Summary
Vance begins Chapter Two by focusing on his grandfather, whom he refers to as “Papaw.” Vance also refers to Papaw as “hillbilly royalty,” as Papaw was a distant cousin of Jim Vance, who married into the Hatfield family and murdered Union soldier Asa Harmon McCoy, igniting the legendary family feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys.
Papaw was not the only heir to a tradition of frontier violence, as Mamaw’s own great-grandfather only became county judge after his son killed a member of his opponent’s family. Vance describes the pride he felt when reading about the latter incident in an old copy of The New York Times. “I doubt that any deed would make me as proud as a successful feud,” he writes.
After marrying as teenagers in Jackson, Mamaw and Papaw moved to Middletown, Ohio to escape the poverty that routinely trapped families whose fathers worked in the local coal mines. Vance notes, however, that a family friend told him Mamaw and Papaw actually moved because 14-year-old Mamaw became pregnant before they wed (not to mention before Papaw had broken off his relationship with another woman). As it turned out, the baby with which Mamaw was pregnant wouldn’t survive its first week.
Job prospects likewise motivated the move to Ohio, as Papaw got a job with a steel plant named Armco, which encouraged migration from rural Kentucky to the Midwest by offering family members of its employees spots at the top of the hiring list. This practice was common amongst industrial firms in the decades after World War II, and many Appalachian families would migrate along the “hillbilly highway” just like Vance’s. “My grandparents found themselves in a situation both new and familiar,” Vance writes. “New because they were, for the first time, cut off from the extended Appalachian support network to which they were accustomed; familiar because they were still surrounded by hillbillies.”
But so-called “hillbillies” who moved away from their homes and families, like Vance’s grandparents, earned stigmas that could not easily be shaken, both from their new communities and from those back home. Vance uses the phrase “too big for your britches” to describe the way families back home saw their family members who moved away, as those left behind often implicitly accused their family of abandoning them.
Even in Mamaw and Papaw’s new home, Middletown, people had preconceived ideas about the hillbillies that were flooding their town. Vance cites Jeffrey Ryan’s Appalachian Odyssey, which notes that the racial similarities between the newcomers and Middletown’s pre-existing community made the culture clash all the more disturbing: “These migrants disrupted a broad set of assumptions held by northern whites about how white people appeared, spoke, and behaved...Hillbillies shared many regional characteristics with the southern blacks arriving.” For example, to the shock of his more urban neighbors, one man who moved to Middletown kept chickens in his backyard, collecting their eggs and then eventually slaughtering them just as he had done back in Appalachia.
Despite the culture shock of raising children without the help of their extended family, as is customary in Appalachia, Mamaw and Papaw’s faith in the American Dream never failed. To some extent, they never managed to assimilate into Midwestern life, maintaining their strong roots in Jackson, but they had their hearts set on a better life for their children. Yet as Vance writes, “It didn’t quite work out that way.”
Analysis
In this chapter, Vance’s salient themes of home and family roots expand in the context of his grandparents’ move from Jackson, Kentucky to Middletown, Ohio. In moving from their families’ longtime home, Mamaw and Papaw encountered resistance from both sides and were hard-pressed to fully assimilate into the blue-collar, suburban culture of their new home. As a result, Mamaw and Papaw belong to neither community completely, made all the more ironic by the anecdotes that begin this chapter, which prove Mamaw and Papaw’s pedigree as “hillbilly royalty.”
Vance also continues to structure his chapters using anecdotes and family legends, and again, the authority of his family members as storytellers is challenged. For example, although Vance first delivers his account of his grandparents’ move to Middletown in detail, explaining that they sought to escape the poverty that routinely plagued families of coal workers, only to contradict that version of events by citing a family friend’s more scandalous account. In doing so, Vance again invokes hyperbole and the Appalachian oral storytelling tradition in which he is partly dealing himself.
Importantly, one such story is the legendary feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. This allusion on Vance’s part straddles the line between family legend and regional history, as it was Papaw’s cousin—albeit a distant one—who initiated the war between the families by killing the head of the McCoy family. Vance uses this story as a way of accessing one of the book’s larger themes: frontier justice, or more specifically, solving conflict by using violence rather than consulting the law.
Vance also introduces readers to the theme of the American Dream in this chapter, particularly by charting his grandparents’ journeys from “hillbilly royalty” all the way to blue-collar jobs in Middletown, even foreshadowing his own future matriculation at Yale Law School. Vance employs irony here as well, since his grandparents, who never attended high school, began their new life in Middletown with the utmost hope and belief in the American Dream, whereas their children, who would attend high school and theoretically enjoy better prospects than their hillbilly family could’ve imagined, would face addiction and economic misfortune.
Finally, by discussing the prejudice that his Mamaw and Papaw faced upon moving to Middletown, Vance touches upon another theme that will run the course of the book: race. Although Vance’s grandparents were both white, they exhibited qualities that their more conventionally civilized Middletown neighbors would associate with black Americans moving to the Midwest around the same time. As such, these Appalachian migrants occupied a complicated spot on the spectrum of race and ethnicity as it intersects with socioeconomic class, leaving people like Mamaw and Papaw uncertain about their place in their new community.
