Don‘t Tell‘em You‘re Cold
A Memoir of Poverty and Resilience
Don’t Tell’em You’re Cold: A Memoir of Poverty and Resilience is an uplifting story of survival from abject poverty, set in the hills and coal camps of southern West Virginia. Katherine Manley and her family faced extreme challenges and struggled with ingenuity and traditional Appalachian stoicism.
Beyond the poverty, other obstacles compounded Katherine’s life: a severely disabled father and a mother who struggled with day-to-day survival. On a cool October morning, she left in a taxi and never returned, leaving 14-year-old Katherine to take care of her father and raise her siblings in her mother’s stead.
Katherine went on to become an award-winning teacher, paying forward her hard-learned lessons to thousands of lucky students. This is a story of triumph that encourages everyone to never give up.
EXCERPTS:
1. Daddy had lost his right leg at sixteen, when he tried to hop a train bound for Kentucky, he’d told me. A few years later, he lost most of his left hand when he was unloading cases of dynamite at a coal company. After the explosion, his little finger and a nub of thumb were all he had left.
2. The year before, Daddy decided to kill the roaches with sulfur. Daddy placed several saucers full of sulfur in each room and lit them. Smoke filled the rooms. We waited in the back yard all day, until the sulfur burned out and the smoke disappeared. It looked like our house was on fire while we all sat on the grass and enjoyed the scene.
3. I opened my folder and read the assignment. “Write a two-page essay titled ‘What I Want to be When I Grow Up'”. I pulled two sheets of paper out of my notebook and stared at the blank space. I picked up my pencil and wrote, “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but one thing I know for sure: I don’t want to be poor. “