Blue Kentucky Girl

Abstract

Blue Kentucky Girl Sonja Livingston (bio) Named for the moon. Little Luna. Luna, blue. The details surrounding your birth are murky, some say 1878, others say a decade later, but why squabble over a handful of years? What’s most clear is that by the time you were born in eastern Kentucky, people had settled into its isolated pockets, inhabiting hollows along the Cumberland Plateau, fringed by rocky ridges and ravines. Men cut timber for as many hours [End Page 33] as they could stand, women tended children and planted corn and potatoes wherever they could clear rocks from the soil, the hardness of their lives contrasted by a world bursting with waterfall and fern. Into this world, little ones came, replacing fathers and mothers, child, boys and girls for the shortest of time, and one of them, near the end of the century was you. Born into the Fugate family, the one I call out to, little Luna blue. Your mama would have been raised on stories of Fugates going back to the time Troublesome Creek was settled in the 1820s. She would have known a few of your daddy’s strangely-tinted cousins, would have spent time with an indigo-skinned niece. She’d married a Fugate after all, and in the isolated hills of eastern Kentucky, there was so much intermarriage that even she carried a spot of Fugate blood. Known as the blue people of Kentucky, people talked of them for miles. But what did that have to do with your mama? Mahala Fugate’s skin was white, as was her husband’s, and all of her other babies, each of which had unfolded from her soft and pink as wild azalea blossoms. Most babies born with Fugate blood were as pale as every other white child in eastern Kentucky. Even among Fugates, it was rare to stay blue. Most of those who showed a tinge upon birth lost their color after a few weeks, a fact Mahala must have repeated to herself as she cradled you, dear Luna, whose skin was like a stain against her breast. Families had to scrounge to survive those hills, so Mahala couldn’t have afforded much time to worry, though being different is nothing anyone ever courted. Life was [End Page 34] hard enough without the burden of strangely colored skin. How your mama must have lifted the edge of her blanket to check on you again and again, listening hard to those around her, clinging to the clucking of old aunts and her husband’s reassurances. Just give it time, they’d have said, that young’un’s skin will right itself, fade as fast as the passing of the days. But the days passed, then passed again, and you remained the bluest of all babies born at Troublesome Creek, blue as the gentians growing along the creeks, bluer than even the moon you were named for. A blue moon itself isn’t as rare as it might seem. Two full moons in one month, it happens once, and sometimes even twice, a year. Once in a blue moon, people say, and what they mean is hardly ever. The saying began as a way to speak not so much of a rarity, but of an absurdity, an occurrence as unlikely as hell freezing over, as impossible as child in the hills of Kentucky, gathering flowers whose color mirrors her face. And even that is only pretty thinking. No, the lips on your face would have been more like the patches of denim your mama sewed to your daddy’s broken trousers than the color of springtime blossoms. Once in a blue moon. Hardly ever. And then along came you. Commonly known as met-H, methaemoglobinaemia is a disorder that results in the reduced ability to carry oxygen in the blood. As a result, the blood of those affected is made darker, so much so, that the darkened blood tints the skin blue, which is known as cyanosis, or the “blue disease.” The condition is usually caused by environmental factors, such as reactions to [End Page 35] certain drugs and exposure to nitrates and dyes. But in rare cases...