Becoming Faye

They All Live Happily Ever After Mama turned seventeen on July 14, 1944, an’ Barney was there to help her celebrate. It didn’t take long before she decided to let this puppy follow her home. By September, she was pregnant. Mama never shared that part of the story with me, though. It would be decades before I thought through the timelines and figured it out for myself. She never wanted me to know she had given in to her human desires, that she didn’t always follow the evangeli

They All Live Happily Ever After Kissiah “Kit” Smith was born on January 16, 1817. She entered this world on the wings of grief an’ loss, just a few hours after her father’s passin’. Her name would become a prayer whispered in anguish an’ a curse muttered in dark corners, when at seventeen, she became The Sin-Eater of Mount Pisgah, Kentucky. Not by choice but by necessity. It was a role she inherited when her mother, a hard an’ broken woman, passed with a slice of bread clutc

It looks a lot like home to me Summertime, an' the livin' is easy Richard got sick in June of 1942, a few weeks before Mama’s birthday. His symptoms were mild at first an’ because his mother had survived the same disease as a young child, an’ had immunity, he remained at home rather than bein’ isolated in a polio ward. Quarantine signs were placed on each door an’ along the white picket fence that surrounded their yard. Their big black letters were a wall Mama couldn’t climb,

It looks a lot like home to me Summertime, an' the livin' is easy... Mama was the second child an’ only daughter of Herbert an’ Faye Smith, born an’ raised in the cozy little farm town of Grinnell, Iowa, where ever’body really did know your name. All your secrets, too. In 1939 she had a Tale of Two Cities kind of year. One of the best an’ worst she’d ever known. It would portend the rest of her life, huge highs an’ lethal lows on a roller coaster ride from one decade into a

The unholy trinity of my Daddy’s youth I didn’t always understand it. Took me a long time to see it for what it was… ‘cause I’d been lied to my whole life. But if you’re gonna get a true picture of how I’s raised, I gotta tell you ‘bout Mama an’ Daddy. After all, it’s their doin’, an’ you’re gonna need the backstory. My daddy grew up in Madison County, Iowa. That’s right. The one with the bridges. He was the sixth of seven children raised on a beautiful hundred acre Iowa f

Like January 6th kinda messy My silent escape from a tangle of lies took years. Terror lives in the hearts of men an’ women who look a whole lot like your next door neighbor. I grew up with ‘em — I went to church with ‘em. Hell, I called ‘em my friends. When they raised their “Jesus Saves” banners in Washington DC on January 6, 2021 — the year that we all hoped would bring us salvation from the one we’d just ended — I knew exactly who they were. My name is Wally Faye an’ I

This is the beginning of my story — told in my own words, one chapter at a time.