy—who, despite being one of the only slaveholders in the region, had enlisted in the Union. Asa Harmon was stripped naked and shot dead by the group after they found him hiding out in the woods. His murder, supposedly committed by Devil Anse’s close compadre James “Crazy Jim” Vance, is considered the feud’s inciting event, though more than a decade would pass before the next clash. Waller cites the lag as evidence that most of the McCoy family disapproved of Asa Harmon’s Union ties, but this time it is King who disagrees. “It is not unusual in a feud to see a decade or more pass between events as sons come of age and avenge the killings of fathers,” he claims. And once Asa Harmon’s boys came of age, vengeance would be their calling.
If Waller’s account is a story of the extreme political and economic circumstances that put the feud in motion amid the static inertia of Appalachian culture, then King’s is of the difficulty in stopping an active landslide as it rushes downhill toward civilization. But both Waller and King agree that growing economic inequality made everything worse; Devil Anse saw an opportunity in the demand for timber in a rebuilding South and, in 1869, formed a logging crew that began to uproot the virgin forest. In 1872, he sued several of his neighbors, including Perry and Jacob Cline (brothers-in-law of Asa Harmon) and won Perry’s five thousand-acre inheritance in a settlement, becoming one of the wealthiest men in the region. Meanwhile, the McCoys struggled to eke out a living. In 1878, Asa Harmon’s brother, Ranel, purportedly accused Devil Anse’s first cousin, Floyd Hatfield, of stealing one of his razorback hogs. The case proceeded to trial before a jury, said to consist of six Hatfields and six McCoys, and things swung in Floyd’s favor when juror Selkirk McCoy, a former Confederate who worked with his two sons for Devil Anse’s logging crew, crossed family lines to refute his cousin’s claim to the hogs. It was a blow to the economically precarious Ranel’s pride and pocketbook.
Once Asa Harmon’s boys came of age, vengeance would be their calling.
According to King, things became even more personal for Ranel when his daughter, Roseanna, asked for permission to marry Devil Anse’s handsome eldest son, Johnson “Johnse” Hatfield. “Was it [this] misbegotten love affair . . . that caused a fury so fierce that it raged out of control?” he mused. Though Ranel begrudgingly blessed the union, Devil Anse refused, prompting Ranel to change his tune and—supposedly—demand that Roseanna return home rather than live in sin under his rival’s roof. But, in fact, it was common for couples in antebellum Appalachia to live together outside marriage, and Waller contends that Ranel may have just been angry that Roseanna had failed to legally seal the deal with the wealthier Hatfields.
Violence between the families did not reach folkloric heights until 1882. Amid the drunken festivities of Election Day, Ranel’s son, Tolbert McCoy, attempted to collect a small debt from Devil Anse’s son, Elias “Bad ’Lias” Hatfield. Devil Anse’s brother, Ellison Hatfield, tried to defuse the mounting tension, but then changed tack and allegedly pulled out a jackknife, and Tolbert promptly sank his own blade deep into Ellison’s side. When the dust settled, Ellison was half-dead with twenty-seven stab wounds and a bullet in his back. Tolbert and two of his younger brothers were headed to prison in Pikeville when Devil Anse and his posse overtook them on the road, brought the McCoy boys back across the Tug River, and held them hostage in an abandoned schoolhouse while Ellison’s life hung in the balance. The Hatfields settled on a verdict: if Ellison lived, so, too, would the McCoys—and if he died, so, too, would the McCoys. When Ellison died the following afternoon, Devil Anse had Tolbert, Pharmer, and Randolph “Bud” McCoy Jr. hauled back across the Tug again and tied to pawpaw trees just over the Kentucky border. The Hatfields shot them dead from the West Virginia side of the river.
Seeking justice for their own, the McCoys turned toward increasingly violent efforts to apprehend the Hatfields responsible for the boys’ execution, setting the stage for the penultimate act of the feud, which took place on the evening of New Year’s Day, 1888. Led by Crazy Jim Vance and William Anderson “Cap” Hatfield Jr., a posse of Hatfield associates stormed the McCoy homestead in Blackberry, Kentucky, by cover of darkness. There, Crazy Jim lit the cabin on fire while Cap and the others killed two more of Ranel McCoy’s children and beat his wife, Sally, unconscious while she attempted to reach her dying daughter’s side. A two-hour shootout along Grapevine Creek ended in a stalemate. In the fallout, Devil Anse’s intellectually disabled nephew, Ellison “Cotton Top” Mounts, was arrested. The Hatfields and their supporters went on trial in 1889, each receiving a life sentence—except Cotton Top, who was sentenced to death for the murder of Ranel’s daughter, though it was well-known among the McCoys that Cap, not Cotton Top, had been responsible. Thousands traveled to Pikeville to witness the first hanging in Pike County in four decades.
First Blood
Given the two Hatfield-perpetrated massacres, many are inclined to side with the McCoys. However, sensationalist retellings neglect certain key events. If Waller and writer Tom Dotson (a descendant of both families) are correct in their theory of the feud—that it was less a struggle between two mountaineering families than one between local elites and mountaineers—then it is only with 150 years’ worth of hindsight that we can grasp its effect: the clearing of Appalachian land for coal mining. Waller is cautious in her assessment, but Dotson, not bound by academic convention, pulls no punches:
The feud story was a creation of the big city newspapers. The immediate purpose for its creation was to devalue the people and thereby facilitate the transfer of ownership of the wealth of the Valley to the same big city financiers who controlled those newspapers. The ultimate purpose was to transform the independent mountaineers into docile and willing wage workers.
According to Waller and Dotson, the “feud” was actually two separate periods of violence. The first, limited to the Hatfields and McCoys, culminated with the pawpaw tree massacre. The second was dominated by Ranel McCoy’s powerful new ally Perry Cline and the Pike County deputy sheriff, Franklin “Bad Frank” Phillips. Cline, whose land Devil Anse had taken back in 1872, was a prominent Pikeville attorney with his own vendetta against the Hatfields; for one thing, his would-be inheritance had grown in value pending the construction of the Norfolk and Western Railway. Cline guaranteed the continuation of violence when he put a price on the head of every man who had participated in the pawpaw tree massacre: a hundred dollars a pop. When Deputy Sherriff Phillips and his men rode into West Virginia to take the perpetrators into custody, he left two men dead in the bargain—Crazy Jim Vance and the governor’s deputy, Bill Dempsey—which in turn motivated the Hatfields’ reprisal at Grapevine Creek.
The men captured by the Phillips posse were held in prison while the slow gears of justice turned. A precedent-setting Supreme Court case, Mahon v. Justice (1888), found 7-2 that the illegal abduction of the West Virginia men would not prevent them from standing trial in Kentucky. The ruling in Mahon inspired a new wave of bounty hunting, at which point a bloody family feud became a nationwide bonanza as dozens tried to get rich off reward money. But no one stood to get richer than the men behind the whole operation. Both Cline and Phillips were former wards of John R. Dils, the wealthiest and most aggressive land buyer in the Tug River Valley. When not suing his neighbors for debt, Dils was an outspoken booster for Pikeville, attempting to bolster its fortunes by damming the Tug in the 1870s in order to secure a railway line through the valley. By the mid-1880s, all that stood between Dils and rich timber and coal were the land’s actual owners. While word of the feud threatened to sabotage certain economic prospects, it also provided an opportunity: if the Hatfields could be removed from their land, a strong message would be sent to other mountaineers who, at the time, refused to sell their land in the name of “progress.”
The yellow journalism of the era was responsible for the jaundiced version of the feud we know today. Newspaper stories were quick to claim, for example, that Devil Anse’s brother, Valentine “Wall” Hatfield, had five wives and thirty-three children. In far-flung cities like Chicago and New York, incidents were invented out of whole cloth, such as the allegations that a Hatfield girl and a McCoy boy were shot at the altar in 1889. The uncomplimentary assessments of local elites bookmarked tales of brutal assault: “I do not know much about these people,” a wealthy Kentucky distiller told the San Francisco Chronicle, “but they live in the neighborhood of Tug River and that is sufficient to show their character. . . . Most of them are desperate wretches who fear neither man nor devil.” For East Coast writers, the feud was both an embarrassment and, conveniently, a form of natural selection.
If the goal of the Dils-Cline-Philips cohort was to oust the Hatfields, they succeeded. Both the Hatfield and McCoy patriarchs moved their remaining families following the New Year’s Day Massacre. Devil Anse settled on the same patch of land on which his great-great-great-grandson Jack now lives, where he spent three more decades keeping a watchful eye out for bounty hunters, at least one of whom is supposedly buried on the property in an unmarked grave. Meanwhile, after their home burned down in the massacre, Ranel and Sally McCoy moved permanently to Pikeville. The myth seemed only to grow as its actual victims and perpetrators died out. By the time Ranel expired in 1914 and Devil Anse seven years later, their names had taken on lives of their own.
In Cold Blood
Following Cotton Top’s hanging, the feud came to an end—at least officially. Dean King claims that the Hatfields and McCoys became preoccupied with other conflicts, though none were of the same scale, nor did any require another alliance with the forces of emergent industrial capitalism. What the conflict lacked was a satisfying narrative conclusion: neither a photographed handshake in 1928 nor an appearance of representatives of both clans in 1979 on an episode of Family Feud, replete with fake rifles, managed to meaningfully close the curtain. In her steamy 1991 chick-lit opus Hatfield and McCoy, Heather Graham imagines two descendants of the feuding families united in the present as they investigate a series of kidnappings. “Let’s end this feud right now,” FBI agent Robert McCoy says to police psychic Julie Hatfield before planting a passionate kiss on her lips.
For East Coast writers, the feud was both an embarrassment and, conveniently, a form of natural selection.
It is an ending possible only in fiction. In fact, the afterlife of the feud is just as politically tangled as its life was. Prominent descendants of the two families include labor hero William Sidney “Sid” Hatfield, progressive West Virginia Governor Henry D. Hatfield, conspiracy theorist and mass murderer Charles Manson, and Vice President James David “J. D.” Vance. The first and last represent one very real arc in West Virginian history: its transition from stalwart pro-union territory to one of the most conservative states in the country. While Sid died in 1921 defending the right of Matewan coal miners to organize with the United Mine Workers of America, J. D. pays mere lip service to organized labor while serving in an administration actively hostile to the working class. Lost somewhere between Sid and J. D. is the transformative possibility implied by organizing against corporate empire. The default cultural narrative about Appalachia is a declensionist melodrama of romantic squalor. One of its premier peddlers is J. D. himself: his critically acclaimed Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016) makes the case that Appalachia’s problem is not poverty so much as its acceptance—which he alone managed to transcend by bootstrapping himself the hell out of the holler. If the Hatfields and McCoys could be fairly accused of the narcissism of small differences, then J. D. would seem to be suffering from the narcissism of small ideas. His bold solutions to the challenges facing Appalachia amount to little more than cosmetic adjustments to Section 8 housing vouchers—far from the radical reorientation for which Sid gave his life.
The manufacture of peace between the Hatfields and the McCoys is perhaps the feud’s only canonical legacy. The latest détente was hatched in the early aughts, not long after Ranel’s great-great-great-grandsons, cousins Bo and Ron McCoy, hosted the first annual Hatfield McCoy Reunion Festival, which brought an estimated five thousand family members home to Pikeville. At the third annual reunion in 2002, the McCoy cousins awarded their Real McCoy prize to a Hatfield, local businessman Reo, who had deployed his logistics company Reo Distribution with four tractor trailers’ worth of goods to New York City following the 9/11 attacks. It seemed like the right time to announce the truce—live on CBS in June 2003. “United we stand as Americans against an opposing foe to our freedom,” the document, now hanging in the Hatfield Homeplace & Museum, declares. “Our families stand as a symbol of unity to let the world know that we will not allow our freedom to be taken from us.” Reo’s thoughts on the truce boil down to the sentiment, “When national security is at risk, Americans put their differences aside.”
It is a fascinating place for the feud to have come to rest. If the Hatfields and McCoys were merely characters in a moral allegory, the message would be clear: even the deepest divisions between men must be bridged so that peace might prevail. But the Hatfields and McCoys are not talking animals in an Aesop fable, and such an epilogue to the family feud only obscures its historical reality. The economic circumstances of the past survive as the economic incentives of the present; there is good money to be made in the feud industry, so long as one sticks to the legend. And many do: “I’m not convinced that the railroad or coal mining industries had that much of an impact on the feud itself,” said Bob Scott, owner of the now-defunct McCoy Museum in Hardy, Kentucky, to the Pikeville County tourism blog in 2019, “but rather the stealing, killing and unrelenting thirst for vengeance between the two families.” It is inexplicable, irrational violence that holds our attention, not the violence carried out by those with little recourse. And so, retellings of the Hatfield-McCoy conflict often consist of senseless killing punctuated by mountainside coitus.
Jack is trying to preserve a different narrative. It doesn’t take a conspiracist or a revisionist to see that the feud, regardless of its origins, was exacerbated by class tensions and ideological differences during a moment of enormous contingency in American history. By the 1880s, both families—even as they fought for their own interests—were being exploited by local elites whose interests had more to do with coal, timber, and railroads than righting past wrongs. There were real reasons to fight, even if the Hatfields and McCoys had been duped into targeting each other by local barons of industry. Whatever legitimate economic and ideological factors once differentiated the Hatfields and McCoys from one another—and from the likes of Perry Cline and John Dils—have been lost to time, sacrificed to the political consensus that industrial capitalism demanded as it reshaped Appalachia for the benefit of a handful of elites. That their descendants have participated in such a consensus is a historical irony that even the authors of horny historical bodice rippers would consider far-fetched. If the violence of the past feels senseless to us, it may be because we are pacified by an economic system that is constantly posited as natural—not the conditional outcome of a particular set of circumstances.
The New Blood
I had driven into Sarah Ann to the sound of “America” by Simon & Garfunkel. I wanted to time it so that I would be humming along to the refrain, “I’ve gone to look for America,” just as I arrived—mostly because I thought it would be poignant to say so in this article. And maybe it would have been, if America were indeed what I had found. But the grove of pawpaw trees where the McCoy boys died has less to say about America than even the Family Dollar across the street. Both the feud and the truce, after all, were byproducts of the historical processes that brought that Family Dollar into being. Maybe I can be forgiven for my optimism. What is more American than killing the shit out of someone? And then renouncing that violence in order to further a war effort overseas? Not that I was going to say as much to Jack Hatfield. You really can’t go around telling people that their family fought and died so Family Dollar could someday be pretty much the only store in town.
The default cultural narrative about Appalachia is a declensionist melodrama of romantic squalor.
Besides, there was pathos in Jack’s version; he told me that the Department of Justice sometimes brought juvenile offenders to the homestead for a lesson on the perils of violence and possibilities of peace. The lesson we settled on, sitting on the porch in the late-afternoon sun while his neighbors drove past honking and waving, is that it takes a village to resist (in)justice. “Devil Anse was hunted like a dog,” Jack explained, “and his neighbors and his community helped the man hide for thirty years.” It is, in some ways, the story’s most incredible aspect. Despite the hefty price on Devil Anse’s wizened old head, his neighbors never sold him out. “That is community,” said Jack, though I doubt he says so to the juvenile delinquents. “That doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, you don’t even know your neighbors, right? Until I moved back here, I didn’t know my neighbors either.”
No one involved in this mystery play of Confederate murderers is a particularly good person by any historical or modern metric. But Devil Anse’s community recognized that selling him out to a bounty hunter who would transport him across state lines for politically biased prosecution fell short of justice. Community lends us both peril and protection—and perhaps, in retelling the feud, we are too quick to focus on the former over the latter. And so, in the version of the feud that Jack and I imagine, it is instead a strange parable of community solidarity. Perhaps that is the spin the feud needs in an era when it seems increasingly likely that we will be called upon to shield our neighbors from ICE.
Is it out of resistance to the more suspect folkloric traditions surrounding them that the Hatfield ghosts are so restless? At one point during our conversation, Cher described an experience she had maintaining the nearby Hatfield family plot and its surrounding graves, which are located so steeply uphill that I had to hit my inhaler twice on the walk. The weather had been bad, Cher explained, and she, too, had struggled on the slope, cursing the family impulse to build there. “You Hatfields and your mountains,” she muttered under her breath and promptly took a terrible fall, as though one of her ancestors had reached out from the past to grab her by the ankle. She told me she is more careful about what she says nowadays. I was only more convinced by the thought of restless ghosts after I returned home to Brooklyn to learn that my roommates had acquired two pawpaw saplings from the New York Parks Department and planted them outside my window, where they now stand swaying in the wind that blows out of the bloody past and into a no-less-contentious present.