Hillbilly problems
People, place, and politics
“There is only one place I’m never mistaken for a local. When buying gas, or at the grocery store, or in a restaurant, they ask me, Where are you from? Surprising everyone, I always say Here. I was born here.”
This ending paragraph to a 144-word Catherine Lacey essay titled “Directions” sticks with me. Place is something that is very important to Southern writers, and I, ostensibly one of them, have always felt out of place talking about where I am from. I always felt a step removed from the overalls-and-tractors way of life I was born into. For one, I never picked up the accent, something which people from outside Tennessee always praise me for. “I never would have guessed”, they say. “You don’t sound like you’re from the South,” they rapturize, as if somehow I’m better than the dozens of other babies born at St. Mary’s hospital that day who had the misfortune of sounding like their community. Stranger in a familiar land, to misquote the Bible.
I start thinking about place every time J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy makes its rounds through the news cycle. People start to argue about what hillbilly is, where you can live and lay claim to being a hillbilly, what the term even means, and so on. Then in the middle of all this discourse a weird thing happens: there’s an inevitable backlash to the entire conversation. I start seeing a chorus of comments along the lines of “I thought Southerners were supposed to be friendly” or “Isn’t this area supposed to be welcoming?”
This question gets to the heart of the mass appeal of the book (which, full disclaimer, I have never read, but intend to once I find a copy at Goodwill. I can’t bring myself to bolster his publishing numbers). It’s the noble savage trope – the idea that poor people are inherently better than the rest of us because they are uncorrupted by society writ large. You find this idea a lot in early writings about the United States, especially in regards to Indigenous Americans. Its shadow lurks behind many of the discussions about rural Americans in general, but in discussions about Southern Americans and Appalachian Americans specifically.
Largely due to mid-century TV sitcoms, there’s this widespread belief that rural people are kind, welcoming, salt of the earth folk who’d give you the shirt off their back. Yes, they’re poor and yes they are territorial, but they operate by a “working-class honor code” that has been “decimated” by liberalism. It’s the sort of life that the David Brooks’ of the world admire from a distance, but would never deign to actually live. Everyone loves a hillbilly in theory. Everyone wants to overall their way back to a time that never was. (The TV show “Green Acres” is a perfect example of this).
As I watched Grannie, and Pa, and Ellie May, and Jethro bumble through the world of civilized Californians on the “Beverly Hillbillies,” I knew this was how the world saw us. We were just a hapless group of people who didn’t deserve to be in their world but somehow found our place in it. We watched the show because it was funny, not because we ever saw ourselves in it.
I saw more of myself in “The Heartland Series”, which aired every weekday at noon and every Friday at six on WBIR. Bill Landry, backdropped by Cades Cove or Norris Lake, would introduce us to our neighbors, people who were making quilts by hand or who were around when the Tennessee Valley Authority came through seizing land, flooding towns, desecrating sacred sites, and ultimately displacing more than one hundred thousand people. I learned about the infamous moonshiner Popcorn Sutton and about people determined to keep shape note singing alive. These were smart, resourceful, suffering people who made meaningful lives in the wake of exploitation and poverty.
When I meet people who find out I’m from Tennessee, they ask about moonshine and cowboy hats and gush about Dolly Parton (as they should). But this is a new, commoditized version of Tennessee. The first legal moonshine distillery in Knox County only opened in 2010 – conveniently, sixteen months after Popcorn Sutton killed himself to avoid being arrested by federal agents for operating a distillery. Cowboy hats and the like were imported from Nashville around the time Sevierville became a popular bachelorette destination. Dolly is queen now, but just twenty years ago Dollywood a b-list Disney World, the kind of place you would only go to if you were poor.
Now, the Californians have taken over my hometown, driving up housing prices and making it impossible for the people who have nowhere else to go to live there. They look down on the people they came to cosplay as. They came for a fantasy of their own making–simpler times, friendly folks, moonshine, guns–and have found it beneath them.
A hillbilly is merely a social type. To paraphrase Louis Menard, a hillbilly is merely a caricature that stands for something that others can stand with or against. A hillbilly is either the purest form of American values or the backwards hick who is going to be our undoing. Either way, discussions of hillbillies or blue collar workers or midwesterners or flyover states are not really about the people blanketed by those categories, it’s about the power the people using those terms get by riling others up.
I don’t really know what to do with this information. I feel a bit weird watching this discourse play out because I both am and am not part of the world being discussed. Born and bred in Appalachia, I’m not redneck enough or poor enough to be recognizably from a place that I know in my bones. And the thing is, I don’t think that this phenomenon unique to me. What I do know is that actual hillbillies need to tell their own stories. I know that Appalachia is a special place and that spiritually strip mining an area for one's own political career is a nasty thing to do, no matter where you’re from.