Hillbilly Elegy Read Online Free Page B

escape Middletown.
    If the problems start in Jackson, it is not entirely clear where they end. What I realized many years ago, watching that funeral procession with Mamaw, is that I am a hill person. So is much of America’s white working class. And we hill people aren’t doing very well.

Chapter 2
    Hillbillies like to add their own twist to many words. We call minnows “minners” and crayfish “crawdads.” “Hollow” is defined as a “valley or basin,” but I’ve never said the word “hollow” unless I’ve had to explain to a friend what I mean when I say “holler.” Other people have all kinds of names for their grandparents: grandpa, nanna, pop-pop, grannie, and so on. Yet I’ve never heard anyone say “Mamaw”—pronounced ma’am-aw—or “Papaw” outside of our community. These names belong only to hillbilly grandparents.
    My grandparents—Mamaw and Papaw—were, without question or qualification, the best things that ever happened to me. They spent the last two decades of their lives showing me the value of love and stability and teaching me the life lessons that most people learn from their parents. Both did their part to ensure that I had the self-confidence and the right opportunities to get a fair shot at the American Dream. But I doubt that, as children, Jim Vance and Bonnie Blanton ever expected much out of their own lives. How could they? Appalachian hills and single-room, K–12 schoolhouses don’t tend to foster big dreams.
    We don’t know much about Papaw’s early years, and I doubt that will ever change. We do know that he was something of hillbilly royalty. Papaw’s distant cousin—also Jim Vance—married into the Hatfield family and joined a group of former Confederate soldiers and sympathizers called the Wildcats. When Cousin Jim murdered former Union soldier Asa Harmon McCoy, he kicked off one of the most famous family feuds in American history.
    Papaw was born James Lee Vance in 1929, his middle name a tribute to his father, Lee Vance. Lee died just a few months after Papaw’s birth, so Papaw’s overwhelmed mother, Goldie, sent him to live with her father, Pap Taulbee, a strict man with a small timber business. Though Goldie sent money occasionally, she rarely visited her young son. Papaw would live with Taulbee in Jackson, Kentucky, for the first seventeen years of his life.
    Pap Taulbee had a tiny two-room house just a few hundred yards from the Blantons—Blaine and Hattie and their eight children. Hattie felt sorry for the young motherless boy and became a surrogate mother to my grandfather. Jim soon became an extra member of the family: He spent most of his free time running around with the Blanton boys, and he ate most of his meals in Hattie’s kitchen. It was only natural that he’d eventually marry her oldest daughter.
    Jim married into a rowdy crew. The Blantons were a famous group in Breathitt, and they had a feuding history nearly as illustrious as Papaw’s. Mamaw’s great-grandfather had been elected county judge at the beginning of the twentieth century, but only after her grandfather, Tilden (the son of the judge), killed a member of a rival family on Election Day. 2 In a New York Times story about the violent feud, two things leap out. The first is that Tilden never went to jail for the crime. 3 The second is that,as the Times reported, “complications [were] expected.” I would imagine so.
    When I first read this gruesome story in one of the country’s most circulated newspapers, I felt one emotion above all the rest: pride. It’s unlikely that any other ancestor of mine has ever appeared in The New York Times . Even if they had, I doubt that any deed would make me as proud as a successful feud. And one that could have swung an election, no less! As Mamaw used to say, you can take the boy out of Kentucky, but you