On Monday, Donald Trump announced his pick for vice presidential candidate: J. D. Vance, the junior US senator from Ohio.
Some would say Vance has had a meteoric rise, from enterprise capitalist to best-selling creator, from junior senator to VP candidate, all in lower than a decade. Like most individuals in America, I used to be introduced to Vance through his book.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is Vance’s account of his tumultuous childhood growing up because the descendent of disadvantaged Appalachian hillbillies in Middletown, Ohio. It was critically acclaimed by pundits and politicians on each the left and the precise and was later made into an Oscar-nominated film. Both book sales and movie streams surged this week with the news of Vance’s nomination.
When I originally read the book, I used to be immediately intrigued by Vance’s story. He and I are the identical age, and, like Vance, I too am a product of the Appalachian diaspora. His grandparents left the mountains the identical decade as mine, his to the Rust Belt of Ohio and mine to the sunshine state of Florida.
Our stories diverge because my family eventually found their way back to Appalachia. I’ve spent most of my life in rural East Tennessee and North Carolina. My immediate family also enjoyed many more economic and academic privileges than Vance. Additionally, I used to be blessed with more spiritual resources than Vance, who indicates his grandmother read the Bible and prayed but wasn’t involved in a neighborhood church like my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were.
But within the pages of Hillbilly Elegy, I met many characters I recognized, folks whose struggles echoed those of my neighbors, classmates, and clan.
There is way to admire in Vance’s book: his resilience within the face of many adversities, his service to our country within the military, and his skill as a dynamic storyteller. When I first read the book back in 2017, I marveled at how well Vance was in a position to capture the angst of the region during which I grew up. It was like he was giving us a tour of the inside emotional world of the white working class.
And so, perhaps inadvertently, Vance became the unofficial spokesperson for “hillbillies,” and Hillbilly Elegy became the de facto textbook on Appalachia for all the country.
Over the last eight years, nevertheless, I couldn’t help but notice that every time I talk over with my Appalachian neighbors about Hillbilly Elegy (each the book and the film), they grimace. I can see of their faces a mixed response to Vance’s story, like they feel each kinship and shame once they read it.
For one, the book has only 21 footnotes. Vance himself admits within the introduction that the book is just not meant to be an educational evaluation of either the Rust Belt or Appalachia, that it is just a memoir. But reading it now, after seeing the reactions of a few of my neighbors, I’m concerned by the phenomenon across the book’s success.
Moreover, reading it as a Christian, as someone whose faith commands love of neighbor, I feel a deep conviction in regards to the problematic ways we tell stories about who we perceive to be “the opposite” on this country. I’m also concerned in regards to the ways people on the margins have internalized stories told about themselves.
After Vance’s book hit the bestseller list, Appalachian scholars, activists, and organizers like Elizabeth Catte, Meredith McCarroll, and Anthony Harkins began to keep off. They noted that Vance’s book sometimes relies on pervasive and harmful stereotypes about “hillbillies” and “rednecks,” often blaming all of Appalachia’s ills on what he believes are the social vices (feuding, heavy drinking, clansman retribution) of the Scots-Irish culture that dominates the region.
These sensible Appalachians taught me that nearly every well-established stereotype that exists on this world was created and cultivated by someone who stood to realize from its proliferation. Enterprising entities, including the “local color” literary movement of the late 1800s, the coal industry, politicians, and Hollywood producers, have all profited by telling a skewed, simplistic version of Appalachia that partitioned them from the mainstream.
And despite all of the progress we’ve made as a society in learning in regards to the harms of reductive stereotypes, the redneck or hillbilly trope seems still to be fair game, enduring unchecked within the American imagination. My friends and neighbors carry the heavy load of shame that comes with these stories. I’m afraid that Hillbilly Elegy, whether by intent or by accident, did too little to set the record straight.
My concern with Vance’s book is just not merely with what is alleged but with what’s left unsaid. The story of this region and its people can’t be told aside from the oppressive influence of extractive industries like coal and timber. In this manner, Barbara Kingsolver’s recent Pulitzer Prize–winning Demon Copperhead serves as a greater depiction of Appalachia.
Vance makes just a few passing references to the declining coal industry in his book. But for many hillbillies, coal is context—not a subtext or a footnote. Coal and timber destroyed the ecological base of a mountainous region that was formerly home to austere but thriving communities built on subsistence farming, hunting, and foraging practices. When the trees were felled to be sold or make way for mines, the soil eroded, and plant and animal life disappeared.
Coal firms made it in order that working for them was the one viable method to support a family. Unsafe working conditions led to countless deaths and injuries. Miners were paid in company scrip, and their families were forced to live in company housing and shop in company stores. This created a crushing monopoly, making it nearly inconceivable for Appalachians in coal country to construct any sort of wealth outside of the corporate.
When the demand for coal declined, many Appalachians were left with no jobs, no wealth, black lungs, and a devastated ecosystem. Moreover, coal firms continued to own hundreds and hundreds of Appalachian acres, at the same time as mines were shutting down. Because firms pay only a fraction of the taxes that residents pay on land, there was far less tax money pouring into Appalachian communities for infrastructure, education, and health care through the years.
Drug addiction features prominently in Vance’s book. But there’s little exposition on the predatory practices of drug firms that specifically targeted Appalachia for opioid sales within the Nineties. They selected Appalachia because they knew the region was filled with injured miners and blue-collar employees.
In the tip, one walks away from Vance’s story with the distinct impression that the misdeeds of his kin are unique and inherent to not his family, but to hillbillies typically. After railing against the “learned helplessness” he disdains in hillbillies, Vance writes of the harmful habits of his community: “These problems weren’t created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we will fix them.”
But a very inquisitive and compassionate heart can see that’s not entirely true. The lives of most individuals who struggle—including hillbillies—are frequently defined by each personal decisions and historic injustices, injustices that I hope aren’t beyond the knowledge or recollection of our legislators and lawmakers.
Hillbilly Elegy is actually an interesting account of 1 person’s experience. But if we’re to grasp a gaggle of individuals we imagine to be “the opposite,” we must lift the discourse from the anecdotal to the great, from the illustrative to the historically rooted.
The authors of Scripture tell meticulously detailed stories, resembling the lengthy narrative of Israel’s enslavement, emancipation, desert wanderings, political exploits, and eventual exile. But persistence is required if we’re to really understand the triumphs and tribulations of characters like Moses, David, Mary Magdalene, or the apostle Paul. The Bible shows us that an individual’s life is just not merely made up of the sum of their very own selections, but by a generations-long story that undergirds any given moment.
This long view of an individual or people group’s history inspires in us the grace we’d like to like our neighbors well. Jesus made it some extent to live alongside those he loved and to step into their stories. In Matthew 9, as Jesus traveled through towns and villages, he met people, healed them, and experienced their struggles. “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep and not using a shepherd” (v. 36).
In a world of political discourse that’s descending from divisiveness to chaos, from vitriol to violence, we’d like the patient, informed compassion that Jesus demonstrated. We need a capability for long stories and sweeping narratives. We must be willing to excavate an individual’s story, all the way in which right down to the deeper, historical, and ancestral tipping points that created the context for his or her life. In so doing, we higher understand why our fellow residents feel the way in which they feel and vote the way in which they vote. Facts must inform us, not stereotypes.
Appalachia is just not a monolith. Neither are Black urban neighborhoods or Midwestern farming communities. If we’re to like those that we perceive to be different from us, we should be willing to imagine that their stories sometimes transcend our meager understanding of them. I, for one, am ready for my hillbilly neighbors to not be typecast for another person’s gain. I’m able to internalize a greater story about my region and its people.
And so, perhaps, hillbillies don’t need elegies. Appalachia is just not dead. God is at work here, in small churches that also meet on hillsides and “hollers,” in faith-based drug rehab centers, in food pantries, and in nonprofits working to reclaim and repurpose pilfered ecology through the care of creation.
More than elegies, we’d like protest songs, just like the ones penned by the widows of coal miners and by Cherokee descendants weeping for the land’s lack of health. We need songs of lament, just like the ones sung by the Israelites in exile, just like the psalms, and just like the mournful banjo-picked tunes which have sounded from the front porches of those mountains for generations. The Bible can actually offer a tutorial on methods to write such songs.
And I pray candidate Vance remembers that, greater than a death dirge, hillbillies need a correct Appalachian ballad. We need a hopeful and triumphant chorus that reminds us that a brighter future is feasible if we rightly remember our past; a ballad that pays tribute to the resilience of a region that has all the time defied its most insidious stereotypes.
Amanda Held Opelt is a speaker, songwriter, and creator of the book A Hole within the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing.
