J.d. Vance's Message in Hillbilly Elegy

The book, “Hillbilly Elegy” by J.D. Vance begins by explaining that he is not a politician, just simply somebody who grew up in the working class of Appalachia, who found a way to achieve upward mobility against the statistical odds. This indicated that as the grandson of hillbillies, and the son of a drug addict, he would fail to graduate high school and likely fall into drug addiction and or domestic violence. His ability to avoid this fate is not the reason that he wrote Hillbilly Elegy. He wrote this book so that people could understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children.

It is explained that hillbillies descend from Scottish/Irish Americans, who migrated to the United States from Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. For these people, poverty is very prevalent and hardly anybody earns graduates from college. Like the relatives of the author, many Scottish/Irish Americans are found in the hills of Kentucky. Although Vance himself spent most of his childhood in Ohio, he calls Jackson, Kentucky as his actual home. This is because his grandparents spent the majority of their lives in Jackson. Vance illustrates the importance of the hillbilly oral storytelling traditions around his town. He writes about his great uncles who he idolized as a child. They used to spend time together and tell him many different types of stories. These stories were very inappropriate for young ears, but Vance was intrigued by the “hillbilly justice” each story told. The tradition of storytelling often emphasized the hillbilly “values” in the community of loyalty and honor. Vance’s Uncle once told a story about a man named “Big Red” who insulted his mother. After warning Big Red to take back what he said, his uncle beat him up and cut the man up with an electric saw. The man did not die, but he never went to law enforcement because “he knew what it meant to insult a man’s mother.” Speaking more on the importance of honor and loyalty in hillbilly culture, Vance discusses the many troubles of Kentucky and Appalachia as a whole. Even today drug addiction is highly common throughout the working class, along with unhealthy lifestyles. Looking for more, Vance’s grandparents moved from Kentucky to Ohio, where his grandfather took a job at Armco Steel. They got married as teenagers in Kentucky in 1947. They were two members of well-known hillbilly families. The young couple moved to Ohio because his grandfather’s only other option was to work in the Kentucky coal mines as a prospect that would bring his family little money to provide. His grandparents had three children, Uncle Jimmy, Aunt Wee, and his mother, Bev. Unfortunately his grandfather was an alcoholic. His grandmother refused to allow her husband to continue his chosen lifestyle, and after many arguments she threatened to kill him if he ever came home drunk again. When he tested her several nights after, she poured gas on him while he slept on the couch and set him on fire. Aunt Wee found out and rushed to put the fire out. His grandfather eventually quit drinking years after.

Vance states that children who witness the kind of domestic abuse that his grandparents were involved in are statistically more likely to lead difficult lives themselves. His uncle Jimmy and Aunt Wee managed to make it out of childhood to start normal lives. Unfortunately, his mother started a life of drug addiction and domestic abuse. She gave birth to Vance in her second marriage, which fell apart soon afterward. Her next husband adopted Vance and was a relatively kind man. The family achieved some stability for a while, during which Vance attended school and fell in love with reading. Even though his mother was not perfect, Vance admits that she believed deeply in education and worked to show this to her children.

His grandparents were a very big part of Vance’s life, since they very close. This calm stretch ended when his mother and step father decided to move away from Middletown because they felt that his grandparents were overstepping some boundaries. Vance was very sad to move away from his grandparents. To make things worse, the move started some domestic disputes between his mother and step father. Vance states that his mother and step father’s arguments were his first image of how to solve marital disagreements. Resulting from this, he began to do poorly in school because he was staying up late and listening with his sister to his mother and step father’s arguments.

One day, Vance came home from school to find that his grandmother had come for an unexpected visit. She came because Vance’s mother had attempted to kill herself after a particularly large argument with his step father. The argument was over his mother having an affair and demanding a divorce. Although his mother drove her car into a telephone pole, she still survived. His grandmother thought that she had tried to make it seem as if she wanted to die in order to take attention off of her affair. After this fiasco, Vance, Lindsay, and their mother moved back to Middletown, where they lived even closer to his grandparents than before. During this time, his mother spiraled out of control with irresponsible behavior, and started dating men who never stayed around for very long.

One day, when Vance was upset at his mother for her behavior. She apologized and promised to take him to the mall to buy him football cards. On the drive, she got angry with him and started speeding on the highway saying that she would crash the car and kill them both. Vance jumped into the backseat, trying to get her to pull over to distract her. When the car stopped he took off through a large field until he came upon a woman in a backyard swimming pool. He told the lady that his mother was trying to kill him and begged her to call his grandparents. The woman got out of the pool, took him inside and gave him the phone. Meanwhile his mother eventually broke down the door and took Vance. The woman had called the police, who quickly appeared and took his mother away. When she was later on trial for a domestic violence case, Vance was called upon to testify against her. Instead, he lied, saying that she had never threatened him. He did this to protect his mother, but also because he had made a deal with her that if he refrained from testifying against her, he could live with his grandparents whenever he wanted.

Papaw died shortly after his mother started dating a new man named Matt, and his death affected the entire family. His mother descended into a prescription drug habit that had been slowly getting worse and worse. More than anybody else, she was devastated by his death. She even made a point to emphasize to everyone that they didn’t have the right to be as sad as her because he was her father. After attacking Matt one day, his mother was arrested and admitted to a drug rehabilitation center. This forced Vance to rely on his sister, Lindsay who had just graduated high school. Finally, when Vance finished eighth grade, his mother was almost one year sober and Lindsay had married a man named Kevin. Before Vance started high school, his mother insisted that he move with her and Matt to Dayton, Ohio. Vance refused to leave, instead deciding to live with his biological father with whom he’d recently reconnected. Don was also from Kentucky, and although seen by all as a terrible husband and father, he had made drastic changes to his life, turning to God and starting a new family that strictly followed the rules of the church. This appealed to Vance, who was looking for a dependable community. Despite the peace and stability of Don’s home, Vance felt constantly on the defense in his new life, which eventually encouraged him to move in with his grandma. He stayed with her for the remainder of the summer before finally going to live with Bev and Matt for fear of overwhelming his grandmother.

As Vance advanced through high school, his mother’s drug addiction continued, along with her disappointing romantic life. After years of attending Narcotics Anonymous to support his mother just to watch her continue to use drugs, Vance finally decided to live full-time with his grandmother, which he believes saved his life. Immediately, his grades in school improved and he lost all interest in hanging out with other kids who smoked marijuana or drank alcohol. He was even accepted to college at Ohio State University, though when the time came to commit, he felt unprepared. He knew that going to college would be an investment in his future, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that not all investments are good investments. His grandma framed education as “the only damned thing worth spending money on,” but he decided to postpone higher education, opting instead to join the Marines which was a challenge that seemed insurmountable, considering that he was out of shape and severely lacked discipline.

Although she was apprehensive, his grandmother supported Vance by sending him letters while he was in boot camp. The experience of constant exercise and psychological challenge transformed him, giving him confidence and agency he could never have fathomed before entering the Marines. Not long before Vance shipped out to Iraq in 2005, his grandmother died, leaving him on his own for the first time in his life, though now he had gained a sense of self-reliability. Thankfully, he served in the Iraq War unharmed, and when he returned, he finally attended Ohio State University. This was an intense time of his life, as he worked multiple jobs while taking classes, but Vance had come to appreciate the value of pushing himself to achieve his goals. As a result, he graduated in only one year and eleven months. He then set about applying to law schools. On his second round of applications, he was accepted to Yale Law School, where he ended up receiving his degree.

During his time at Yale, Vance was forced time and again to confront the huge class divide between his hillbilly upbringing and the elite environment in which he now found himself. Luckily, he became close with a classmate, Usha, who often helped him navigate social situations. He and Usha ended up dating, eventually marrying after they graduated from law school. Vance notes that even after successfully attaining upward mobility, he still often finds himself drawn back to the uglier sides of his original community. One night not long after his graduation from Yale, he drove to Middletown to pay for his mother to stay in a motel because her current husband had kicked her out after she started using heroin. Vance states, “Upward mobility is never clean-cut, and the world I left always finds a way to reel me back in”. This is not something he claims to be ashamed of, rather something he embraces as his responsibility as a successful, stable representative of the “hillbilly class”, doing what he can to support young people who struggle with the same situations he himself had to face as a teenager.

Hillbilly Elegy is a life story, but it also examines the Appalachian working class as a whole, often incorporating sociological studies to supplement Vance’s life story and proposing possible new ways of thinking about poverty. Vance holds up religion and education as two means by which young people can attain upward mobility. Although he outlines various governmental and economic ideas that contribute to the current situation in Appalachia, he maintains that the best way to address rural poverty is not with policy changes, but with social changes. Too many people blame the government and various external figures for their own misfortune. This allows them to shy away from responsibility and hard work. A pervasive attitude adjustment is called for, one that takes into account the working class’s “problems of family, faith, and culture.”