Hifalutin

I'm just about finished reading Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance.

I almost put the book down after fifty or so pages. You've heard that adage, that for any book you should sample one hundred pages minus your age. Vance's book wouldn't have cut it by that standard. I didn't actually like it nor did I see the inherent value so many others had placed in it by page fifty. I hadn't gotten comfortable with his awkward style of writing, going from vaguely set family stories to statistics about the region. I kept reading because there was something that niggled in the back of my mind when I went past the fifty page mark, something familiar.

I hoped Vance would get to the point, would teach me something about my own roots. So I kept reading.

I'm from Indiana yet I don't come from a home like the one that Vance describes. I grew up in a college town, Bloomington. I was friends with the professor's kids. My father was an engineer so I didn't struggle to become the first of my family to get into college. In fact, my father, an uncle, my sister, and my brother preceded me.

But Vance's descriptions of hillbillies hit me in the gut. He eventually explained to me something I had struggled to understand my entire life. Why was I so uncomfortable going back home to visit and why did I feel so awkward going into situations above my station. I was, ultimately, from hillbilly roots.

Only two of my grandparents completed high school. My grandmothers both quit and had children before they were seventeen. Not one of them went to college. Yet, I was lucky enough to have two grandparents who were great readers, who became educated through the public library. That was probably my saving grace, probably what gave my father the impetus, with a wife, a child, and one on the way, to go to college, and to graduate. The rest of us flowed from his example. He made sure we understood that an education could change our lives.

Bloomington, Indiana lives on a great cultural divide. To the north lies Indianapolis and Chicago, both heavily urban influences. Even the culture brought from around the world to Indiana University shifted Bloomington squarely into that Northern mindset. South of Bloomington to Kentucky lies a whole lot of nothing, people might say, corn and soybean fields, toxic strip pits abandoned by coal companies, and then the Ohio river border with Kentucky. Oh, I know I'm missing some wonderful places, but bear with me. I'm talking about the impression I always had about Southern Indiana, about what outsiders thought of Southern Indiana.

I grew up speaking a bit of the Indiana twang. Don't ask me to pronounce hydrangea or peony. That accent rolls all the way north to the suburbs of Chicago where it shifts. But just outside of Bloomington city limits and south to the region where my cousins and grandparents lived, the accent sounded indistinguishable from Kentuckian. Go further south all the way to Georgia and it's still the same only stronger. That vocal divide, even as a child, put me on edge.

The kids at my public school who had the stronger Southern accent were looked down upon. Those kids were from the country, had no connection with the university. Teachers assumed that if I had that stronger Southern accent, that I was stupid, or at least ignorant. Even my parents tried to get us to pronounce our words without the heavier accent though it would have come naturally to them since they'd grown up with it themselves. We didn't say 'ain't' or 'nothin.' We pronounced the -ing on a word as if we could sing.

Yet, when we visited our grandparents and cousins, I was aware that we adopted the more Southern style of talking. It was just easier that way. It felt rude to pronounce the -ing like sing. I felt like an outsider in my family's presence when they said, "Y'all come on now." I didn't say y'all. I could copy their patterns of speech, but it felt rude, like I was making fun of them, but when I didn't shift it a little, I was an outsider. You'all was some kind of compromise I could make. I didn't say that at home or at school. So, during the week, I spoke one way and on the weekend with extended family, I spoke a different way. From a young age, I had to try to remember where I was.

When I was nineteen, I started a summer job at the Navy base about forty-five miles South of Bloomington. I had completed my first year at Purdue. I was going to be an engineer. On my first day at my new job, that title of engineering student backfired on me. My neutral accent backfired too. I realized that to fit in, I needed to adopt that drawl all the way down to the y'all. When I first spoke with my more newsworthy accent, they told me I was 'highfalutin,' too big for my britches. I was just some snot-nosed kid from the city come down there to tell them all how to do their jobs when they damned-well knew how to do their jobs already. And while I was at it, I needed to slow down my pace, both talking and working, because I was making them look bad.

Except for the engineers who ran the place, the people seemed proud that they hadn't gone to college, proud of their ignorance. They were even proud that they didn't read books. I didn't exactly know what to talk to people about if they didn't read books. I was a bookworm. Then, when I said that I was going to the East Coast for a week before I went back to college, that I was going to see New York City, they asked me why in hell I'd have any interest in a place like that. Some of them asked me why I even bothered going to college. They laughed at my pay scale, but we both knew I'd get a job when I was finished, that my pay would outstrip theirs in the first couple of years. I assumed they were just mad about it.

Yes, there was a divide.

Even now, when I go back to Indiana to visit, I find myself bringing on my old accent. I don't lay it on thick. But I think my mother is more comfortable with me when I hold it out for her hear, as if I hadn't really moved away, as if I weren't trying to tell her I was better because I had moved up and away.

I don't know for sure. She's never said any of it outright, but it's a feeling I get, that my neutral accent makes me an outsider even though I'd been born in Indiana and lived there the first twenty-two years of my life.

And then there was New York City. I lived near there in my twenties. I could make a whole room full of New Yorkers laugh with my twang and the way I pronounced certain words. Hyderangie, piney. I felt like I went from intelligent to stupid in that simple transition and back again when I dropped the accent.

Why couldn't a biomedical engineer from Indiana be just as intelligent with her homespun accent as without it?

Because people assume that accent is connected with ignorance. I know. I entertained them with it.

I never told the New Yorkers that I could also make a whole room full of Hoosiers laugh with my Brooklyn accent.

So J.D. Vance's book, when he began to describe being an outsider, hit home. When he got down to the social structure of planned ignorance, it hit me again. When he described feeling of a different class when he attended Yale, it hit me one more time. Three strikes and I was out.

Hillbilly Elegy is worth the read. Vance has an important message that was worth getting past the first fifty pages. The hard part, the solution to helping that group of rust-belt underemployed people, that will be harder to solve. I rubbed up against some of those people, the ones who seemed proud to be uneducated, proud as they explained that they could work the system to get unemployment, proud that they hadn't read a book in the past ten years.

I read recently that Amazon is looking for a second location. Some reporters suggested that they could rejuvenate a whole region if they put it squarely in the rust-belt. I wouldn't want to bring big business into an area where the people prided themselves on ignorance and laziness. I've lived both in the Pacific Northwest and in the rust-belt. I can tell you that an encounter between the two cultures would not prove a happy one. Amazon would be better off sticking within city limits.

Thanks to J.D. Vance, I now know why.

Thank you for listening, jules