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JACKSON RESIDENT TELLS STORY OF HER KENTUCKY UPBRINGING
By Lauren Puglisi
 | | Jackson resident Portia Cloud-Banach self-published her book "My Dizney, Kentucky Appalachian Mountain Ancestors" online through iUniverse in early September 2007. |
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Portia Cloud-Banach started to write stories from her childhood as a way to remember her rural Kentucky past and to explain to her daughters about how unique her upbringing was.
After gathering information from her mother and distant relatives about the Clouds, her father's side of the family, Cloud-Banach compiled a Web site mostly made up of family stories and pictures.
According to Cloud-Banach, after a few years had passed, so many relatives were contacting her with family information that the success of the site brought upon the idea of writing a book.
And now that idea has come to fruition. Her self-published book, "My Dizney, Kentucky Appalachian Mountain Ancestors," is now available online.
"Mostly, I didn't start out to do a story about me, I started out to do a family tree to find out where everybody came from. Then it fell into, well, I want my kids to know where I grew up," she said.
Having raised two daughters in Jackson with her husband, William, Cloud-Banach found it hard to relate her life experiences to her children.
"They would just learn a little bit here and there and when we would go to Kentucky to visit my family usually once a year. They would just absorb everything but they didn't know what it was like for me," Cloud-Banach said.
Portia Cloud-Banach was born in a desolate area in Dizney, Kentucky on September 17, 1948, where her father and grandfather were all coal miners, blacksmiths and farmers.
After contracting polio at only a few months old and being only the second person in her village to have the disease, she was forced to travel to Louisville for surgeries that continued throughout most of her life.
"I remember acting as like there was nothing wrong with me and that worked as a was a type of therapy for me, because as a little girl, I just hated when people would stare," Cloud-Banach said. "I started ignoring it and I would do everything my brothers did, like go hiking or jumping off the roof of the house, and I think the fact that my parents encouraged that gave me my own independence."
Cloud-Banach reminisces about her life with a smile on her face yet recalls the hard times as important fixtures in her story as well.
"Harlan County was a miners village. It really wasn't a safe environment. Whenever we heard the screeching of a loud whistle, we knew that something horrible had happened in the mines," Cloud-Banach said. "Everyone knew how to shoot a pistol. The families that lived in Dizney were self sufficient. Since we had no money, we made everything that we needed. We didn't have a car, so we walked everywhere that we needed to go or rode mules for transportation."
When she was just 13 years old, the Cloud family made the decision to move to Louisville, a city that appeared to be the complete opposite of the small village of Dizney.
"I hated the city. My brothers did so much that they moved back to Kentucky as soon as they had the chance, but I knew that there was no future there. I met my husband at a YMCA dance when he was stationed in Fort Knox, Kentucky with the Army. After we got married, we moved to Jersey City, then here in Jackson," she said. "Living in those two cities was so hard but once we moved here, I remember waking up and smelling the fresh dew on the grass again, and I knew I could live here forever."
After 15 years of writing stories and researching her past, Cloud-Banach published her book: "My Dizney, Kentucky Appalachian Mountain Ancestors" online through iUniverse Inc., a self-publishing, print-on-demand service.
"I discovered by accident that I could get my book published on the Internet. Since my book was published in September 2007, large online book store corporations like Barnes and Noble and Amazon are now selling my book," Cloud-Banach said. "Although my book is only sold online, anyone could do a quick Google search to find the sites where to purchase a copy."
Cloud-Banach's 256-page book is filled with chapters about Harlan County pioneers, small school houses, church visits on Sunday and tales of playing in the creek having good-old fashioned outdoor fun.
Since her mother and cousins have moved back to Dizney, Cloud-Banach says that every year she brings her entire family to the place she grew up for a large reunion celebration.
"I wrote this book to tell a story that people from Dizney could relate to and that others could learn and enjoying from reading," Cloud-Banach said. "My daughters were the first ones to encourage me to write my book and now that I've completed it I can read my granddaughter a chapter of my life before she falls asleep every night."
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