Della Combs Brashear had had enough.

She backed her Cadillac long-ways across the one-lane road in front of her house, lit the Virginia Slim in her mouth, pulled her .38 pistol from her purse, and waited, stone-faced and determined, for the next coal truck to come along.

The trucks had been running day and night up and down the head of the Left Fork of Maces Creek in front of her house every day for weeks. They were coating every bit of furniture in and outside her home with a thick layer of gray coal dust. Her kitchen counter; the rocking chair she sat in while watching “The Price Is Right” in the morning and “Wheel of Fortune” in the evening; the porch swing; the hanging ferns that encircled the porch. Nothing could escape the intrusive, insidious dust kicked up from the road by the trucks as they barreled back and forth to the strip mine on the overlooking mountain. The dust swirled in thick, gray clouds around the house, seeping in under the front door and closed windows. It buried everything. No matter Della’s efforts to keep the tides at bay, coal-dust tsunamis were inescapable.

There’s only so many times a woman bound to the code of Clorox, Pledge, and Windex can clean up after someone else’s mess before the time comes to act.

She wasn’t afraid of jail. “They’ll give me three hot meals a day and a place to sleep,” she proclaimed to my dad when he tried to persuade her to remove her one-woman barricade. And she wasn’t really making a political stand against an oppressive, thieving industry. She was more interested in defending her home from unwanted, unclean intrusions.

She didn’t make the trucks stop forever, but they did turn around and go home that infamous day when she couldn’t take it any longer. A small victory for a woman who fought for nearly everything she had.

Fierce is a good word for Della Combs. Fiercely loyal to her children and grandchildren. She once threatened a coach at the local high school so he would give her son a letterman jacket. Fierce advocate for doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Legend has it she kept most of the hungry children in Christopher, Kentucky, fed their entire childhoods. Fierce mountain woman who had big dreams of city life, playing piano and singing in Chicago or New York City, but who instead married a man her mother picked for her before she graduated high school. She stayed with him until the end of her life because of a fierce sense of duty.

To me, though, she was Granny Della. A fierce storyteller who had the most enormous zest for life and love, with the heart to match. Her laugh seemed to always echo off the walls and reverberate off the hills that held the holler. Music was her one true love, second only to the fierce, expansive love she had for her family. Made-up songs about everyday life rolled over her lips as easily as the fog rolls into the valleys. She would often catch a word someone spoke to her, and trail off into a song containing the word.

“The sun sure is shining bright today,” someone would say. She’d answer in melody: “In the pines / in the pines / where the sun never shines...”

She always wore pink lipstick and white powder, and clip-on earrings. She had arthritis in her toes from a youth spent in high heels with matching dresses. She was a beautiful woman. Once, she took her two firstborn to have their portraits made in Hazard, and the photographer was so struck by her beauty, he insisted on taking her portrait too. She’s wearing pearls in the photo. She was always put-together like that. She maintained a standing hair appointment every Friday at Dascum’s Beauty Shop in Vicco. She always had short hair, which she preferred, even for her only daughter, my Mom, who preferred the opposite of almost everything her parents wanted.

Granny Della got her driver’s license and earned her GED when she was in her 40s. She kept a newspaper clipping in a drawer that was a picture of her and her fellow GED recipients that year. She lived a life of confinement in some ways, always meeting others’ expectations, and sidelining her own dreams in the process. Her middle age was about reclaiming her independence — creating a life outside her husband and her children. She was, and remains, one of the fiercest, strongest women I’ve ever known.

I grew up her neighbor. We lived just up the hill from her, and I knew her door was always open to me. I could run down the hill, and into her house without warning any day, and she would welcome me in, offering me food and conversation. I was often in her kitchen as she put up peaches in Ziploc bags for winter, or watered her beloved hanging ferns that encased her porch. She played piano every Sunday at Lone Pine Baptist Church — the family church founded by my great-grandfather, less than a mile from my home. When she told me I had “piano fingers,” I felt so special, like she had chosen me to carry on her music. Sometimes, Mom and I would visit in the evenings, and watch “Wheel of Fortune” with her. In the summer, her porch would be full of family who lived within a mile radius. Great aunts and uncles, cousins, neighbors. Life updates and family stories would be swapped late into the gloaming hours of the evening.

Granny Della was gregarious and outspoken, once telling a man to “get a life and get a job,” and another time telling Lone Pine’s preacher he was wrong about God not giving people talent they didn’t have to learn. Everyone knew where they stood with her, and where she stood on certain issues. Mostly, everyone knew you didn’t cross her, or disrespect her. They revered her, and praised her, and followed her lead. She was one fierce mountain woman, and it showed.

* * *

But, I would never, ever — in my wildest dreams or imaginings — disrespect her in any format because of her fierceness by calling her a lunatic, as J.D. Vance so often refers to his Mamaw in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

The way he describes this woman, whom he claims to revere and credits as the reason he made it out of his low-income life in suburban Ohio and into Yale Law School, is shameful. It displays a willingness to sell out his family members by tapping into a long history of distorted, false, and intentionally made stereotypical images of central Appalachia that have been imposed on the region by outside media makers for nearly three hundred years, ever since the first white land prospectors were sent into the region by George Washington himself.