Summary
While Vance admits he has few memories from before age seven, one of his most vivid is being told by his mother and sister that his father had decided to give him up for adoption. “It was the saddest I had ever felt,” Vance remembers. “After the adoption, [his father] became kind of a phantom for the next six years.” Vance’s mother remarried Bob Hamel, who would become Vance’s adoptive father but who irked Mamaw to no end. Although the couple’s marriage was initially peaceful, Vance imagines that Mamaw hated Bob because she saw herself in him. With Mountain Dew mouth and a trucking job, Bob was “a walking hillbilly stereotype,” and Mamaw had expected her children to marry “well-groomed middle-class folks.”
In an effort to erase any memory of Vance’s father, his mother changed his middle name from Donald (his father’s first name), to David, supposedly after his marijuana-smoking great uncle. Bev and Bob moved in near Mamaw’s house, and their jobs provided enough money for the family to live happily for a time. Vance’s mother encouraged him to read and learn as much about football as possible, particularly where strategy was concerned; she and Vance built models of football fields and used loose change to represent the players. “We didn’t have chess, but we did have football.” As a former salutatorian, Vance’s mother was, above all, a believer in the power of education, and Vance believes, “the smartest person [he] knew.”
On the other end of the spectrum was Mamaw, who encouraged Vance to learn the rules of fighting from a young age. “In the southwest Ohio of my youth, we learned to value loyalty, honor, and toughness,” Vance writes. Mamaw taught him never to start a fight, but to always end it if someone else starts it. There was one unofficial caveat to this, however: if someone insults your family, you may start a fight. Although Mamaw later took this back—and “Mamaw never admitted mistakes”—she also endorsed fighting when Vance was sticking up for the bullied.
Unfortunately, this fighting bled over into Vance’s home life. At age nine, his parents moved the family thirty minutes outside Middletown, devastating Vance (Mamaw and Papaw were his best friends) and exacerbating the already heated fights that had become a pattern for his mother and Bob. Like Mamaw, Bev never allowed herself to become a victim, and Vance recalls her not only initiating the violence at home but even during his youth league soccer games, pulling a woman’s hair when she insulted Vance’s playing. “I beamed with pride,” Vance recalls. Later, Vance would interfere in a physical fight between his mom and Bob, ending the fight by punching Bob in the face. He had been taught the hillbilly way of conflict resolution.
Vance’s grades began to slip in school, and he began to gain weight from the stress. He notes, however, that these violent family arguments were by no means uncommon amongst families he knew. “Seeing people insult, scream, and sometimes physically fight was just a part of our life,” he writes. Even so, Vance admits having a kind of love-hate relationship with the fighting, sometimes pressing his ear up against a wall to hear a fight better. “This thing that I hated had become a sort of drug.”
This all changed, however, when Vance arrived home from school one day to learn that his mother had intentionally crashed her car into a pole, possibly attempting suicide, or as Mamaw saw it, a staged distraction from her marital problems, the result of both debt and a years-long affair with a fireman she met at work. Either way, Vance’s mother divorced Bob and moved back to Middletown, one block closer to Mamaw than before. Nonetheless, Vance’s mother’s behavior worsened. She slapped or pinched her children, cycled through boyfriends, came home in the early hours of the morning, and said things for which Vance sometimes couldn’t forgive her. She apologized and promised that those things would never happen again. “They always did, though,” Vance writes.
It all came to a head the day that, while driving in the car with his mother, Vance made a comment that sparked her temper. She sped up, telling Vance she’d crash the car, killing them both. When she pulled over to beat him, he leaped out and took refuge at the nearest house he could find, telling the homeowner his mother was trying to kill him. Although his mother tracked him down, the homeowner had called the police, who arrived and arrested his mother. Arriving home that day, Vance remembers Papaw putting his head on Vance’s forehead and sobbing, the only time he’d ever see Papaw cry. Vance later lied in court, saying that his mother had not threatened him, but he lived at Mamaw’s house from then on. Mamaw promised her daughter that if she had a problem with the arrangement, “she could talk to the barrel of Mamaw’s gun.”
What Vance remembers more than anything about the experience was the difference between the way he looked and talked and the way the social workers, judge, and lawyers did. They all wore nice clothes and had “TV accents,” whereas his, as well as the other families in court that day, wore sweatpants and had frizzy hair. “Identity is an odd thing, and I didn’t understand at the time why I felt such kinship with these strangers,” Vance writes. He grew to understand this better soon when he visited his Uncle Jimmy in California, where everyone said he sounded like he was from Kentucky. Once again, Vance realized, the hillbilly culture had spread from places like Kentucky all across the Midwest.
Analysis
Much of Hillbilly Elegy is devoted to stories of familial violence—in fact, it is a Vance family legacy, with roots in the famous feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. But in this chapter, Vance goes from a spectator of this violence to a participant. Surely, having studied his family’s stories of frontier justice, not to mention being chased around by his switchblade-brandishing uncle as a child, normalized the idea of violence in young Vance’s mind. But here, Vance admits to having embraced this legacy by fighting in the schoolyard and at home, punching bullies and even his own stepfather. Thus, Vance builds on the theme of inherited legacies of violence, and whether one can choose to escape from those legacies. As a child, he suggests, he could not.
Vance also compares violence to “a sort of drug” in this chapter, thus drawing a comparison between his love-hate relationship with violence and addiction. This metaphor allows Vance to illustrate just how central violence was to his experience of childhood, and how unhealthy it was for young Vance. Whereas we learn early in the book how proud Vance is to be part of this legacy centered on frontier justice, we see here that whereas he experiences pride he also experiences shame and fascination, voyeuristically pressing his ear up against the wall so as to better eavesdrop on the punches thrown by his mother. Later in the book, of course, comparing violence to a drug will prove devastatingly apt, as his mother will fall victim to addiction—ironically, the only thing that will quell her violent tendencies.
Because of this confusing relationship with violence, young Vance begins to look in the mirror, noticing himself growing chubbier and less motivated. At the same time, he begins to look outward and, for the first time, notices the ways in which he’s different from the upper-class Midwesterners around him. He notices the “TV accents” of people in a courtroom and, on a visit to California, sees gay people in the Castro district of San Francisco. In contrast, he begins to notice things about him and his family that he took for granted: his clothes, his appearance, his accent, and his religion. For the first time, Vance is made aware of his own hillbilly-ness and feels “kinship” with those like him. Thus, Vance introduces the theme of identity, community, and belonging, the first step in his long journey towards realizing that it is alright to embrace some parts of one’s roots and discard others.
Vance’s memories—and thus his tone—in this chapter alternate between warm and devastating. One of the most charming images is that of the model football fields he built with his mother, using pennies and nickels to represent the players. Perhaps a symbol of his family’s nuanced economic situation, this image dramatically contrasts with those he associates with his mother’s temper. For example, the imagery of Vance running away from his mother through the “tall blades slapping [his] ankles,” is vivid and terrifying. Indeed, the contrast between Vance’s various memories of his mother draw out the complicated nature of their relationship, which is itself charged with their contrasting identity politics; while Vance’s mother was salutatorian when she got pregnant, Vance would go on to attend Yale. Elevated in importance by the way Vance begins the chapter—“I assume I’m not alone in having few memories from before I was six or seven”—these memories embody the love-hate relationship that Vance has for so many parts of his hillbilly identity.
Here again, the theme of the American Dream as imagined by his Mamaw and Papaw stalls and hemorrhages as Vance’s mother, who was supposed to achieve more than her parents, regresses and inherits their violent, irresponsible tendencies. We learn of Vance’s theory that Mamaw hates her daughter’s new husband precisely because he reminds her of herself: a hillbilly. Notably, even Vance’s mother reminds her husband of this, shouting in the heat of a bad fight, “‘Go back to your trailer park.’” Vance also makes a point of noting that his mother, salutatorian of her high school class, was the smartest person he knew. However, as we learn, this intelligence cannot save her from debt, marital failure, and domestic abuse inflicted on her children. Whereas Mamaw and Papaw moved from Appalachia to escape their family’s harsh legacy of violence, that violence follows them to Ohio; similarly, although their daughter was raised in a middle-class home that her parents’ family back in Kentucky couldn’t have imagined, even earning a job as a nurse, she ends up in court on domestic abuse charges. Thus, Vance illustrates how hillbilly legacies can coexist with the trappings of upward mobility, complicating the notion of the American Dream as the ultimate idyllic lifestyle that Mamaw and Papaw thought it was.
