Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture

“Poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, and sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family.”

Vance illustrates that poor, working-class conditions have been part of hillbilly culture for its entire existence. This is important to contemporary working-class white communities, and to Vance, due to recent collective pessimism and cynicism among his people—beliefs that, according to Vance, do much to hold Greater Appalachia back from happiness and success.

“My people were extreme, but extreme in the service of something—defending a sister’s honor or ensuring that a criminal paid for his crimes. The Blanton men, like the tomboy Blanton sister whom I called Mamaw, were enforcers of hillbilly justice, and, to me, that was the very best kind.”

Vance shows that hillbilly law and justice trump all else, both for himself and his family, and his community. Geographically isolated, poor, and family-centric, Appalachians possess a code of honor that defines who they are, much more than any external, societal forces. A central tenet of this code is defending family members from all outsiders.

“It was not simply that the Appalachian migrants, as rural strangers ‘out of place’ in the city, were upsetting to Midwestern, urban whites. Rather, these migrants disrupted a broad set of assumptions held by northern whites about how white people appeared, spoke, behaved […] the disturbing aspect of hillbillies was their racialness. Ostensibly, they were of the same racial order (whites) as those who dominated economic, political, and social power in local and national arenas. But hillbillies shared many regional characteristics with the southern blacks arriving in Detroit.”

Vance takes this quote from the book Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration, a 2000 text about the mass out-migrations of Appalachians to other parts of America. Vance spends a portion of the memoir illustrating how it was difficult for his grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, early on in Ohio due to cultural differences between white communities in Appalachia and the Midwest. At various points in his memoir, Vance likens these migrations and cultural differences to those of African Americans.