Summary
Although Vance tried to bring himself to express his sense of frustration with life in yet another father figure’s home to Mamaw, he was always overcome with a sense of guilt—until his mother burst into Mamaw’s house one day demanding that her son give her a urine sample. She needed one to pass a drug test at work and had been using drugs again. Outraged, Vance was exploded with criticism, telling his mother she should stop “fucking up her own life and get [the urine] from her own bladder,” and telling Mamaw that she was a “shitty mother.” Although this obviously wounded Mamaw, she pleaded with Vance to give his mother his urine. “‘Maybe, if we help her this time she’ll finally learn her lesson,’” she said. This was the perennial hope to which Mamaw and Vance clung, and Vance marvels at the way Mamaw could forgive people who let her down. Because of this, Vance relented, giving his mother the clean urine sample she wanted.
Once again, Vance moved in with Mamaw, but permanently this time, as his mother argued she needed a “break” from being a mother. Soon after, Ken left Vance’s mother, partially due to her worsening addiction. Although he was glad to be back in the stability of Mamaw’s house, Vance also bristled at Mamaw’s harsh demeanor. “If I didn’t take out the garbage, she told me to ‘stop being a lazy piece of shit,’” he remembers. Years later, Vance’s relatives expressed sympathy for him, as they thought Mamaw was too hard on him. Even so, he remembers his time at Mamaw’s for the fun they had together.
He also began to understand parts of Mamaw’s psychology he hadn’t before, like the reasons his family rarely returned to Jackson anymore. Whereas for Vance, Kentucky was filled with idyllic, rambunctious memories, for Mamaw, it represented the home from which she fled after a pregnancy scandal, the home where many of her family and friends had become poor coal miners. He also got to witness Mamaw’s love of children first hand, as she often babysat for Aunt Wee or Lindsay’s kids, who took every opportunity to repeat the cuss words on which Mamaw’s vocabulary depended. Vance also recalls watching endless episodes of Mamaw’s favorite TV show, The Sopranos. “Mamaw respected his loyalty and the fact that he would go to any length to protect the honor of his family,” Vance writes. Looking back, Vance regrets keeping it from his friends at school that he lived with his grandmother, too embarrassed of his non-traditional family.
At school, Vance happily tested into the honors Advanced Math class, taught by a legendarily dedicated Ron Selby. Famously, an exam in Mr. Selby’s class had once been disrupted because a student faked a bomb threat; Selby threw the supposed bomb in the trash and told the police the kid wasn’t smart enough to make a functioning bomb. Mamaw encouraged Vance’s enthusiasm for Mr. Selby and even scrimped to buy a graphing calculator, which pushed Vance to try harder in school. “Those three years with Mamaw—uninterrupted and alone—saved me,” Vance reflects. He didn’t notice it then, but the moment he moved in with her, his grades began to improve and he made friends more easily. He even got a job as a cashier at the local grocery store, Dillman’s.
While he worked at Dillman’s, Vance says, he became something of an “amateur sociologist,” observing customers. The more rushed people were, the more they bought pre-cooked or frozen food, and the more likely they were to be poor. Vance also noticed that the owners of the store allowed customers with good credit to run grocery tabs and resented it, as he knew none of his relatives would qualify for such treatment in the eyes of the owners. On the other hand, he noticed how some customers on welfare gamed the system by buying soda with food stamps and selling it for cash.
This marked Vance’s first inclination that Mamaw’s democratic beliefs “weren’t all they were cracked up to be.” And, as the discrepancies between the working and non-working poor cropped up—Vance recalls his neighbors on welfare buying T-bone steaks whereas he was too poor to do so—even Mamaw started to sound more conservative. She attacked her neighbors who received Section 8 government vouchers to rent housing, although Vance believes she was simply frustrated that those neighbors looked like his own family. “Depending on her mood, Mamaw was a radical conservative or a European-style social Democrat,” he writes. Over time, Vance began to see the wisdom in this, as Mamaw was simply heartbroken about the difficult social issues confronting her America. Most of all, Vance believes, she was alarmed that the poverty she believed she was escaping when she moved away from Kentucky had followed her to Ohio.
In an effort to answer all the complex questions he had about the sinking social conditions in Middletown, Vance began devouring books about social policy and the working poor. One book in particular spoke to him: Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged, which depicted the fragile communities that spring up around factory towns. When those factories close, Wilson wrote, the folks who can afford to leave do so, but those who cannot afford to leave are trapped in towns that can’t support them; hence, “the truly disadvantaged.” This book was written about black people in the inner cities, but Vance found it resonating with his hillbilly community.
However, even these insightful books did not answer all of Vance’s questions about his neighbors, and he now recognizes that no single book could explain the problems confronting his community. “Our elegy is a sociological one, yes,” he writes, “but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith.”
In the next pages, Vance chronicles the many irrational tendencies of the poor members of his community: conspicuous consumption even in the face of bankruptcy; talking to children about “responsibility” but then sabotaging their dreams of attending a prestigious school because it’s too expensive; telling themselves lies about Obama shutting down coal mines but then taking long restroom breaks at the job they do have. Vance cites the statistic that life expectancy of working-class whites is going down even as that of every other ethnic group is rising, and links it to the former demographic’s dependency on fast food and despise for exercise. He also remembers the various puppies he was allowed to have and then forced to give up as a child: “Our hearts harden. We learn not to grow too attached.”
Vance admits that not all working-class whites live this way and divides them into two groups: those like his grandparents, the “old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking,” and those like his mother, “the consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.” Fortunately, Vance writes, he straddled those two worlds and saw both the best and worst the community had to offer, whereas many of his peers only saw the worst. Even so, Vance writes, he is still plagued with anxiety when he recalls how chaotic his childhood was. But Vance believes that Mamaw saved him, citing studies that find supportive parental figures predict resilience amongst teenagers. “I no longer feared the school bell at the end of the day, I knew where I’d be living the next month, and no one’s romantic decisions affected my life,” he writes. “And out of that happiness came so many of the opportunities I’ve had for the past twelve years.”
Analysis
In many ways, this chapter is Vance’s heartiest, as it arrives at the heft of his eventual thesis: that the challenges that hillbillies and the working-class poor face are complex and interweaving, but what saves individual people in those communities are the loving arms of parental figures. Vance reaches this conclusion by calling on sociological evidence to support his ideas, but this chapter mostly consists of his personal stories and memories. In fact, the final pages of the chapter boil down to a summary of the myriad irrational behaviors that Vance has witnessed first hand in his community, each paragraph a litany of harmful tendencies that much of the working-class poor tends to exhibit. Vance does cite Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged to support his conclusions in this chapter, as well as other studies such as the one finding that working-class whites’ life expectancy is actually declining. But for the most part, Vance asserts his authority as a social observer and primary source of Rust Belt social decay in this chapter, even dismissing academic studies about the working-class poor (“I know Mamaw was good for me not because some Harvard psychologist says so but because I felt it”).
Vance’s realization about the intersectional challenges of the working-class poor ultimately emerges from the tipping point in Vance’s story of shifting father figures and an addicted mother: his permanent move to Mamaw’s house following his mother’s relapse. For Vance, this change cleared a course for his ultimate success, as it allowed him to stop worrying about the precarious state of his home life—it allowed him stability. Vance goes even further than this, saying that permanently moving in with Mamaw during high school “saved” him. Certainly, the safety net analogy that Vance has used throughout the book to refer to Mamaw’s house lies between the lines here—that safety net has finally become a permanent home.
Despite the unfortunate circumstances that pushed him to move in with Mamaw, Vance also remembers this time as a period of deeper understanding and sympathy for Mamaw. Although Mamaw is the story’s steady, unflappable core, Vance begins to see her weaknesses and strengths. He describes learning about Mamaw’s strained relationship with her sister, Rose, and that Mamaw no longer viewed Jackson as a home, but rather as a place to which it was her duty to return. As this is the final chapter before Mamaw’s death, it is a satisfying development in Vance’s loving characterization of his grandmother.
As yet another tribute to his grandmother’s complexity and compassion, Vance alludes to the TV show The Sopranos, Mamaw’s favorite show. Although the show depicts the storyline of gangsters who kill their enemies, Mamaw adores it, because the characters only kill to protect or avenge their family and friends. This harkens back to the theme of “family above all,” which runs through Vance’s book as a tenet of hillbilly life. Not only is this allusion humorous and ironic, since people of Mamaw’s background share very little with the Italian mafia of New Jersey, but it also serves to round out Vance’s tender characterization of his grandmother: a woman who believed that violence was alright as long as it was committed in the name of family.
This chapter also marks Vance’s first foray into sociological observations, and a few images stand out from his observations while working at Dillman’s. Perhaps the most poignant is the image of the T-bone steak that Vance saw his neighbor cooking. For Vance, steak was a luxury his family could not afford despite his hard work at a blue-collar job, but for a man who was ostensibly poorer than Vance, it was a fringe benefit of living on welfare. Earlier in the book, Vance complicates the image of the so-called “welfare queen” by saying that people who exploit welfare are more diverse than the stereotype allows. However, the T-bone steak in this chapter serves as a symbol of the welfare lifestyle as a whole, a path that Vance fails to comprehend while working for everything he’s got.
Vance’s authorial voice also briefly changes in this chapter, a shift that we see throughout the book from time to time. Although he clearly writes about his past (in the past tense), his tender, detailed narration tends to lend his writing a sense of the now, and we as readers feel that we are watching his story unfold in the present. However, from time to time, Vance breaks with this style and writes in the actual present tense, admitting he still experiences anxiety when he recalls this chapter of his life. Such a pivot from past tense to present has the effect of reassuring the reader even as Vance admits his own anxiety still holds him back, since we as readers remember that Vance is telling us his story from a wiser, hopefully more stable place in his life.
