The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt Lora E. Smith

Author:Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, Lora E. Smith [Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, Lora E. Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780821423929
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2019-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

AT the Kentuckians’ hall, I met people raised in metro Detroit who speak with southern accents, so surrounded were they by Appalachians. One of them is Burl Stevens, who’s from Wyandotte, a neighboring town, but whose parents came north from eastern Kentucky. I met Burl on the porch the same night I met Conley. I had come with questions about the Hillbilly Highway, and Conley was suspicious of most of them.

“Unfortunately, the questions haven’t changed since the ’40s and ’50s,” Conley said. “Writers are not the most … what’s the word, Burl?”

“Don’t ask me,” Burl said.

Conley settled on “dependable.” “Nearly all of us that came up here could read and write,” he said. I told him I assumed as much. “Well, many don’t,” he said. “‘Buncha dumb hillbillies.’” Appalachians were just doing “what people did for years and years before,” he said. “They went where the work was. It’s no different now.” Conley met people here from all over the country, and yet, he said, writers could only ever find Kentuckians and West Virginians. I asked what questions I should be asking—what the flip side of that story is.

“The flip side is the humanity of it,” he said. “Those of us who came here weren’t any different than the ones that were already here. We might have talked a little different, we might eat a little different”—he paused, laughed—“We did teach ’em how to eat up here.”

I heard nothing harsher than this “buncha dumb hillbillies” remark from the dozen or so Appalachians I spoke with about their moves north, all of them white Baby Boomers and most of them Kentucky natives, but the written record of the Hillbilly Highway is not nearly as compassionate. An article by Louis Adamic, published in 1934 in The Nation, referred to the incoming Appalachians as “white trash or a little better.” These “hill-billies,” Adamic wrote, “with their extremely low standard of living and lack of acquaintance with modern plumbing, are looked down upon by all but the most intelligent local workers, both native and foreign born; they are despised also—indeed, mainly—because they take employment away from the old-time automotive workers.” Adamic, a cultural critic, was reacting to Detroit employers who equated Appalachians with mechanical aptitude and a strong work ethic and the resulting rising tensions he witnessed in the city.7

In a Harper’s article from twenty years later entitled “The Hillbillies Invade Chicago,” writer Albert Votaw used similar language to describe “these farmers, miners and mechanics from the mountains and meadows of the mid-South” as “clannish, proud, disorderly, untamed to urban ways,” confounding “all notions of racial, religious and cultural purity.” In Cincinnati and Chicago, workshops were held to explain mountain people’s “peculiar ways.” The Council of the Southern Mountains—the home team, as it were—sponsored speakers to address city professionals about the “strangers” entering their communities. A survey by Detroit’s Wayne State University, taken just after World War II, asked, “What people in Detroit are undesirable?” Respondents ranked “poor Southern whites; hillbillies, etc.,” second, just below criminals.

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