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Reflections from a Hillbilly at Heart: A Response to Hillbilly Elegy

I’m not sure what I expected when I began reading Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. I knew many people in Appalachia were angry about the book, and I was aware that there have been several rebuttals penned in response. Other than that, I wanted to go in blind, as it were, without outside opinions influencing how I might feel about this book and its author. It didn’t entirely happen to plan, but that is to be expected in the twenty-first century. Still, I was determined to be open-minded and, at times, that was challenging enough.

Hillbilly Elegy has been on my shelf for more than a year, one of the many books that popped up when I began looking for secondary sources to explore for an upcoming historical I have planned. I suppose what I expected were tales of growing up in Appalachia, little vignettes of the author’s life that would take me on my own trip down memory lane in the hills that will always have a place in my heart. Instead, I got the Rust Belt of Ohio, a family in crisis, and a kid who, at times, lets his judgments and perceptions of people cloud his perspective. All that being said, this will not be a review disparaging the book. For what it is, there are some very valid points mixed in with the dramatics of the Vance family and the prejudices of the author. There is, in fact, an opioid crisis in America, the Appalachian region – though it is becoming a popular vacation spot for rich folks – is still overwhelmingly poor, and upward mobility is still tricky whether you hail from a holler in Kentucky or a valley in Southwestern Virginia.

Vance begins his story by distinguishing between home and where we stay. When he writes, “[m]y address was where I spent most of my time […] But my home never changed: my great-grandmother’s house, in the holler, Jackson, Kentucky” (Vance 11). As a girl unwillingly plucked out of Appalachia at the tender age of ten, I felt this profoundly. I have lived in North Carolina for more than thirty years, but Rt. 1 Box 25, Cedar Bluff, Virginia will always be my home, an address long gone now, replaced by the new system adopted sometime in the 1990s. In that simple statement, I found a kindred spirit in Vance. A child, unable to spend their life in the one place they love more than anything, the same child that as an adult has the choice to move back and won’t. We know what the heart wants, but we also know what comes with it. Maybe for Vance, it’s monetary, but for me, it’s knowing that even though the seasons change, the people and their ideals stay the same.

Jim Vance and Bonnie Blanton, the two most influential people of the author’s childhood – his maternal grandparents – left the hills of Kentucky amid scandal in the late 1940s and migrated to Ohio away from their multi-generational home in the Appalachian Mountains. For those unfamiliar with the codes and beliefs of “hill people”, you might think that this meant a whole new life for the Vance family. While it did, in a way, it takes more than a move up the “hillbilly highway” to break free of experienced traumas. The mountains may be enchanting, but they have dark recesses where learned helplessness lives, and stagnation thrives. One need only spend a little time in certain areas of Appalachia to witness Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development in real-time. I see them every time I go back home, and I see them from family members who have moved away. Breaking out of learned behaviors is difficult. I appreciate Vance being truthful about this, and for mentioning the “avoidance and wishful-thinking” ways of coping so prevalent in people of this region. When he writes, “We [hillbillies/mountain folk] tend to overstate and understate, to glorify the good and ignore the bad in ourselves,” I can’t help but think of my own family and their propensity to do exactly this (20). Vance’s grandparents knew how to survive, persevere, and how to provide sustenance, but like many hill people, they didn’t know how to show love in what is considered a healthy way, especially not to one another. I grew up a hill person and I am a southerner. I understand Bonnie and Jim in a way that readers outside the region may not. I’ve spent my life decoding criticism to find the true compliment, studying the body language to find the message of love, and digging through the pride to find the apology. J.D. Vance’s grandparents loved their family, there’s no doubt about that, and they did the absolute best they could.

Vance understands this, just as he is aware that his family found themselves in much happier economic circumstances when his Papaw (PAP-aw) secured a job with Armco in the 1940s, a company he would retire from, thus providing the author’s mother and her siblings with – outwardly, at least – the typical nuclear family experience that was so promoted in the mid-twentieth century. So, while the family certainly had more opportunity than their kin back in that Kentucky holler, the codes and learned behaviors of the hills followed them, and the childhood Vance’s mother and her siblings lived through was fraught with tension, abuse, and trauma. This isn’t to cast a negative glow on the family of the author. Every family has its issues. A favorite quote from Bishop T.D. Jakes comes to mind, “Broken people can't do all that we might want them to do... they don't have the capability.” Jim and Bonnie Vance – Papaw and Mamaw – gave their children a home, but they couldn’t give them what they themselves never really had, an environment that cultivates stability and growth.

This economic opportunity experienced by the Vance family when they moved to Ohio may explain why the author has such a harsh view in the book toward those on welfare. One of the most telling passages is when he discusses his time as a cashier at a local grocery store. It’s here he claims to have become something of an “amateur sociologist” (139). It’s also here that the author’s prejudices about his own kind can be found, especially when he writes, “I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off government largesse [money or gifts given generously] enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about” (139). I understand this observation is from a teenager in the early 2000s who sees someone with a cell phone paying for their groceries with food stamps. Still, for him to write about it in 2016 without adding the addendum that he may have judged these people with limited information, points to lasting prejudices, to me. Yes, he admits to this being his mind-set as an angry seventeen-year-old boy, but instead of saying he may have been wrong in his assumptions, he blames the “policies of Mamaw’s ‘party of the working man’—the Democrats” (140).

Growing up in Appalachia, I knew plenty of people who needed assistance but refused due to their own pride, though I suspect they, too, were amongst those receiving “monthly checks”. This refusal led to harder times than may have been necessary, but the old mountain mentality I’m familiar with won’t abide “handouts”. Pride is a big thing in Appalachia. Or at least it was when I was growing up, and still is in my family. When I moved out of Appalachia to the Piedmont of North Carolina, I met people who collected that monthly check my mountain family always mentioned with disdain. Some were gaming the system (some maybe still are), and some collected from the government rather than work, but none of them were living high on the hog, as my mawmaw would say. For the author to perpetuate the middle and upper-class belief that those on welfare are eating steaks and caviar while the hardworking folks suffer goes against his thesis. This idea that welfare recipients are somehow living it up while others struggle is counterproductive, in my opinion, and dangerous, as it threatens to villainize those of the lowest economic status in our country. I know these people Vance refers to, the ones who “buy beer, wine, and cigarettes with cash,” and then pay for their food with food stamps, as well as those who sell their stamps for cash, but I’m not about to judge them for their vices, or for doing what they need to do for a little bit of money, not when I’ve seen firsthand how they have to live (139). I’m willing to bet J.D. Vance has never huddled as close as possible to an electric heater in a 45-degree house because there’s no money for oil or wood pellets to fill the main heat source. I’d also lay money down that he’s never sat staring at a final notice for his electric bill with nothing but a food stamp card in hand. Some of these people he judges as “gaming” the system are just trying to do what they can to survive in a country that tells them every day they’re not worth helping.

This doesn't imply Vance is creating a problem that doesn’t exist. With all social programs, you can guarantee someone will take advantage. I get where he’s coming from. Give money to someone who struggles to live every single day, who rarely gets to vacation or have a decent car, or who doesn’t get to have that 70-inch television their middle-class friend has, and there is a distinct possibility they’re going to spend it frivolously. We see it every year at tax time. People buy new phones, get new car loans, etc., and then two months later they can’t afford the phone bill or the car payment, and the repo man comes calling. As a young family, my husband and I often misused at least a portion of our tax returns. We made sure the bills were caught up, the children’s needs were taken care of, and then we bought things we didn’t necessarily need, but, oh, how we wanted them. Unlike Vance’s claim that “we spend to pretend that we’re upper class”, we spent because we believed that even though we barely made enou