Hillbilly Elegy: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Vance writes that Mamaw and Papaw’s presence in his life was the best thing to ever happen to him. He then gives a brief overview of their personal histories. As a teenager, Papaw lived next to the Blantons with his grandfather, spending much of his time running around with the wild Blanton men (Vance’s great-uncles). It wasn’t long before he and Mamaw became involved romantically, and in 1946 Mamaw got pregnant at the age of 13. Papaw was 16 at the time. Fearful that the Blanton men would defend their little sister’s honor by harming Papaw, and hoping Ohio would provide them with better economic prospects, the young couple fled Jackson, but their child died within a week of having been born. Still, they stayed in Middletown, Ohio, where Papaw got a job at Armco, a steel company “that aggressively recruited in eastern Kentucky coal country” by promising hillbillies a better life.

Vance notes that Armco’s promise of a better life was, for the most part, true. He considers the two major waves of hillbilly migration from Appalachia to “the industrial powerhouse economies in the Midwest,” explaining that the first influx came after World War I, when veterans couldn’t find work in their rural communities due to the fact that these towns hadn’t been industrialized. Mamaw and Papaw, Vance points out, were part of the second wave of hillbilly migration, which occurred in the 1940s and ’50s. As such, they found themselves in a community of hillbillies despite the fact that they had left Kentucky. Still, though, they were estranged from their relatives back home, who resented them for getting “too big for [their] britches” by leaving behind “the stock they came from.” To combat this sentiment, they visited home often.

While Mamaw and Papaw’s relatives resented them for abandoning their home, their new neighbors “viewed them suspiciously.” To these middle-class Midwesterners, hillbillies represented an entirely different—and rather disagreeable—lifestyle, and they were unhappy to see their town flooded by such newcomers. Vance references a book called Appalachian Odyssey, which points out that “the disturbing aspect of hillbillies [to Midwesterners] was their racialness. Ostensibly, they were of the same racial order (whites) as those who dominated economic, political, and social power in local and national arenas. But hillbillies shared many regional characteristics with the southern blacks arriving in Detroit.” Furthermore, many hillbilly values were ill-suited for a place like Middletown, which was comprised of nuclear families who valued privacy. Hillbillies, on the other hand, were accustomed to barging into each other’s houses and involving themselves in each other’s affairs.

Despite how hard it was to integrate into Middletown, Mamaw and Papaw slowly started to get used to their new life. In 1951 they had their first boy, Vance’s Uncle Jimmy. For a while they achieved something like domestic bliss, but things didn’t always work out well, usually due to their poor conflict-management skills. Once, when a young Jimmy was asked to leave a store after touching an expensive toy, Mamaw and Papaw barged in and cursed out the clerk before tearing items off the shelves and threatening to kill the employee. While Papaw was off at work, Mamaw felt isolated and alone, discontent with the middle-class expectation that she invest herself in “sewing circles” and “picnics.”

Although Mamaw and Papaw felt isolated from their culture, Middletown’s values aligned with their belief in hard work and the American dream, a conviction that politically manifested itself in a staunch support of the Democratic party, which they believed represented “the working people.” Mamaw used to tell Vance, “Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them. You can do anything you want to.” Vance notes that this attitude was well-founded in the 1950s, when Mamaw’s generation suddenly catapulted from poverty to economic stability. But he also remarks that wealth didn’t necessarily change the hillbilly lifestyle; “[…] their financial success masked their cultural unease, and if my grandparents caught up economically, I wonder if they ever truly assimilated,” he writes. Mamaw and Papaw escaped Kentucky to give their kids more opportunities to succeed—opportunities they expected their children to use to continue climbing the socioeconomic ladder. Unfortunately, Vance says, it didn’t always work that way.