The Light
Bluefield was the last place Hank Williams ever left before he left this earth. For years, I’ve heard stories about New Years Eve 1952: a bar room fight at the King Tut that ended in a sickly Hank being thrown out, or maybe he was so sick he never got out of the car. I heard that he scored his last morphine from a dirty doctor in Bluefield, or maybe he was already too far gone. The details of the final night of his life are foggy at best, but I guess all oral histories are open to a little artistic license, especially here in the mountains. I can’t say for sure what happened that day, but that night he left Bluefield sick and nearly dead.
Williams wasn’t the only recognizable name to leave Bluefield: Katherine Johnson, of Hidden Figures fame, taught math in Bluefield until she had to leave because the house she was renting burned down. Patsy Cline left Bluefield after finishing beautician school only about a mile from the King Tut. In 1929, Duke Ellington left Bluefield as a member of the Alphas after a controversial induction ceremony. Ellington would return to play shows in Bluefield for years to come.
But that was before the scars; before a bomb and a bombshell decision that caused most of the black students to leave Bluefield State. That was before the jobs left us and the people followed. That was before the opioids and a different kind of leaving. A leaving more like Hank’s: “These old hills…they’ve seen their share of leavin’.”
The problem then is that this is the easy way to tell the story. Brokenness can be blinding. If we are not careful, it becomes the only story ever told, a caricature that gets more wrong than it gets right. It is much harder to see the light. Bluefield is not broken. Bluefield is beautiful. In my opinion, it is the most beautiful place in the world. Brokenness is part of the story, but isn’t brokenness a part of every story?
One of the first things you will realize when you come to HopeWords is that the conference has been shaped by this place. For me, HopeWords is extremely personal. It contains the hopes and frustrations that have defined my complicated relationship with Bluefield. Truthfully, I have spent my whole life leaving these hills and being drawn back.
Through HopeWords, Bluefield is calling hundreds of people from around the country not to leave, but to visit the heart of Appalachia and will attempt to tell a story of a people and a place far more lovely and far truer than most have probably heard. An in-between place and an in-between people.
Both often described by their pain instead of their promise. Their past instead of their future. Both dirt, one God-breathed, one God-spoken. Both God loved. We will tell and hear stories of beauty and tears, love and loss. Stories about dirt and seeds and flowers and bees. Stories about words and prophetic imagination but ultimately about the power of brokenhearted hope.
This year’s conference will focus on the question of living between cultures and the unique potential it holds for creativity. On the one hand, there’s the possibility of cross-pollination. But beyond that, existing outside the center of a particular culture grants you a vantage point that simply isn’t possible if you’re in the mainstream. This is an essentially Christian way of creating. To be a citizen of God’s kingdom is to be both in the world but not of the world — to live in-between. In this sense, our faith holds rich possibility for insight and creativity because it resides in both the “already” and the “not yet.” We hope to help draw your eyes back from familiar caricatures to see afresh, not to ignore, but to fully see. To see the light of hope beyond the brokenness.
Hank Williams, Sr. wrote the classic Country Gospel song “I Saw the Light” as he awoke from a drunken stupor in the back seat of his mom’s car. This song is an anthem of a sinner who is hoping for redemption. In his impaired condition, I see a beautiful, battered soul that did not succumb to despair but sang the songs of the Lord in a strange place. I can’t tell you what happened that fateful New Years Eve in Bluefield. It is hard for us to see beyond the blinding brokenness, but I suspect there was more to the story, and I hold out hope that as he left Bluefield, as he left this world, the last thing he saw was the beauty and the Light.
