Summary
“What I remember most is the fucking spiders,” Vance begins in his book’s final chapter. After learning that his mother had been kicked out of her house after stealing some of her new husband’s family heirlooms to buy prescription opiates, Vance decides to rent a room for her in a rundown, spider-infested motel. This was not an easy decision for Vance, who had all but written off the idea of bailing his mother out of trouble again.
At this point, Vance was in a good place, having married Usha and moved to Cincinnati with their two dogs, and having finally changed his—and thus Usha’s—last name to Vance, a name of which he could feel proud. However, Vance was also beginning to consider his mother’s own emotional wounds and explore the Christian faith he rejected as a child. He drove from Cincinnati back to Middletown to pay for the motel and give his mother a place to live.
Vance’s relationship with his mother is still strained, but he has found a balance between being angry at her for her continual mistakes and forgiving her based on her traumatic childhood. Still, people often ask him whether there’s a solution to the problems of his community, such as his mother’s. He believes that nothing can solve these problems for good, but that his mission should instead be to “‘put [his] thumbs on the scale a little for the people at the margins.’” In doing so, he might be able to help people in the ways he received help here and there from people like Mamaw, Lindsay, and even his mother. It is the people who receive positive interventions such as this that overcome their circumstances and thrive, Vance argues. To succeed despite these obstacles, one must have family or friends to count on and must have positive role models in order to see what’s possible.
According to a study by economist Raj Chetty, poor children in the South, the Rust Belt, and Appalachia struggle to be upwardly mobile, and actually many foreign countries seem to nurture this kind of meritocracy—supposedly the American Dream—much better than America itself. To explain this, Chetty found two factors to be predictive of socioeconomic stagnation: single parents and income segregation. In other words, if one grows up with a single parent and lives only amongst the poor, their chances at being upwardly mobile are slim.
One policy idea that Vance supports is to revamp social services. He remembers lying to the social workers handling his mother’s case when she was arrested for threatening to kill Vance, which he did in order to avoid being assigned a foster family (the courts wouldn’t recognize Mamaw as a capable guardian). If the law took into consideration what hillbilly families often look like—in other words, a large extended family of all-hands-on-deck caretakers—they might be more likely to find a good home for neglected children. Another proposal Vance makes is limiting Section 8 vouchers that encourage poor people to live all in one area, as living in a socioeconomically diverse area is proven to increase a poor child’s chances of upward mobility. Vance acknowledges, however, that policy cannot address everything holding people back, such as the conditioned belief amongst hillbilly boys that academic success is a feminine trait.
Perhaps most problematically of all, many of the traits that were so crucial to Vance’s survival as a child limit his success as an adult. He recalls a recent episode of road rage in which he was cut off by an irresponsible driver and nearly got out of his car to fight the man. Remembering that this was no longer acceptable behavior, Vance got back into his car, but as a child, this kind of hillbilly sense of justice gave Vance a sense of control in his chaotic life.
As he is now in a position to give back to his community, Vance often participates in Christmastime adopt-a-child donation drives, in which he shops for a child whose family cannot afford presents. Looking at his list, however, he balks at the items—what poor child needs pajamas? He remembers his family Christmases, for which his mother would always scrimp to buy the most impressive toys. Little did they know, upper-class families were buying their children books or even donating their Christmas gifts to the needy. Increasingly, these two groups, upper-class and working-class, occupy two drastically different worlds, and one has happier children, lower divorce rates, and longer life expectancies.
Vance cites as an example a teenager named Brian who reminded Vance of himself at that age, Like Vance, Brian’s mother was an addict, and she passed away suddenly. During a lunch, Brian was scared to ask Vance for more food and showed many gaps in his understanding of employment and education. Vance counts himself as lucky that he had people to step in when he was like Brian, and argues that it is only with the help of one’s community that they can succeed. “I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth,” Vance writes. But are we tough enough to do what needs to be done to help a kid like Brian?”
To close the book, Vance recalls a recurring nightmare he’d had as a child, in which he was chased by whatever demon he was facing at the time: his mother, a Marines drill instructor, or a mean teacher. Although Mamaw and Lindsay always escaped from the pursuer in the dream, Vance would wake up just as the villain was catching him. He hadn’t had the dream in years until a couple of weeks after graduating from law school. But in this version, he was the one chasing someone: his dog, Casper. He woke up, looked around, and saw his dogs next to the bed where he and his wife lay. Counting himself lucky that, even as the villain, he could now control his temper, he went back to sleep.
Analysis
In this final chapter of the book, Vance throws his reader directly into the bizarre setting in which he finds himself. Kicking off the chapter with “What I remember most is the fucking spiders,” Vance creates for the reader the same anxiety and repulsion he experiences while reserving a room for his mother at a sleazy roach motel. This setting comes as an intense shock since we have watched Vance escape his impoverished origins, a journey that has required not only personal strength but also cutting ties with his abusive, addicted mother. Because of this, Vance’s brusque style and drastic change of setting—from Yale to a dirty motel in rural Ohio—at the start of his final chapter catches the reader by surprise, perhaps even scaring the reader into believing that Vance has made some kind of fatal mistake landing him back at the epicenter of his hillbilly troubles. In this way, it is a very effective way of reminding the reader that, no matter how high Vance climbs, his hillbilly identity is never far behind, trying to tear him down.
Although shocking, this introduction is a fitting one, since Vance’s objective in this chapter and conclusion is partially to catch the reader up on his life as it currently stands. As a result, Vance alternates between trying to make sense of his past and looking to the future. A case in point is Vance’s account of a teenager he mentors, Brian. Similar to Vance in more ways than one, Brian badly wants to overcome the many obstacles in his life, such as a mother who passed away due to her addiction. Thus, Brian serves as a parallel to Vance, who describes Brian as a younger version of him, only without the advantages that Vance thanks for his success, such as a loving grandmother to serve as his “safety net.” Vance poses a rhetorical question to his fellow hillbillies: can they save children like from the dark future that he believes is on the horizon? As a near mirror copy of Vance, Brian serves as a crucial example of parallelism in the text.
Vance invokes a metaphor used by a friend of his who works at the White House to illustrate this point. “‘The best way to look at this might be to recognize that you probably can’t fix these things,’” his friend says. “‘But maybe you can put your thumb on the scale a little for the people at the margins.’” This metaphor is a powerful demonstration of what allowed Vance to excel in the face of harsh circumstances: a little help from his family and community. Vance continually claims that Mamaw and Lindsay were the only ones standing between him and life as a young father or convict. This crucial help from his family was the figurative “thumb” on the scale weighing Vance’s future, which hovered too persistently between success and failure. Vance invokes this metaphor to illustrate how vital the help of one’s community can be to one’s success.
Vance’s tone in these chapters is a unique one, as it hovers somewhere between resilient and bleak throughout. On one hand, Vance readily admits that he doesn’t have all the answers for how to solve the plight of the hillbilly, since his own success boiled down to both luck (his loving Mamaw) and good choices (joining the Marines). But on the other hand, he does propose several policy changes, such as limiting Section 8 vouchers and changing the definition of “family” that can take in a child who would otherwise be sent to foster care. Overall, the tone in which Vance closes the book is one that characterizes his entire book—despite so many indications to the contrary, he is hopeful that his fellow hillbillies will hear his elegy and ask themselves how they can help kids like Brian.
To close the book, Vance recounts a recurring nightmare he has experienced throughout his life. In the nightmare, Vance is chased by whatever villain seems relevant at the time, from his mother to an angry drill instructor. However, this time, he dreams that he is chasing his dog, Casper, with whom he lost his temper earlier in the evening. This reversal is a powerful one and indeed Vance’s worst nightmare—that he has become the kind of monstrous, brutal man he feared as a child. However, his reaction to the dream is more powerful than the dream itself. Comforted by the loving wife and dogs at his side, he goes back to sleep. Thus, this dream serves as a powerful symbol of Vance’s real triumph over the course of the book: gaining a sense of control over his own life. As Vance states several times throughout the book, this perceived lack of control is the source of the hillbilly’s problems; one cannot possibly be hopeful about the future if one feels that one will fail no matter what. Vance, for his part, has realized how vital his optimism and sense of agency is to his own success. He only hopes his fellow hillbillies will realize the same thing.
