Hillbillies Deserve More than an Elegy

On Monday, Donald Trump announced his pick for vice presidential candidate: J. D. Vance, the junior US senator from Ohio.

Some would say Vance has had a meteoric rise, from venture capitalist to best-selling author, from junior senator to VP candidate, all in less than a decade. Like most people in America, I was introduced to Vance through his book.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is Vance’s account of his tumultuous childhood growing up as the descendent of disadvantaged Appalachian hillbillies in Middletown, Ohio. It was critically acclaimed by pundits and politicians on both the left and the right and was later made into an Oscar-nominated film. Both book sales and movie streams surged this week with the news of Vance’s nomination.

When I originally read the book, I was immediately intrigued by Vance’s story. He and I are the same age, and, like Vance, I too am a product of the Appalachian diaspora. His grandparents left the mountains the same decade as mine, his to the Rust Belt of Ohio and mine to the sunshine state of Florida.

Our stories diverge because my family eventually found their way back to Appalachia. I’ve spent most of my life in rural East Tennessee and North Carolina. My immediate family also enjoyed many more economic and educational privileges than Vance. Additionally, I was blessed with more spiritual resources than Vance, who indicates his grandmother read the Bible and prayed but wasn’t involved in a local church like my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were.

But in the pages of Hillbilly Elegy, I met many characters I recognized, folks whose struggles echoed those of my neighbors, classmates, and extended family.

There is much to admire in Vance’s book: his resilience in the face of many adversities, his service to our country in the military, and his skill as a dynamic storyteller. When I first read the book back in 2017, I marveled at how well Vance was able to capture the angst of the region in which I grew up. It was like he was giving us a tour of the interior emotional world of the white working class.

And so, perhaps inadvertently, Vance became the unofficial spokesperson for “hillbillies,” and Hillbilly Elegy became the de facto textbook on Appalachia for the entire country.

Over the last eight years, however, I couldn’t help but notice that whenever I talk to my Appalachian neighbors about Hillbilly Elegy (both the book and the film), they grimace. I can see in their faces a mixed reaction to Vance’s story, like they feel both kinship and shame when they read it.

For one, the book has only 21 footnotes. Vance himself admits in the introduction that the book is not meant to be an academic evaluation of either the Rust Belt or Appalachia, that it is simply a memoir. But reading it now, after seeing the reactions of some of my neighbors, I’m concerned by the phenomenon around the book’s success.

Moreover, reading it as a Christian, as someone whose faith commands love of neighbor, I feel a deep conviction about the problematic ways we tell stories about who we perceive to be “the other” in this country. I’m also concerned about the ways people on the margins have internalized stories told about themselves.

After Vance’s book hit the bestseller list, Appalachian scholars, activists, and organizers like Elizabeth Catte, Meredith McCarroll, and Anthony Harkins began to push back. They noted that Vance’s book sometimes relies on pervasive and harmful stereotypes about “hillbillies” and “rednecks,” often blaming all of Appalachia’s ills on what he believes are the social vices (feuding, heavy drinking, clansman retribution) of the Scots-Irish culture that dominates the region.

These wise Appalachians taught me that almost every well-established stereotype that exists in this world was created and cultivated by someone who stood to gain from its proliferation. Enterprising entities, including the “local color” literary movement of the late 1800s, the coal industry, politicians, and Hollywood producers, have all profited by telling a skewed, simplistic version of Appalachia that partitioned them from the mainstream.

And despite all the progress we’ve made as a society in learning about the harms of reductive stereotypes, the redneck or hillbilly trope seems still to be fair game, enduring unchecked in the American imagination. My friends and neighbors carry the heavy load of shame that comes with these stories. I’m afraid that Hillbilly Elegy, whether by intent or by accident, did too little to set the record straight.

My concern with Vance’s book is not merely with what is said but with what is left unsaid. The story of this region and its people cannot be told apart from the oppressive influence of extractive industries like coal and timber. In this way, Barbara Kingsolver’s recent Pulitzer Prize–winning Demon Copperhead serves as a better depiction of Appalachia.

Vance makes a few passing references to the declining coal industry in his book. But for most hillbillies, coal is context—not a subtext or a footnote. Coal and timber destroyed the ecological base of a mountainous region that was formerly home to austere but thriving communities built on subsistence farming, hunting, and foraging practices. When the trees were felled to be sold or make way for mines, the soil eroded, and plant and animal life disappeared.

Coal companies made it so that working for them was the only viable way to support a family. Unsafe working conditions led to countless deaths and injuries. Miners were paid in company scrip, and their families were forced to live in company housing and shop in company stores. This created a crushing monopoly, making it nearly impossible for Appalachians in coal country to build any kind of wealth outside of the company.

When the demand for coal declined, many Appalachians were left with no jobs, no wealth, black lungs, and a devastated ecosystem. Moreover, coal companies continued to own thousands and thousands of Appalachian acres, even as mines were shutting down. Because companies pay only a fraction of the taxes that citizens pay on land, there has been far less tax money pouring into Appalachian communities for infrastructure, education, and health care over the years.

Drug addiction features prominently in Vance’s book. But there is little exposition on the predatory practices of drug companies that specifically targeted Appalachia for opioid sales in the 1990s. They chose Appalachia because they knew the region was full of injured miners and blue-collar workers.

In the end, one walks away from Vance’s story with the distinct impression that the misdeeds of his kin are unique and inherent not to his family, but to hillbillies in general. After railing against the “learned helplessness” he disdains in hillbillies, Vance writes of the harmful habits of his community: “These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.”

But a truly inquisitive and compassionate heart can see that’s not entirely true. The lives of most people who struggle—including hillbillies—are usually defined by both personal decisions and historic injustices, injustices that I hope are not beyond the knowledge or recollection of our politicians and lawmakers.

Hillbilly Elegy is certainly a fascinating account of one person’s experience. But if we are to understand a group of people we believe to be “the other,” we must lift the discourse from the anecdotal to the comprehensive, from the illustrative to the historically rooted.

The authors of Scripture tell meticulously detailed stories, such as the lengthy narrative of Israel’s enslavement, emancipation, desert wanderings, political exploits, and eventual exile. But persistence is required if we are to truly understand the triumphs and tribulations of characters like Moses, David, Mary Magdalene, or the apostle Paul. The Bible shows us that a person’s life is not merely made up of the sum of their own choices, but by a generations-long story that undergirds any given moment.

This long view of a person or people group’s history inspires in us the grace we need to love our neighbors well. Jesus made it a point to live alongside those he loved and to step into their stories. In Matthew 9, as Jesus traveled through towns and villages, he met people, healed them, and experienced their struggles. “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (v. 36).

In a world of political discourse that is descending from divisiveness to chaos, from vitriol to violence, we need the patient, informed compassion that Jesus demonstrated. We need a capacity for long stories and sweeping narratives. We need to be willing to excavate a person’s story, all the way down to the deeper, historical, and ancestral tipping points that created the context for their life. In so doing, we better understand why our fellow citizens feel the way they feel and vote the way they vote. Facts must inform us, not stereotypes.

Appalachia is not a monolith. Neither are Black urban neighborhoods or Midwestern farming communities. If we are to love those who we perceive to be different from us, we must be willing to believe that their stories sometimes transcend our meager understanding of them. I, for one, am ready for my hillbilly neighbors to no longer be typecast for someone else’s gain. I’m ready to internalize a better story about my region and its people.

And so, perhaps, hillbillies don’t need elegies. Appalachia is not dead. God is at work here, in small churches that still meet on hillsides and “hollers,” in faith-based drug rehab centers, in food pantries, and in nonprofits working to reclaim and repurpose pilfered ecology through the care of creation.

More than elegies, we need protest songs, like the ones penned by the widows of coal miners and by Cherokee descendants weeping for the land’s loss of health. We need songs of lament, like the ones sung by the Israelites in exile, like the psalms, and like the mournful banjo-picked tunes that have sounded from the front porches of these mountains for generations. The Bible can certainly offer a tutorial on how to write such songs.

And I pray candidate Vance remembers that, more than a death dirge, hillbillies need a proper Appalachian ballad. We need a hopeful and triumphant chorus that reminds us that a brighter future is possible if we rightly remember our past; a ballad that pays tribute to the resilience of a region that has always defied its most insidious stereotypes.

Amanda Held Opelt is a speaker, songwriter, and author of the book A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing.