Leslie A. Lindsay Writer | Designer | Photographer
This is the story of my great-grandmother, Cora Bell Compton.
When my father texted a photo of a woman flanked by two men in front of an old home, I had questions. Who was she? Who were the men? Her husband? Brothers? Suitors? Sons? His response was slow. Finally: Your great-grandmother and her brothers. They had a hard life.
The photo haunted me. Who, exactly, were they? What made their lives so hard? I dove into the census records. I looked at maps and more photographs. What I discovered is that Cora Bell Compton, born in 1894 rural Kentucky, was a woman of many layers, secrets, and struggles.
All I knew about Cora Bell is that she raised six children alone in a dirt floor home during the Great Depression.
Once I entered the narrative, I discovered a bright, hardworking, ostracized woman who never quite fit in. Widowed in 1937, Cora Bell was the sole earner for a young family, taking in laundry to make ends meet. The image of Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” came to mind, so did the dusty roads and abject poverty of the time. THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE is at once a portrait of a woman but also a conglomeration of all women struggling to survive.
Spanning 130 years,THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE: A Memoir of Place, Art, & Legacy explores not only my Kentucky-born great-grandmother’s joys and obsessions, shames and desires, but is a searingly intimate tour of Cora Bell’s world: from her hardscrabble rural beginnings to a bustling train town in Southern Missouri, widowed with young children during The Great Depression, WWII, and beyond, Cora Belle’s life weaves and bobs within my own, eighty years later, a collision of ancestral and personal past.
THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE is a hybrid work of poetry, essay, and historical fiction as it re-imagines and examines how identities flex and transform over a lifetime, which fundamental parts remain the same, no matter where we find ourselves.
“You have distilled this story so beautifully. I am in awe of your ability to take your own experiences and shape them into such a readable, cohesive story.”
I traveled to Adair County, Kentucky and drove along the winding lanes of Cora Bell’s birthplace. I met with long-lost relatives. I walked the land. I slept in a cabin. I wrote and wrote until I wrote her home.
Leslie Lindsay| Writer | Designer | Photographer
Leslie A. Lindsay 