The Mountains Call Me Home

Responding to criticism of JD Vance's novel 'Hillbilly Elegy'

In Suttree, possibly the greatest novel ever set in the Appalachian Mountains, Cormac McCarthy tells the story of a fisherman living on a houseboat on the Tennessee River. The novel focuses on themes of loss, loneliness, and the struggle for identity. In particular, it describes the poverty, lack of education, isolation, and violence of many Appalachian communities. The reader is left with a terrible heartache, having met such beautiful yet broken people who are “mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark’s total restitution could appease.”

These are a folk who have learned to live “in the darkness of God’s plan,” thriving in places where “flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream.”

Part of what the author captures in this book is the emptiness that permeates so many of these mountain towns. In the early 1600s, the British began to colonize the Irish province of Ulster. During this time, poor Scottish planters came to Ulster looking for arable plots. But when the Irish retaliated against the English for being massacred and driven off their ancestral lands, the Scots of Ulster were almost wiped entirely out of existence. They survived the conflict only to face further oppression in the late 1600s on the basis of their Presbyterian faith. As a result, hundreds of thousands fled to the British colonies in America where they became known as Scotch-Irish.

As Brandeis history professor David Hackett Fischer writes in his book Albion’s Seed, North America was settled by four major waves of English-speaking immigrants. Puritans fled eastern England to settle in Massachusetts Bay, Royalist elites and their indentured servants left southern England for Virginia, Quakers from northern England and Wales resettled in the Delaware Valley, and people from the borderlands of northern Britain and northern Ireland moved to the American backcountry.

The backcountry folk were the poorest of the four before they left home and remained the poorest when they settled in the New World. The major industries of the Appalachian Mountains included timber, hunting, coal mining in places like West Virginia and Kentucky, and in some places, salt production.

During the 1700s, the frontier regions of the Appalachia were among the poorest in the colonies and later the nation. The settlers who moved to these mountains lived a subsistence lifestyle. During the 1800s, the rural South suffered severe economic hardship due to the ravages of the Civil War, but the Appalachian Mountains remained one of the poorest region in the country as their rugged terrain limited urban or even agricultural development. By the early 1900s, coal provided more than half the nation’s energy, yet still quality of life did not improve for the coal mining communities of the Appalachian Mountains. This is because mine operators exploited their workers such as by docking them for sending up imperfect coal or paying miners in scrip (a kind of currency that was only good in company stores).

To this day, the Appalachian states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Alabama are among the poorest in our nation. The Appalachian region has higher mortality rates than the nation in seven of America’s leading causes of death including heart disease, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), injury, stroke, diabetes, and suicide. The median household income in rural Appalachian counties is $48,879 or more than $10,000 less than in rural countries in the rest of the country. This is the poorest and most beleaguered region in America.

Near the end of the book, when his friend says he thinks it’s the end of the world, Suttree laughs and says, “Do you think the world will end just because you’re cold?”

“It ain’t just me,” his friend replies. “It’s cold all over.”

This simple reply just about sums it up. Later, Suttree asks a ragpicker what happens after death and the ragpicker replies, “Don’t nothing happen. You’re dead.”

Suttree then asks what the ragpicker would say if he ever met God. The ragpicker replies that he’d ask, “What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldn’t put any part of it together.”

Life in the mountains can be like this. For many, it’s only this. A confusing, painful, thin existence.

Suttree asks the ragpicker, “What do you think he'll say?”

The ragpicker spits and wipes his mouth. “I don’t believe he can answer it. I don’t believe there is an answer.”

This is the resigned stoicism of the Appalachian, a people who fled from slaughter and persecution overseas only to find crushing poverty in America. Not to mention being brutally exploited, coldly forgotten, and mocked for their suffering.

This week, former President Trump announced J.D. Vance as his pick for vice president. Without getting into Vance’s political viewpoints, I think it’s interesting and disturbing that people are attacking him for having written the book Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir growing up in Middletown, Ohio, and the Appalachian values of his Kentucky family. It is, as the subtitle says, “a memoir of a family and culture in crisis.”

In one passage, Vance captures the sense of resigned stoicism mentioned above when he writes, “Whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, The feeling that our choices don’t matter.”

The book is not as beautiful nor as heavy as what McCarthy offers, but it is more intimate, and in that sense, the suffering it communicate sings more sharply. I could not read the book without thinking of my own youth growing up in the Appalachian Mountains. Every few pages I turned, I was reminded of the appalling anguish that is on full display in some communities. And that was before the opioid crisis hit.

Don’t get me wrong. The Appalachian Mountains are among the most beautiful pieces of land in the world. And the people of the Appalachia are some of the wisest, kindest, and most interesting you’ll ever know. But it’s important to note the insane levels of suffering they have endured, and the zero fucks our country has afforded them. This is especially important to keep in mind now, in the wake of Trump’s announcement, as people are piling on Vance for having written his book. As the author of the blog Ask a Korean, a leftist named T.K. who now lives in the States, writes:

Man doing nothing but writing bullshit about his own life and leveraging that into Senator and VP nominee is peak white privilege.

And yes I thought Hillbilly Elegy was nothing but racist bullshit the moment it came out thank you very much. White people were just having a ball with their one chance to whine about how hard their life was so they can go and be full on fascists.

As I said in my response to T.K., the most racist sentiment imaginable is that you should suffer or die because of your race. But the second most racist sentiment imaginable is that the suffering of one race or another is basically a joke or just “whining.” All people of all races suffer, and all people of all races deserve compassion. One of the reasons Trump has appeal among certain white Southern voters is because he pushes back against the deeply racist rhetoric that poor white Americans are inherently bad or not deserving of empathy.

Trust me when I tell you, the good people of Appalachia have been breaking themselves in half, sacrificing their lives for country and kin, and listening to exactly this kind of disgusting rhetoric for centuries. What Hillbilly Elegy did was to humanize the struggles of a poor Appalachian family and the conditions of Middletown, Ohio, where per capita income is $19,773.

I went to high school in the Appalachia and I know those struggles. The pain and suffering that my white friends endured was just as real as the pain and suffering my black friends endured. Yet we have sadly fallen into the practice of abstracting human beings into racial classes to the extent that some of us have become blind to people’s humanity if they happen to have the wrong skin color. I utterly reject this racist and supremacist worldview and seek to judge people by the content of their character. And I think if one reads a book like Hillbilly Elegy and all they have to say about it are some derogatory things about white people suffering, then that’s probably a decent gauge of their character.

When I posted some of these comments online recently, a reader named Blue Ridge Barbarian shared her own experiences. Moved by what she had to say, I told her, “The mountains in those parts are God’s country.” To which she replied, “Wherever I go, the mountains shall always call me home.” And so, with all the discourse on J.D. Vance and his book, the discrimination white mountain folk receive, and the degree to which our society condones it, I leave you with her thoughts.

I was born and raised in the Appalachian region of Virginia. I have experienced more hatred towards my white skin and judgement due to the mountains I come from, in the last several years, than I ever thought possible. I lost a loved one to a racist muderer that bragged about executing him because he was white. I’ve been accused of racism for politely rejecting a black man romantically and he openly had a crude fetish for white women. He wanted vengeance. I’ve even had a few Native American coworkers threaten me for things they percieved me to be guilty of. I’ve been blatantly told by a former boss that I deserve to be discriminated against due to my whiteness. I’ve had my Appalachian accent mocked. All I ever did was accept every single one of these people. I never expected any of it.

I come from rough stock and some of my ancestors did evil things. Some of my relatives are terribly racist. But, my mountain people are stronger and kinder than the mainstream media and biased critics will ever care to know. We are not stupid. To be willingly stupid is a choice, not a racial trait.

I’ve met some truly evil people of every color. And I still have a hard time healing from the trauma my family went through because of the hate we internalized towards ourselves. I’m not claiming I’ve had it worse than anyone else. I know there’s a long history of discrimination throughout America. I’m not sure how so many people don’t see how hypocritical they are by judging and monolithing us.

The truth always comes out. So, I’ll take the hate as a compliment from now on.