Welcome to another session of Turning Pages!
Synopsis: Liberty’s junior year just cracked wide open and catapulted her out on the ground. Her mother – a placard-carrying, species-saving, liberal-agenda-advancing, chronic protestor – is currently under guard at the Pender Women’s Correction’s Institute. A car bomb, which injured five people, went off at her last demonstration, and while Liberty’s mother swears she’s innocent of involvement, the judge isn’t letting her go without a little more proof than just her word. Bad enough that Liberty’s spent days, sometimes weeks not even seeing her mother, making her own meals and paying the utilities bills at the apartment because her mother is too involved with her causes to remember, but now she’s discovered that her mother has spent the college money her grandparents had saved up for her on yet another one of her causes, and Liberty is BEYOND finished with her. Calling her “my former mother,” and moving on with her life to save her sanity seems the best option. Packed off from their DC apartment and her private school, which offers Comparative Religions, Anthropology and German III, to her Granny Briscoe’s farm and the local high school in rural Plurd County, Appalachia, where “coal mining keeps the lights on,” Liberty’s life and dream of early admission to Georgetown are faded, distant memories.
Things in Ebbottsville are a lot different than Liberty remembers – for one thing, the tap water’s bright orange. Though the neighbor boy she ran around with when they were small turned out to be simply gorgeous, there’s not a lot else to recommend the place. The underfunded high school, staring townspeople, rusted junker cars, and endless underage partying going on in the back hollers are just background noise to the stark reality of food stamps, buying bottled water, and too few resources on the Briscoe farm. Liberty’s reality now includes a grandmother who is thin, stooped, and coughing up blood, half a mountain visible from her grandparent’s property, the top removed to mine the mountain for coal, and the effects of the mining a poison blighting the creek, the hills, and the ground. Mining is killing Ebbotsville, Kentucky and the Briscoe Farm — and it turns out that mining — may be responsible for killing Liberty’s Granny, too. Is there really anything one poor person can do to stop a rich person bent on making more profit from his crooked business practices? Liberty aims to find out. Suddenly being a placard-carrying, species-saving, liberal-agenda-advancing protestor doesn’t sound half bad. But, is there a point at which a person should stop tilting at windmills? When are the costs of fighting the good fight too high? And, what happens to a community if whistleblowers dig too deeply for the truth?
Observations: The minute I read about water coming out orange from the tap, and the number of sick and out-of-work people in town, I knew this was a story that was “ripped from the headlines” as it were. My thoughts immediately went to other whistleblowers in history, and the situation in Flint, Michigan.
