Sarah D. Phillips
I am tired of talking about J.D. Vance. And I’m not one for introspection (just ask my husband). But as a daughter of Appalachia and a professor of anthropology at a public university, J.D. Vance’s claim to represent Appalachia and his threats to attack our nation’s universities and their professors, who he’s labeled “the enemy,” are personal for me. Echoing other Appalachia-raised writers who have recently weighed in, I say to J.D. Vance: you are a hillbilly phony (Caleb Miller). You don’t represent us (Neema Avashia). And you can keep your “elegy” (Ivy Brashear) because hillbillies don’t need one (Meredith McCarroll). Your Hillbilly Elegy is a political platform disguised as a memoir, and I call bullshit.
I grew up on a mountainside in Jefferson, North Carolina. That’s in Ashe County (the Christmas tree capital of the country), in the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the Appalachian Highlands. My parents were public school teachers, first generation college students who met in the 1960s at Appalachian State Teachers College (now Appalachian State University). My mother, June, was one of seven children, born in Mitchell County, NC. Her fondest childhood memory was when the bookmobile came to the homestead. She would hide in a tree all day long with a stack of books. Her least favorite childhood memory was having to carry the hog’s head in a bucket up the road to Aunt Hattie for making hog’s head cheese. Mom’s father was an underemployed tinkerer and mica miner who died of silicosis when I was three years old (that’s a lung disease caused by breathing in tiny bits of silica). Mom’s mom, who we called Grandmommy, served hot lunches in a public-school cafeteria and sewed jeans at a Wrangler factory in Spruce Pine. Years of hoisting and sewing heavy denim left her with debilitating arthritis and a twisted back. After retiring, Grandmommy handstitched a quilt for every grown child and grandchild in the family. Some of us got two or three. She must have made at least 30.
Like other families, our social life centered around the local church. Ours was Baptist. We often went to church three times a week—two services on Sunday, and a Wednesday evening event. My dad David taught Sunday school, served as a deacon, and sang in the choir. My sister and I sang in the children’s choir and did service projects through “Girls in Action.” Mom coordinated potlucks, picnics, and trips for the youth, and did overseas outreach as head of the Women’s Missionary Union. We got, and gave, a lot of social support at church. It was our community. My sister and I were in Brownies and Girl Scouts, and I was in 4-H. We were always busy.
I went to Lansing Elementary and Northwest Ashe High School. The mascot for both of these rural mountain schools was the “Mountaineer,” in some pictures a proud explorer in the mold of Daniel Boone or Lewis and Clark, in others a hayseed, a hick, a clodhopper, a country bumpkin—in other words, a hillbilly. (I secretly wondered if the original mascot wasn’t Old Reece, the kindly bearded man with long grey hair who lived—and eventually died–in a cave near the high school).
We were lucky to grow up with two teachers for parents: in our household reading and learning was fun and homework was non-negotiable. At school our third-grade classroom had a termite problem. Our fourth-grade teacher had bad temper. (He was arrested on a meth charge thirty years later in the TV series “Southern Justice.”) But we got an excellent education at those small rural schools. When Mrs. Caviness had us read Chaucer in the original Old English, we were proud to recognize some of our own mountain dialect in the Old English. Our tough English vocabulary tests every Friday prepared us for the SAT. We went to statewide band competitions because Ashe County schools had strong music programs. The young former Peace Corps volunteer who taught French managed to equip us with a surprising amount of it.
My high school classmates, many of whom still live in Ashe and the surrounding Appalachian counties or slightly down-state, have jobs in agriculture, education, engineering, health care, social work, manufacturing, law enforcement, real estate, the arts, tourism, the service industry, and more. They went to universities like App State, UNC Chapel Hill, and NC State, or took classes at Wilkes Community College. Thanks to scholarships and federal loans, I went to Wake Forest University, a full two hours away in Winston-Salem (an eternity back then). Some amazing faculty members became my mentors, like Dr. William (“Billy”) Hamilton, who was like a second father. With their encouragement I studied abroad in Moscow, embarked on graduate studies, and eventually became a professor.
Our community had its problems—quite a few kids had food instability; some experienced domestic violence, addiction, and mental health crises themselves or in their families. One of our classmates died by suicide not long after graduation. But these challenges were not “special” to Appalachia. And almost all of us benefitted from supports like excellent teachers, arts programs in schools, community churches and other organizations, and public assistance like subsidized meals at school.
Appalachia is in my bones, and I don’t recognize myself or my community in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. But I would never offer my own history, my own little story, as representative of the Appalachian experience. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what J.D. Vance does in his book.
Vance tracks his rags to riches journey from Middletown, Ohio, to Yale Law School (with summers in Jackson, Kentucky which, unlike Middletown, is actually in Appalachia). He bounces from one living situation to another with a substance-using mother and her string of “flavor of the month” boyfriends, all under the watchful eye of MaMaw and PaPaw, with whom he also lived intermittently. Vance describes an environment of domestic violence and substance use, but also of fierce love for family and country. He “made it” not because of his environment but in spite of it. His Appalachia—the “hillbilly culture” he escaped—is one of backwardness, bad choices, and lack of initiative. The characters in Elegy are vivid and relatable, especially MaMaw, the salty family matriarch, who cusses like a sailor and smokes like a chimney. Vance credits MaMaw with keeping him on the straight and mostly narrow. (In his recent RNC speech, Vance proudly claimed that after her death, he found 19 loaded handguns in MaMaw’s house.)
But that’s just it. Hillbilly Elegy is one man’s story, the story of a man who technically didn’t even grow up in Appalachia. Vance grew up in an Ohio town in the Rust Belt, a town to which a lot of people from Appalachia—including Vance’s grandparents—had moved. His grandparents were products of the so-called “hillbilly highway,” the migration of tens of thousands of Appalachian families to towns and cities in the Midwest and elsewhere for work.
So, Vance’s very claim to be a “hillbilly” from Appalachia is not clear cut. As Kentucky’s governor Andy Beshear recently said, “J.D. Vance ain’t from here.”
Even if Vance did qualify as Appalachian, he certainly does not speak for all of Appalachia. He uses anecdotes from his own life to paint a vast swath of the United States in broad brushstrokes. Appalachia spans 206,000 square miles and comprises 423 counties across 13 states. He overlooks Appalachia’s rich diversity and her 26.4 million residents, instead offering his own experiences as representative of “hillbilly culture.” His statement that “the culture of Greater Appalachia is remarkably cohesive” (p. 4) is breathtaking in its dismissal of the tapestry of topographies, linguistic traditions, racial and ethnic identities, livelihoods, and cultural traditions that make up Appalachia.
By contrast, Roger May captures Appalachia’s unique beauty and diversity in his “Looking at Appalachia” project, a crowdsourced website of nearly 600 photographs taken by Appalachians from New York to Mississippi. As Meredith McCarroll describes in The Bitter Southerner, scrolling through the website, you see Appalachia. Mechanics, farmers, poets, tattoo artists, preachers, and builders. Mountains under descending fog, mountains with their tops blasted off, mountains covered in snow. Car lots and tobacco barns and trailer parks and factories. Schools and rivers and kudzu and train tracks. Dancers and soldiers and barbers and loafers. Laughter and pride and sorrow and regret. You see Appalachia and know that it is also America.
An image of “Stikes Holler” in Warrensville shows a cascade of vintage cabins and barns where my classmates, the Stikes, used to live, and maybe still do. I rode past Stikes Holler every day going to school for 12 years. Stikes Holler is an iconic image of hillbilly poverty. It exists, and it is real. But it is only one tiny sliver of Appalachia, not representative of the region as a whole. Nothing is.
