Hillbilly Elegy: A Response

 Something—I am not sure what—compelled me to read Hillbilly Elegy. Here’s the background, the tributaries of reasons for my decision to invest time in a book sure to elicit emotional responses from just about anyone.

A colleague posted an endorsement of the book Appalachian Reckoning on Facebook. That book, published in 2018, is a response to Hillbilly Elegy (henceforth HE) by some scholars, poets, essayists, journalists, and photographers who, to say the least, take issue with the portrayal of “Appalachia” and “Appalachians” in HE. Our College Library had both books, and I checked them out a few days ago. I’ve overspent my book budget and was not ready to commit money to either book. Reading time would be enough investment.

Second, I recently visited what I call “deep Appalachia,” by which I mean coal-mining area of Southwestern Virginia. I went there because I wrote a novel about the county where my mother grew up; it is not a book about my family, only based on some stories they told me. It renewed my—connection? spirit? memories?—of my Appalachian roots on both sides. My father’s family hails from the Shenandoah Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains, still considered Appalachia. Where I live now, in Northwest Georgia, still qualifies as well. So it would be hard for me not to eventually crack “the book” that is supposed to explain all of us to the rest of the country (please feel the depth of my sarcasm).

Third, well, J.D. Vance is the Republican Party’s VP pick. I can’t call him their darling; it’s not clear if he is that popular with the rank-and-file of the party, much less the general electorate. But he is well known; his book sold millions and it was a Hollywood-royalty-made film. (I mean, Opie directed it.)

Finally, I think back to an interesting faculty book group in 2017 or so when the book came out. The Appalachian history scholar, a native of Kentucky, was livid—I mean, visibly angry, about the book. She rejected Vance’s depiction of her state and people. One of the younger professors had a different take: “This is just what my students, our students, are like.” How she made that conclusion, I’ll never know. What I do know is that was one tense meeting and I don’t think bridges were ever mended.

With these reasons to bolster my resolve and to guide my thinking, I started the book. I read introductions and prologues most of the time, and it did not take me long to get irritated. Vance likes to invoke, or maybe throw around, the term “Scots Irish.” It seems to his thinking that the genetic component of these folks curses them with a life of violence, gunplay, vile language, laziness, sexual promiscuity, stubbornness, honor code excesses, addiction, alcoholism, ignorance, and deviancy. In Vance’s thinking, the Scots Irish infest Appalachia, having come down the mountain chain once they landed in the New York and Pennsylvania of the New World. The geographical characteristics of Appalachia cemented these bad genetics. Maybe some escaped to live a better life. The reader can imagine how I, whose maiden name is Graham, respond to this depiction of those who share my DNA and background.

One does not have to read far into the text (and I have read about half of it, unmotivated to finish the whole book) to find that Vance’s primary literary sin is that of logical fallacies: hasty generalization, straw men, and faulty analogy. His family is all families. His grandmother is all Appalachian women. His mother, the drug addict, is all drug addicts and all descendants of Appalachian migrants. Middletown, Ohio, is all post-industrial (Rust Belt) cities, and all those cities are Middletown, Ohio. A shiftless guy he worked with in a tile factor is every worker today. And so on. I do not understand how this got past editors, or how he got a law degree.

In the particulars, the book is very good. It is hard to put down, and he knows how to tell his family’s story. The wildness of the Blantons, his mother’s family, is tailor-made for a movie, of course. I was moved and horrified by his mother’s mood swings, abuse, and addiction struggles. I had to laugh at his grandmother’s outrageous reactions to life in general. I was appalled by his grandparents’ temper and violence, even to store owners, where in one story they trash a store after an owner tells J. D. to leave because he was handling merchandise without the purpose of buying it (he was quite young at the time). Somehow his family escapes a lot of jail time.

Yes, “outrageous” pretty much capsulizes it. I suppose his family had to be so outrageous to warrant such a book, and only a family like this would not be too upset about this kind of personal memoir going so public. I can’t help feel the reverse injustice that his mother’s many sins ended with stellar actress Amy Adams playing her in a movie and her son graduating from Yale, becoming a millionaire, and being chosen as the vice-presidential nominee of a major party. It wasn’t from her choices or virtues, but from Vance’s personal ones, that he achieved this kind of fame, although fame has its curse. His experience with choice leads him to conclude that personal choices are the one and only answer and that systemic problems are no impediment to freedom from the Appalachian genetic curse.

That last sentence may lead someone to conclude I think “systemic” change is the answer to everything. I do not, but I find it ironic that Vance thinks ethnicity and geography hold young people back while others, whom he might disagree with, think class or race does.

Were life that simple, is my response. I also have to note, and this is my most personal connection, the theme of Appalachian migration. Vance’s argument is that those who left Appalachia to work in cities like Detroit, Columbus, Chicago, and Indianapolis brought their culture with them. Their life goal was to go back and visit the hollers of home as often as possible. You can take the boy out of Appalachia but you can’t take the mountains out of the boy, is the reason. Likewise, their lives in the cities to which they migrated were stained with their pasts. The cities saw them as hillbillies invading their territory and bringing all kinds of evil. This is Vance’s view of it.

The migration of Appalachians out of the area is well documented and studied. In my family’s case, my mother and father migrated after WWII to the Washington, D.C., area. My uncle, Mom’s half-brother, migrated to Detroit and worked for GM in the early ‘50s, retiring to West Virginia (not his original home). Mom’s other two brothers migrated to the military, an option Vance does not write about except for himself. Appalachian towns and counties probably contributed as many young men to war efforts as anywhere in the U.S. Mom’s stepbrothers, at least one of them, also ended up near D.C.

My family had its problems. “Dysfunctional” became a popular and overused word in the ‘90s, and families with problems are not dysfunctional; they still function and stay together and don’t end up in jail. Maybe we were dysfunctional; things happened that shouldn’t have. But my grandmother, as Appalachian as they come, never touched a gun or liquor and would have sooner died than use the f-word. The same with my mother, who was born a year earlier than Vance’s “Mamaw.” His portrayal of the morals and lifestyles of Appalachian residents simply bears no relationship to my own or to the writers of Appalachian Reckoning.

Or perhaps, the mass migration changed Appalachia. Perhaps the ones who left were the winners and the ones who chose to stay, the losers.

Maybe that’s nonsense.

Which brings me to the Appalachian Reckoning book. The writers of these pieces have scholarship behind them, and anger at how HE treats them. The folks behind that book take umbrage with HE, and I don’t blame them. They live in Appalachia, love it, and work for it.

However, among all the personal issues these writers and I have with HE are that Vance expands his family’s story into a political argument, and that the literati outside of the region interpret is book at the end-all of Appalachian “culture.” The book debuted in 2016; perfect timing to be tied to Donald Trump’s victory, and it became the treatise to explain why Trump won over the white working class of the Rust Belt and Appalachia. Forget any flaws of Hillary Clinton as an unappealing candidate. Along with “explaining” why Trump is popular with these folks (and I saw plenty of Trump posters on my trip to Virginia in July), he makes an argument that federal government programs hurt the region rather than helping it.

In a good argument, one defines her terms first, and I did not do that, letting the readers define this phenomenon of Appalachia for themselves. So, what is Appalachia? It is that part of the Eastern mountain range below the Mason-Dixon line, reaching into Alabama and Georgia (technically it includes the range all the way into Maine, but that part is rarely lumped in with the Southern part). It is actually made up of two ranges with a high valley in between. I see that here in Northwest Georgia: Lookout Mountain is to my west, and the Blue Ridge to my east, but in between we have, well, rolling land with some ridges.

What is overlooked is that Appalachia is not a political entity unto itself. It is part of nine states that govern it in nine different ways. Kentucky Appalachia is not North Carolina Appalachian or Georgia Appalachia or Virginia Appalachia, in other words. A person in Appalachian regions of those states are more likely to consider themselves a Kentuckian or Georgian or Virginian than an Appalachian. They pay taxes to the state, vote for state officials, and get that state’s drivers license. No one pays taxes to Appalachia. Thus, perhaps the general economy of a state is more of a reason for the poverty in that state’s Appalachian region, rather than the other way around.

As the writers of Appalachian Reckoning also argue, the region is not even predominantly Scots Irish, but German, Eastern European (immigrants who worked in the coal mines and brought Catholicism here), African American, and general salad bowl, mutt Americans. My mother’s people seem to be Dutch and English for the most part, not Scots Irish. Ashby, Mullins, Vanover, Fraley, Elkins, and Ramsey may or may not be Scots Irish names: Vanover is Dutch, originally “Van Oever,” “from the riverbank.” Mullins was Norman, related to “mills” (Moulin).

As one of the writers in Appalachian Reckoning notes, to conclude that Scots-Irish people are cursed with deviancy and addition is to say that all Italians are like Tony Soprano.

The addiction issue, and its supposed genetic or ethnic component, loom large in HE, due to trauma the young J.D. Vance went through. And it was traumatic and horrible, no doubt about that. This struggle is really the focus of the movie. The opioid crisis has hit those of the Appalachian region hard (is it really fair to label people “Appalachians”), and that is an area for me to do more research if I plan to write intelligently about the region. Are the opioids a replacement for alcohol and moonshine, and later meth, or is something else going on? We know that over-prescription was a major contributing factor, over-prescription that enriched drug companies. Why were they prescribed in the first place?

I imagine one reason is that working-class people, and mostly men in this group, injure their bodies through physical labor and thus need and want “effective” painkillers. Many doctors are ready to oblige; what else can they do with the results from years of heavy labor when options like physical therapy are harder to come by, less convenient than a pill, and more expensive? And is the opioid crisis really worse in Appalachia than in other regions of the country? Textile workers in the South? Farmers? Urban folks? Or upper middle class people who can live in just as much despair as a poor person, only for different reasons?

Another and older issue, and one I am not currently qualified to write about any more than I am to write about the opioid crisis, is environmental damage. Beyond scraping the tops of mountains off to get to the coal rather than digging for it, there is the problem of toxic and nuclear waste and waste in general: in other words, making the remote mountain areas into massive landfills. I saw a big billboard protesting the possibility that New York would send its trash to Southwestern Virginia if a certain law was passed. Well, why not, one might ask? There’s land, it creates jobs, and it solves the problem of never-ending trash from the Northeast.

The reality is that these coal- and lumber- and other resources-rich mountains, which are considered geologically older than the Rockies, have been fair game as far as outsiders are concerned. Coal mining did not really take off until the early part of the 1900s, although it did exist before that. The lore of coal-towns, company stores, cave-ins, unionization and strikes, and black lung, and the region’s dependence on coal production, is not just legend. It is very real, and I remember it as a child in the ‘60s. One particular town we had to drive through to get to Grandma’s home in McClure is frozen in my mind as the stereotypical coal-town; it still exists, although the mine is closed and some of the houses have been renovated to modern livability. Some remain just as dilapidated. Vestiges remain, although coal production in that area has diminished quite a bit. Again, this is an area I will need to research deeply before writing about it intelligently. My mother’s stepfather worked in the mines, and his granddaughter married into a mine-owning family.

Poverty, poor housing, lack of educational opportunities, lack of good employment, aging populations, and so on are real in this region spread across nine states called Appalachia. Yes, they like Trump; maybe that’s because of racial animosity or dislike of outsiders, authority, or elitist politicians. Maybe it’s from lack of decent political choices period. Maybe the best solution is for folks to move away, get educations, settle in “real America,” and try to shake off the legacy of the mountains. Maybe the War on Poverty pumped a lot of money into the areas but did not change much. Maybe the region is just too far off the “beaten path,” the centers of power, education, and finance. Maybe their love of Donald Trump and national populism, their guns and religion, is an insoluble problem.

Or maybe we believe the J.D. Vances and the pundits a bit too much. Maybe we commit the same logical fallacies. Maybe we think the past is not just prologue, but present, that nothing has changed or improved in Appalachian, and therefore nothing really can. Education, government infusions, jobs programs—“those folks just don’t have the motivation to make something of themselves.”

Maybe we read about it rather than living there. On my visit, I met the head of the county library system, a lovely and well-trained professional, and three motivated ladies leading the country historical society. The library is big and well-stocked. People came to talk to me and buy my book. People come to the library and READ BOOKS. They have the Internet. These are not stupid people. These are not the borderline criminals of J.D. Vance’s family in Jackson, Kentucky.

I have been told by many people to read Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Demon Copperhead, which won the Pulitzer. Maybe; I fear I will read more of the darkness than the light that exists in Appalachia, will meet more of the criminals and addicts and degenerates than the people trying to build community. That is what I wish to write about and celebrate.

I stopped by the land and house my grandmother owned, bought by her first husband, my grandfather, who died in 1930 in a train accident. He was thirty, a supervisor in the lumber business, and left her with three very young children, all under the age of four. The ownership of the house and land is a matter of family dissension, and it had fallen into great disrepair, but someone was using it and had built a kind of homestead behind it on the land, a few acres of flat farmland in the holler that is encircled by high steep ridges. I need to look into the county records soon and find out who now owns it. I spoke with a neighbor and asked what was going on, after I assured her I was the granddaughter of one of the former owners. “You should buy it back and use it as a mountain retreat,” she said.

Ah, what a dream. I could write and seclude myself, have my dogs and invite family to visit and remember. Yes, a dream. Not practical when I have a life 250 miles away and I myself am aging, though my body so far has not let me feel like it. It would give me inspiration, perhaps. On the other hand, I committed myself to returning to the county seat next July 4th for their celebration of their contribution to the armed forces, which is quite substantial.

But no, I won’t be moving back there; it was never my home anyway. I’m “from” Maryland, and I’m not moving back there either. Georgia and the Tennessee Valley have been my home for many years; as a woman who had moved to Ringgold, Georgia, said to me yesterday, “I’m from here now.” My family, work, spiritual community, friends, real estate, and legacy are here. On the other hand, my heart is Appalachian; “I’ve always lived in the mountains,” I often tell myself, such that flat land seems alien to me, like a different planet. It reminds me of the beach, swamps, and featurelessness. Give me a rushing creek or waterfall any day over the tides. The tides are powerful, fierce, frightening. Sharks lurk there; people drown. A full, fast creek is living water, at least in my imagination. I know today it is as likely to be toxic as something I would want to wade in.

To have a sense of place is to know its realities and its effects on one. Those effects can lean toward pride but also shame. And I think that is what I take away from HE. Vance writes a lot about the pride he felt as a child when his family stood up for themselves and didn’t take any crap off of other people, non-family, outsiders. Yet that is the pride of a kid looking for a role model anywhere and lacking the wisdom to know who is worthy of emulation and hero worship. The book chronicles, whether he sees it or not (and I think he does) that misplaced pride leads to a sense of shame. I think he still feels that shame acutely, still is looking for mentors and role models, and has tried to exorcise demons by writing this book. One might argue his agreeing to be the VP for a man he originally called a Hitler is part of that quest. Yes, J.D. Vance feels a lot of shame from his childhood, misplaced shame, since as a child he was the victim of adults who loved him but saw their lifestyles as more important.

(By the way, this “Trump is Hitler” stuff is really bizarre and deranged and the product of diseased, mob minds. Call him a grifter, phony, “mess,” or whatever—he’s certainly worthy of some jail time--he is not committing genocide or about to. . As one wise guy pundit said, If he were Hitler, he would have gotten rid of Obamacare in his first month in office.)

Finally, as a Christian, I have to comment on his chapter (6) on his religious upbringing. His foul-mouthed grandmother practiced her own, external-to-church form of Christianity. His biological father, whom he began to have a relationship with in elementary school (complicated by his mother’s pathologies), was a charismatic Christian in a megachurch that generally rejected overall American culture, such as rock music, evolution, gay people, and Harry Potter. My sense is that Vance appreciates the faith but is not that interested in prioritizing it in his daily personal life, thought, or political viewpoints; he did marry a Hindu, after all. I get the feeling he really did not have a well-rounded theological training as a young man, but actually, how many do? The resources are there but so are many distractions, and having to deal with the violence and addictions in his family would have been the main ones. Connection to a stable religious community with educated, successful mentors could have provided a better spiritual foundation.

All this does not fully explain to me J.D. Vance’s political views, which seem eclectic; I’ll use that word to mean they don’t seem consistent, but they do appear opportunistic. Maybe they are still evolving. Maybe Kamala Harris is our next president and Vance will fade into the background as a political figure. I have empathy for him, and a measure of compassion. He has been through a lot, and his choices took him from a bad family situation to the U.S. Senate, among other places. I hope, for his sake, his choices serve not just himself but the American people. Even as I write this, pundits are talking about how Trump could jettison him now that Harris is Trump’s opponent and Trump could use a do-over, could take a mulligan (I hear he takes a lot of those on the golf course).

However, Vance’s book has done us a disservice, a palpable harm. It has misinformed its readers, it has made them comfortable with their prejudices, and it has lied about the people of the region he thinks he knows. The book should have been vetted more carefully, at the very least. He should have said, this is my story, no one else’s.

I recently watched American Fiction, a very funny satirical movie about an accomplished Black literary fiction author who writes a parody novel about black life “in the ‘hood” (which he knows nothing about) to make a point. It becomes a huge hit instead and he falls deeper and deeper into the deception. I can’t help wondering if HE is the opposite of the writer’s work in American Fiction. (The writer chooses to name the parody novel the F-bomb to keep it from being published, but the white liberal literary establishment thinks it is authentically Black and embrace it).

Vance wrote HE without irony, and it is a good, truthful, moving story of a family. But it has been taken as a full depiction of a large group of Americans because the readers, and perhaps the publishers, liked that it confirmed the stereotypes they already held. They want to believe millions of people in a large geographical region who generally vote differently from them can be reduced to devotion to their guns and religion, are the definition of deplorable, and are a monolithic group like no other.