Hold Tender This Land

By Quest Lakes, July 18, 2024

The photo below shows my grandparents in Kentucky with my mother and my uncle, around 1949. My mom was born in her Grandma Delia's home in Rockcastle County in eastern Kentucky. Our Lakes relatives have lived in the Appalachian region since the late 1700s. Many summers during my childhood, my parents and grandparents took me to Sandgap, Kentucky to spend time with my great grandparents on the Lakes side of the family. They had a small subsistence farm and also grew tobacco to make ends meet. They welcomed us with big suppers of homemade biscuits, fried ‘taters and gravy and cobbler made with blackberries they picked on their own land. Nevertheless, I do not claim to be “a daughter of Appalachia.” JD Vance, who grew up in a working class family in Middletown, Ohio rather than Appalachia, implies he's a son of Appalachia because his grandparents grew up in Kentucky. 

In a 2020 essay, Kentucky native Piper Hansen writes that Vance’s memoir “Hillybilly Elegy” is a “sociological construction of what Vance thinks Appalachia is...Vance's writing shows that he may have a seriously narrow view of not just Appalachia but the world...His memoir bashes the entire region with shocking ease and gives a false impression of what the people of Appalachia are really like.”

 It’s worth noting that the term "hillbilly" developed as a way for coal companies to eliminate empathy for the Appalachian people as they destroyed the region's beautiful mountains, forests and streams. The insult was first used in the early 1900s, around the time coal industries began to appear in Appalachian communities. The hillbilly caricature solidified during the Great Depression.

In her essay for The Guardian this week, Neema Avashia, “the child of Indian immigrants who settled in Appalachia in the 1970s”, writes that “folks outside Appalachia devoured Hillbilly Elegy because it reinforced what they already believed about us: that we were lazy, homogenous, and to blame for the unemployment, addiction and environmental disasters that plagued us. Vance’s description of a Jackson, Kentucky, where ‘people are hardworking, except of course for the many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work’, allowed liberals and conservatives alike to write Appalachia off as beyond saving, and its problems as self-created, and thus, deserved.” Avashia concludes that “a person who truly represented Appalachian people wouldn’t take money from the same big pharma lobby that left West Virginia with the highest opioid overdose rate in the country. They wouldn’t deny climate change in the face of catastrophic flooding that eastern Kentucky still hasn’t recovered from two years out. They wouldn’t stoke fear of immigrants, who provide essential labor in Appalachia in healthcare, agriculture and service industries. They wouldn’t sow division through culture wars in a region where solidarity is desperately needed.”

The photo below shows my relatives Polly and Tom Milt Lakes, who lived in what Barbara Kingsolver describes as a "deep hollow above the creek." Polly was a school teacher and postmaster in Jackson County, Kentucky who is remembered for having helped deliver many babies in the area. Barbara Kingsolver wrote, with tenderness and insight, about the Lakes family land near Horse Lick Creek in her book High Tide in Tucson. Kingsolver's description of the area perfectly captures the place I remember visiting on family trips as a child: " The forest is unearthly: filtered light through maple leaves gives a green glow to the creek below us. Mayapples grow in bright assemblies like crowds of rain-slick umbrellas; red trilliums and wild ginger nod from the moss-carpeted banks." 

If you want to learn more about Appalachia, try bell hooks 2012 book Appalachian Elegy, or Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hilbilly Elegy, edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. For more about the Lakes family’s “homeplace” in Kentucky, see Kingsolver’s book High Tide in Tucson, pg 175: https://pacificnorthwestwriting.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/kingsolver_high_tide_in_tucson.pdf

The title used here, "Hold Tender This Land," refers to a poem from bell hooks 2012 book Appalachian Elegy.