Hillbilly Epithet: A Comment on Prejudices and Caricatures

Hillbilly Hot Dogs, a roadside hot dog stand located on West Virginia State Route 2 north of Huntington, West Virginia. The photo was taken on 8 July 2006. Photo by Youngamerican at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The senior faculty member at a student-faculty retreat introduced me to the student body as a hillbilly, the resident hillbilly. It was an interesting contrast he was drawing, so I didn’t take offense. “Here he is, a man who can stand in the presence of Queen Elizabeth without putting a foot wrong, but also run barefoot in the pine forests of the Appalachian Mountains. Which one will he be today? The cultured or the hillbilly?” Indeed.

As a junior faculty member, adjunct, as these days seem to relegate all of us less-ambitious talents, I could not offer a riposte. The senior is from England, but not London, nor any of the cosmopolitan cities offering their wares to European sophisticates, but from the north of England, not quite in North Yorkshire, but not too far south of Scarborough. That part of England has traditionally served as the butt of prejudicing and caricaturing jokes, from London’s anxious identity crisis, and I know them fairly well, but I held my tongue. Besides which, the thrust got a good laugh from the students, and who am I to bristle at a little good-natured ribbing?

After I gave my presentation, he asked, in front of the student body, if I wouldn’t punch it up for publication in the circular, which was a great compliment, especially seeing as how I did bring both my lyre and my banjo to my words, some acculturated wisdom for the courts of great men and women along with a little horse sense to dance with the asterisms. It is an odd caricature to live up to, I must say, especially when one considers William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Mark Twain, Truman Capote, among others, Vanderbilt University, Tulane, Duke, among others, the Redstone Arsenal (one of my favorite places on earth), that when I left the Southeast and moved to central Illinois, people were surprised that I could read and write.

“Do you like punk rock?” someone asked me when I was still new. “Yes,” I said. “I absolutely love Dead Kennedys and Subhumans, but I think right now 7 Seconds is my favorite band.” There was a slight pause. “Oh, that’s really cool, man. My favorite punk band is Metallica.” I remember hunching down into my jacket and thinking I’d never be warm again. When punk rock finally pushed through into the environs of Springfield, Illinois, as early as 1990, my friends were astonished that anyone from Appalachia could have had access to this world before they did. And they all pronounced Washington as “Warshington.” The hicks.

Even so, when I was a little boy, tucked up in the hills above Mayberry, USA, two years passed which were a little hairy. My dad’s anxieties were sky-high with the realization he could not feed us by himself. It was an intersection of two travesties: heartless people and a capriciously changing tax code. One year Dad had to bow his head and shuffle his feet into the government man’s office to beg for food, and they obliged with a big hunk of cheese and some dry beans. The next year he was ineligible (that capricious tax code prejudiced against the self-employed), so there was no cheese or dry beans. Some people from church, however, heard about it, and from the kindness of their hearts or the compulsion of the Gospel, they set aside food for us: tomatoes in plenty, string beans, turnip greens, chili peppers (to pickle and serve with the turnip greens after Mom canned them), sweet potatoes, and a side of salt pork. I almost forgot the okra, fried in a large iron skillet, in cornmeal batter, as God intended. Someone opened his property to Dad so that we could fish whenever we pleased, so we had plenty of trout and bass and bluegill to eat.

At the same time (2^nd Grade), I was reading selections from Yeats, Shakespeare, Twain, Wordsworth, Longfellow, the greats of English literature, in school. This was a normal elementary school in Appalachia. I will not go so far as to say that I understood any of it, but I was learning it, learning them, by heart, so that I could recite a sonnet by John Donne, and I could tell you what a sonnet was, and I could write one myself, poorly, how to use imagery and comparison (“the clouds are like cotton”), and so on and so forth. This was unremarkable to us, even to us who were wearing clothing our mothers made for us out of seconds from the fabric store (you could get old issues of Simplicity for free, if you knew where to look, and Mom did). One of my friends—I just googled him—from that same school is now a brain surgeon in the UNC medical system. I was surprised: when we were on the swings together he expressed interest only in astrophysics. The two of us sat cheek-by-jowl to a kid whose sole purpose in life was to become an “18-wheeler,” a truck driver. Yes, Appalachia. Hillbilly.

I moved away in 1989. I don’t know what it’s like now. Casual observation says that many things have changed, and Google Maps shows that the entire hillside I grew up on has been scraped by hurricanes and earth movers to make way for a burgeoning population. What once was an isolated mountain hollow is now the outskirts of Charlotte. Or maybe Winston-Salem, I’m not sure which.

I have a memory, though, during those lean, frightening years in the late 70s and early 80s. Our church put on a show to go along with the annual square dance, which wasn’t even a fund-raiser. It was just a party. They essentially copied their favorite bits from the television show Hee-Haw and performed them, ably, I recall. There was a fellow who bore exact resemblance to Grandpa Jones, and a lady named Lucille who looked just as much like Miss Minnie Pearl, and they served as emcees, while the rest of us sang and told dumb country jokes and acted out the skits. It was a hoot, and then we danced the square, first the children. It is inculcated in me. The punk rock courses through my veins, but my heart is the Blue Moon of Kentucky and it beats to the rhythm of Outlaw Country.

This is the tie to England, the eruditest of the nations, the island of the genteel conquerors. The Scots-Irish settlers of that region were bound, almost by forged steel, and unwillingly, to the north of England, and, thereby, to the entirety of English high culture, its attitudes and values, and the senior professor recognized it. He has his own reputation as one who has memorized every step of the minuet, but also having his uncouth moments of bloodcurdling, vicious, temperamentalism (he would say in his wonderfully piping adenoidal voice, “Now, David, not temperamentalism, but irascibility.”), an unleashing of pent-up humanity, just as one might observe of that old Appalachia, which now despairs for its existence, as you can hear in their old songs, which are sung new, now, but out of context. I had quoted Yeats in my presentation, which, unsurprisingly, surprised the students, at least the new ones, and E.M. Forster. He said, “Very lovely, David, and, if I may, in the same way that my students sometimes do not understand my lectures, I understand some of your lectures when others do not.” He’d had a beer, but you understand the logic.

I laughed out loud at that because it is absolutely true. “You’ve found me out,” I said, a hillbilly stepping lightly in the presence of royalty. “You’re too clever for me.”