Summary
In many ways, the Vance that entered his second year of law school was more successful than he’d ever imagined; with a summer job at the US Senate, a beautiful girlfriend, and a prestigious job offer in hand, things were looking up. However, Vance’s relationship with Usha was on the rocks. She accused him of becoming a “turtle” whenever they had a disagreement, retreating rather than addressing the conflict openly. When he tried to break things off with Usha, she told him that would be stupid, and he reverted to his mother’s way of handling disagreements: screaming. “I was a third-generation escaper,” Vance admits. Vance recalls running away from an argument with Usha and wandering the streets of DC. He later found her looking for him on the steps of Ford’s Theater. She told him she was worried, and that he had to learn how to talk to her, but she forgave him.
Vance tried going to a counselor to solve his issues, but it made him uncomfortable, so he went to the library instead. He learned about ACEs, or “adverse childhood experiences,” meaning “traumatic childhood events” that have consequences into adulthood. Common ACEs include being sworn at by parents, being pushed or assaulted by parents, having parents who were separated or divorced, living with an alcoholic or drug user, or living with someone who was depressed or attempted suicide. Vance learned that ACEs were more common in the working class, with 40 percent of people in that group having multiple ACEs (the average amongst non-working class people is 29 percent).
Vance actually administered a test used to measure the number of ACEs someone has faced to those closest to him. He found that those whose families were relatively peaceful scored a zero. At the other end of the spectrum was Lindsay, Aunt Wee, and Vance himself, and such people are more likely to suffer heart disease, obesity, anxiety, depression, and certain kinds of cancer. In fact, Harvard pediatricians have found that childhood trauma can actually rewire a child’s brain. Just as people respond to emergencies by choosing between “fight or flight,” children whose family life is chaotic can develop a hyperactive stress response. “The response is great ‘if you’re in a forest and there’s a bear,’” Vance writes, citing psychologist Nadine Burke Harris, “‘The problem is when that bear comes home from the bar every night.’”
He also found that such a prevalence of family-inflicted trauma is unique to the United States, where 9.2 percent of children are exposed to three or more maternal partners. Worse yet, these periods of familial unrest are vicious circles, with each new father figure, at least in Vance’s case, inviting more chaos yet. “Instability begets instability,” Vance writes. “Welcome to family life for the American hillbilly.”
Vance consulted with Lindsay and Aunt Wee, asking if they had experienced similar instincts to fight back with their partners. Despite their peaceful, successful marriages, both Lindsay and Aunt Wee admitted they’d both been on guard at first, with Aunt Wee even physically taking a fighting stance when her husband began speaking. Vance began to analyze what life with his mother and even Mamaw and Papaw had taught him: to distrust apologies and to use words as weapons.
He tried to unlearn these lessons, but it was an uphill battle at times, as Vance sometimes believed he couldn’t escape his destiny. “In my worst moments,” he writes, “I convince myself that there is no exit, and no matter how much I fight old demons, they are as much an inheritance as my blue eyes and brown hair.” This goal was particularly hard on Vance because, by the time he entered his second year of law school, he had all but convinced himself that he had risen above his circumstances and become more successful than his wildest dreams. Little did he know, the happy love life and home of which he’d dreamed would require constant attention and care.
Part of this journey required that Vance analyze his relationship with his mother, to whom he had not talked in months by this point. Vance’s Uncle Jimmy told him that he’d witnessed Papaw break down and cry once when Vance’s mother was asking for help, saying, “‘I’ve failed her...I’ve failed my baby girl.’” Vance points to this rare breakdown on Papaw’s part as an example of the question hillbillies ask their whole lives: how much of their misfortune is the result of their own poor choices, and how much of it is an inheritance from their culture and families? Vance was unsure how much sympathy to have for his mother, as she was located at the center of this very question. Though her parents fought like crazy her whole childhood, she also had successful siblings who had experienced the same chaotic times.
Vance largely blames his mother for her unfortunate situation. Near the end of his time at Yale, Lindsay called him to say that their mother had taken to heroin, a new drug for her, and would be going to rehab. In a way, Vance considered her more lost than ever upon receiving this news, but he also felt afraid for his mother. Though he was about to graduate from one of the country’s top law schools, he was left wondering if hillbillies can ever truly change. Vance remembers Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor speaking at his graduation, advising graduates that it was okay to be unsure about their future plans. Vance interpreted this not as career advice but as advice about love and family: he was unsure about whether his mother—and, by extension, he himself—could ever truly change.
Analysis
This chapter returns to a theme that is vital to the beginning chapters but that goes largely forgotten in the chapters immediately before this one: the inherited nature of familial violence. For roughly the first half of the book, Vance feels helpless in the face of the brutality he experiences at the hands of his mother, who in turn experienced the same violence in her childhood household. However, once he moves in with Mamaw, enters the Marines, and eventually reaches Yale, his mother’s temper feels far away, like a souvenir from days past. However, once Vance becomes more serious with his girlfriend, Usha, the hair-trigger temper he was encouraged to have as a child becomes a big problem. It is as if Vance is a jaguar transplanted from the harsh Serengeti to prim-and-proper New Haven. Whether Vance can ever shed the violent tendencies that seem almost a part of his family’s DNA is a question he explores deeply in this chapter.
Indeed, the analogy between Vance and a jaguar is not so far off from his own, as he cites a psychologist who compares parents with tempers to bears. The fight-or-flight instinct is great, she says, “‘if you’re in a forest and there’s a bear...The problem is when that bear comes home from the bar every night.’” Indeed, Vance’s relationship to his mother is not so different from this precise dynamic: he is an innocent bystander, while his mother can transform at any moment into a vicious predator, threatening even her own son. Of course, this metaphor breaks down when one considers that even Vance’s harsh mother once experienced the same violence as a child in Mamaw and Papaw’s chaotic house; one is not born a bear, but rather becomes one over time. Nevertheless, it is a powerful metaphor, as it characterizes the intense fear and anxiety that Vance carries with him into adulthood and which unfortunately plagues his relationship with Usha.
Interestingly, Usha herself compares Vance not to a bear, but to a turtle, as he often not only lashes out but retreats from conflict as a defense mechanism. In a way, these two metaphors provide the essence of the two extremes that threaten the success of hillbillies like Vance; one on hand, they fly off the handle when provoked, and on the other hand, they tend to resist this impulse by withdrawing from conflicts. Although it comes second-nature to Usha to hash out conflicts openly, Vance is a “third-generation escaper” and becomes a turtle in order to avoid transforming into a bear instead.
Owing to the cyclical nature of violence in his family, which Vance begins to realize is part of his hillbilly inheritance, Vance wonders whether hillbillies can ever truly change. This is perhaps the most central theme of the entire book: whether people like Vance are responsible for their mistakes and misfortunes when they are at such a disadvantage from the start. Of course, Vance’s success up to this point is directly linked to his responsible choices and ambition, and he is a shining example of how even working-class hillbillies can succeed in spite of the societal forces that hold them back. Even so, Vance reflects on his mother’s mistakes to try to understand his own unhealthy tendencies and mistakes; he finds himself ill-equipped to decide whether his mother deserves forgiveness or deserves the consequences of her poor choices.
Vance also develops Usha’s character in this chapter, as she constitutes a kind of foil to Vance’s irrational temper. Whereas Vance lashes out often, almost unaware of his own temper, Usha is not only collected and direct, but also patient with Vance’s struggle to contain his inherited rage. Indeed, the image of Usha waiting for Vance on the steps of Ford’s Theater is particularly heroic, and we root for her to help Vance through his journey towards emotional betterment.
Although this chapter contains plenty of uncertainty, it also revolves around Vance’s mission to make sense of his own behavior and legacy through research. Because of this, the chapter feels like a return to the social science-heavy structure that Vance uses earlier in the book. For example, Vance researches the ways in which trauma affects its victims, finding that children with numerous ACEs are more likely to experience adverse effects like anxiety, depression, and even cancer. This analytical form works for the reader much like it works for Vance: it infuses his irrational anger with logic and reason, and it therefore encourages us to believe that he can address his anger in a healthy way.
