Summary
Vance had always considered his older sister, Lindsay, his only true sibling, despite the numerous half or step-siblings that his mother’s frequent marriages and divorces produced. Although he remembers the day he found out that Lindsay was also technically his half-sister as “one of the most devastating moments of [his] life,” Vance credits Lindsay with raising him during the many moments in which their mother was absent or abusive. Lindsay’s dream was modeling, and Vance tells the story of the time the whole family drove to a hotel where a modeling competition was being held, only to find out that, despite Lindsay’s success, they could not afford to advance to the next stage of the competition held in New York City.
After a car ride home that was fraught with crying, slaps, and harsh words, Lindsay trudged upstairs, wearing “the pain of a defeat known by only a person who experiences the highest high and the lowest low in a matter of minutes.” That night, Vance asked Mamaw if God loved them, and Mamaw cried, wounded by his words in light of her devout Christian faith. Although Mamaw hated organized religion, she believed that God “never left our side” and always had a plan. But in a world where his sister’s dreams, so achievable for a moment, could come crashing down in minutes, Vance wanted to know if this belief could guarantee “some deeper justice, some cadence or rhythm that lurked beneath the heartache and chaos.”
On his eleventh birthday, Vance realized that Bob, his adoptive father, would no longer take his calls, the icing on the cake that was a “long line of failed paternal candidates.” Although Vance guesses that his mother sought companionship in these men, he also believes that she was mostly looking for positive male role models for her children. Instead, he and Lindsay learned that men merely drink beer, scream, and eventually leave. Further complicating things, losing Bob as his father meant Vance no longer identified with his last name.
One day, however, Vance’s mother called his biological father, who asked if Vance would like to spend time with him. “In the same summer that my legal father walked out of my life, my biological one walked back in,” Vance writes. Little did he know, Vance had more in common with his father than he realized: a life in both Ohio and Kentucky, where he was mostly raised by his grandparents. Not to mention that the home Vance’s father had made for himself in Kentucky, where Vance would visit him now, was serene, with a pond, cows, horses, frogs, and chickens. Vance had learned about his father mostly through Mamaw and the rest of the family, who had told him that Don Bowman was extremely religious and abused Vance’s mother. But this looked nothing like the father that Vance got to know at an older age. Now, he was married with children, attended church regularly, and never raised his voice.
Vance links this to a well-documented sociological phenomenon: that “religious folks are much happier” and more successful because church tends to promote positive habits. According to Vance, this kind of regular attendance at church is rarer than you’d think in the Bible Belt; people say they attend church more than they actually do in the South. Thus, the people in this region who need the social support that church provides don’t attend.
Vance, for his part, grew to love his father’s faith, throwing away his Black Sabbath CD’s and engaging in online chat rooms to challenge evolutionists. He also began to spend a lot of time with his father, learning that the real reasons behind his father giving him up for adoption were more complicated: namely, Don worried about the custody battle tearing young Vance apart. Thus, he asked God for three signs that adoption was the right choice for his son. Vance continued to resent this choice, but for the first time, he understood part of his father.
As he grew more involved in his father’s church, Vance noticed himself distrusting aspects of society that he hadn’t before, like his Uncle Dan, who believed in evolution, or the music of Led Zeppelin. “Even Mamaw fell from favor because her religious didn’t conflict with her affinity for Bill Clinton.” When Vance was eight or nine, he convinced himself he was gay while listening to a Christian radio broadcast; at the time, Vance liked his friend Bill more than he liked the girls in his class. Mamaw assuaged this belief but also told Vance that it was alright if he was gay: “God would still love you.” Looking back, Vance sees how unnecessarily scary the world seemed to him while he attended church with his father and notes that this type of fear-mongering is ironically responsible for the poor retention rates of evangelical churches.
Analysis
Beginning as it does with the departure of Vance’s stepfather, this chapter provides the climax of a struggle that Vance has encountered throughout the book: that of his own name. Although his mother changed his last name to Hamel when she married, Bob’s departure left Vance with too many names and little significance. His biological father’s name was Bowman, his sister’s was Lewis, Mamaw and Papaw’s was Vance, and his mother took the last name of each husband as they married (and inevitably divorced) her. Not to mention that Vance’s mother had changed his middle name from Donald, his father’s first name, to David, supposedly after Mamaw’s brother (though Vance thought this was a stretch). This ties into an existing motif in Vance’s story: hillbilly dialect. Earlier in the book, Vance describes the dialect of Appalachia, which pronounces “hollow” like “holler,” and substitutes “Mamaw” and “Papaw” for grandmother and grandfather. Overall, these offshoots of “proper” American English, even as they demonstrate how specific “hillbilly culture” is, define part of Vance’s otherness, which he will chart throughout the book.
Similarly, this chapter marks Vance’s realization that his sister, Lindsay, is merely his half-sister, thus raising the theme of the meaning of family. It is a theme that defines this chapter in particular, since it also marks the realization that Bob, Vance’s stepfather, no longer wishes to occupy that role, as well as the happier realization that Vance’s biological father wants a second chance. Looking back, Vance realizes that one’s true family is defined not by close blood relation, but by love and caring. Thus, despite Vance’s relatively complex family tree, he has a solid trunk: his Mamaw and his sister.
Complicating Vance's family tree even further is his return to his biological father. At several points in the book, Vance refers to his mother's numerous partners as his "revolving door" of father figures. This expression becomes literal when, "in the same summer that [his] legal father walked out of my life, [his] biological one walked back in." Thus, this metaphor for the relentless family upheavals that Vance struggles to navigate demonstrates just how fragile his sense of family stability is at this point.
Vance also raises a theme that is key to his journey throughout the book: maintaining a clear identity in the face of multiple opposing forces. Vance describes his biological father as a complex and contradictory man; although devoutly Christian and a family man, Donald gave him up for adoption when Vance was a child. Thus, Vance's father is full of contradictions, not unlike Vance's mother, whom he describes as almost bipolar, alternating between caring for Vance and threatening to kill him. As a result, Vance struggles throughout the book with his search for a distinct identity, particularly as it relates to his place in his family. He suffers in the face of this question during this chapter—particularly as it relates to his father's religious beliefs, since Vance is afraid to have a frank conversation with his father about faith.
One of the metaphors that Vance invokes serves to characterize his chaotic, unstable life at this time quite well. He writes that he sought "some cadence or rhythm that lurked beneath the heartache and chaos." Here, Vance implicitly compares his own life to an arrhythmic heartbeat or cadence and describes his longing for a steady beat or rhythm. This search for a steady, measured—perhaps above all, predictable—rhythm will define Vance's journey going forward.
