This week, we visit a cemetery in Bluefield, Virginia and learn how racial segregation followed some people to the grave. We also hear from Neema Avashia, author of the celebrated memoir, “Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer And Indian In A Mountain Place.” And we remember Hershel “Woody” Williams. The West Virginia native was America’s last living World War II Medal of Honor winner. He died last summer at the age of 98.
This week, we visit a cemetery in Bluefield, Virginia and learn how racial segregation followed some people to the grave.
We also hear from Neema Avashia, author of the celebrated memoir, “Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer And Indian In A Mountain Place.”
And we remember Hershel “Woody” Williams. The West Virginia native was America’s last living World War II Medal of Honor winner. He died last summer at the age of 98.
You’ll hear these stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.
For decades, the graves of Black residents in a Virginia community were neglected in the town’s old, segregated cemetery.
It might have stayed that way if not for the efforts of one woman who had family buried there.
Folkways Reporter Connie Bailey Kitts brought us this story.
World War I veteran Robert L. Dalton was a corporal in the 803rd Pioneer Infantry which included the band of African Americans who played for French and American troops. His grave is now decorated on Memorial Day.
Credit: Connie Bailey Kitts/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Neema Avashia
Courtesy Photo
Coming Up Queer And Indian In Appalachia
Recently, Inside Appalachia put together a list of summer reading suggestions. We interviewed several prominent Appalachian authors, but we couldn’t fit them all into one show – including Neema Avashia.
Her collection of personal essays, “Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place,” about growing up in West Virginia, was a well-received memoir.
Mason Adams spoke with Avashia.
Remembering Woody Williams
Hershel “Woody” Williams was the nation’s last surviving World War II Medal of Honor recipient.
He was a West Virginia native and died June 29, 2022 at the age of 98.
Before he passed, though, he did an interview with WVPB’s Trey Kay for the podcast Us & Them.
Hershel “Woody” Williams
Credit: e-wv, The West Virginia Encyclopedia
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Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by Chris Knight, Chris Stapleton, Harvey & Copeland, June Carter Cash, and Little Sparrow.
Bill Lynch is our producer. Zander Aloi is our associate producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens.
You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.
Writer BreeceD’J Pancake died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on April 8, 1979. The South Charleston native grew up in Milton, which became the fictionalized setting for many of his short stories.
A graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan and Marshall, Pancake taught at two military schools in Virginia before entering the University of Virginia’s Creative Writing Program, where he was influenced by authors James Alan McPherson, Peter Taylor, and Mary Lee Settle. He began writing human interest stories for a Milton newspaper and working on a series of short stories. His big breakthrough came in 1977, when the Atlantic Monthly published his story “Trilobites.”
West Virginia was a popular locale for Pancake’s tales. In addition to Milton, which he fictionalized as “Rock Camp,” he wrote about the southern coalfields, Huntington, the north-central mountains, and curvy roads like Route 60 across Gauley Mountain. His stories are stark, with ironic humor, featuring characters who are trapped either by forces beyond their control or by their own past.
A collection of his short stories was published in 1983, four years after his death, bringing Pancake widespread acclaim in literary circles.
Great public media resources at your fingertips. West Virginia LearningMedia is free digital library with over 118 thousand pubic media resources from over 200 content providers. Resources are suitable for pre-K through adults and are searchable by grade level, content area and type of resources.
To provide a glimpse into one area we have provided links to several of the resources teachers use to help them bring American Literature alive. There are over 1.8 million registered users on the LearningMedia platform. Join those taking advantage of this resource to bring your classroom to life.
In which John Green reads Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and talks to you about it. You’ll learn about Zora Neale Hurston’s life, and we’ll also look at how the interpretations of the book have changed over time. Also, this book will give you a healthy appreciation for the rabies vaccine, and the terrible dilemmas you’ve avoided thanks to that modern development.
This primary source set showcases five prominent American authors and includes examples of the different media that promoted, and sometimes significantly altered, their public images and literary works. Looking at these primary sources provides an opportunity to explore both the authors’ literary texts and the ways in which those works, and the authors themselves, were portrayed in the media at the time of their renown.
Meet F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic character Jay Gatsby in this video from the American Masters film Novel Reflections on the American Dream. Learn about the spectacle of Gatsby, the techniques the author uses to present Gatsby, and the role of perspective and narration in shaping a reader or viewer’s interpretation of a character or event.
Visit the American Masters Collection for additional resources on the American dream and other American writers.
Alice Walker shares stories from her childhood that highlight the strong female figures in her family, particularly her mother who stood her ground against the white landowner and insisted on an education for her children. These experiences inform her views on what it means to be a Southern black writer.
This video from American Masters: Harper Lee: Hey, Boo highlights the social climate in the South when To Kill a Mockingbird was first published and a few years later, when the film premiered. The video highlights the reactions to the issues presented in the story. The account by Diane McWhorter, a classmate of Mary Badham (the actress who played Scout in the movie), is given special attention.
This video from American Masters: Salinger examines Salinger’s purpose for writing The Catcher in the Rye and how, by inhabiting his character, he was able to find a compelling authorial voice that allowed him to channel his critique of the adult world.
One look at the recent arrivals shelf at Carmichael’s Books, in Louisville, and I knew something was up. Titles like “White Rage,” “White Trash,” and “The End of White Christian America” were piling up.
“And then this has been the surprise,” Carmichael’s co-owner Michael Boggs said, picking up another hardcover. “This actually hit the Times bestseller list: ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ by J.D. Vance.”
Boggs has been in the book business nearly four decades, so he’s seen publishing trends come and go. This trend is built on something that hits close to home.
“I think we’re talking about white working class disappointment at what their lot has been,” he said. “Being ignored or being ridiculed, really.”
Many writers are taking a fresh — and some would say overdue — look at these often overlooked voters in this, their electoral season of discontent. I spoke with three authors who take very different approaches — statistical, personal, and historical — to explore why the white working class has such a dark outlook on the country and their future in it.
The End of White Christian America
Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute uses demographics to explain what he calls “The End of White Christian America.” That’s the title of Jones’s book about the recent decline of the country’s dominant cultural force.
“If we go back just two election cycles ago, to 2008, when Barack Obama was first running for president, the country was a solidly majority white Christian country: 54 percent of the country identified as white and Christian in 2008,” Jones said. “That number today, from our latest surveys, is just 43 percent.”
Jones said that has brought a sense of loss, anxiety and fear that’s seeping into public debate on a range of issues, and Donald Trump has seized on that.
“Donald Trump has essentially converted ‘values voters’ into what I call ‘nostalgia voters,’” Jones explained. “His slogan, ‘Make America Great Again,’ that last word, ‘again,’ really does hearken back to a time when white Christian churches and people had much more power in the culture than they have today.”
Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute says White Christian America has passed on, demographically speaking. Credit Courtesy of the publisher
Jones said polarization along class and race lines has decreased the person-to-person conversation that can happen with someone who doesn’t look like you. Churches, which could provide common ground, remain highly segregated.
“When Martin Luther King, Jr., said that 11 o’clock on a Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in American public life, well that is still largely true,” Jones said, citing a statistic that 90 percent of churches remain mono-racial. An analysis of social networks also shows little diversity.
“For the average white person in America, their close personal social friendships are 93 percent white, and three-quarters of white people have no people of color in their close friendship groups,” Jones said. “So when it comes to these thorny issues of ‘black lives matter’ and police violence, not enough people have opportunity to have conversations across these divides.”
Hillbilly Elegy
Where Jones leans on statistics, J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” draws on his personal experience in small town Ohio (Middletown, near Dayton) and Kentucky (Jackson, in Eastern Kentucky). Subtitled, “A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” it’s a searing account of a childhood amid the chaos of his mother’s addiction and a family often torn by abuse and financial insecurity.
Vance recounts a parade of boyfriends and stepdads as his mother became more erratic and abusive. At one point as a teenager, his mother demanded clean urine from him so that she could pass a workplace drug test.
J. D. Vance drew on his own painful family history for “Hillbilly Elegy.” Credit Naomi McColloch
Eventually, Vance goes to live with his gun-toting grandmother, who, despite her creative cursing and occasional violence, provides a stable and loving home. Vance became a serious student, later joined the Marines, and wound up studying law at Yale.
It’s an “up-by-the-bootstraps” story but one told at the expense of unearthing some painful family history.
“It definitely was difficult to write about it, but I was motivated to write it because I think that people did not appreciate the scope and scale of the challenges that exist in these families,” Vance said. “And if I wanted to show that, there was no better way than to open up my own life, my own family, and say, ‘This is what it looks like when you’re really struggling to get ahead.’”
Vance said the combination of economic stagnation and a deadly opioid addiction crisis has darkened the mood in the Midwest and Appalachia, and has many rural Americans voting out of a sense of despair.
“They don’t believe anymore in the promise of the American dream, they don’t believe that hard work can connect them to better opportunities, because no matter what they do they just don’t believe that they are going to have a better life,” he said. “That feeling isn’t made up, it doesn’t come from nowhere.”
Vance’s memoir has struck a chord. He’s on the bestseller list and appears in opinion pages and on cable news shows as a sort of guide to help coastal elites understand Middle American woes.
But while his personal story is compelling, Vance’s diagnosis of social problems has drawn criticism for tilting toward a “blame-the-victim” mentality.
Vance describes himself as a conservative — although he criticizes some conservative positions on poverty — and attempts to thread the needle between liberal ideas about public assistance and conservative emphasis on personal responsibility.
Credit Courtesy of the publisher.
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He writes: “I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth. But are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children?”
Does Vance view the problems he describes as personal or structural? And what he would like to see happen if people in the region took a “hard look” at themselves?
“Well I think it’s both, it’s hard to tease out the personal from the structural,” he said. “I’d like us to think about how the ways we conduct ourselves can be detrimental to our children. All these things matter. And also that policymakers know they can put their thumb on the scales for these people, that it’s not hopeless.”
White Trash: A History of Class in America
Louisiana State University historian Nancy Isenberg cautions that Vance’s personal tale, though compelling, places too much emphasis on individual choice.
“Blaming it on family dysfunction, blaming it on drug addiction, misses that these are rooted in economic dislocation,” she said.
Isenberg’s book, “White Trash,” is subtitled: “The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.” She argues that despite our national myth of a land of opportunity borne from the American Revolution, we carried British notions of class into the American experiment.
Isenberg covers a lot of ground to make her case, but the most compelling thread traces the language used to describe the poor, and how those words work over and over to excuse the oppression of “waste people.”
Credit Mindy Stricke
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Historian Nancy Isenberg’s “White Trash” shows how Americans have ignored the role class distinctions play.
She documents terms such as crackers, sand-hillers, mudsills, swamp-dwellers and clay-eaters, (all refer to the marginal lands the people were forced to use) right up to the title slur, white trash. All were used to make poor working people of the rural south and Appalachia seem like a different breed: people whose self-destructive behavior made them less than fully American.
“We begin to see this focus on how they are a group of people that have so many defects that somehow they can never be assimilated into normal society,” Isenberg said. “This is how Americans can ignore class. If you claim that no education, no charity can uplift these people because of their derelict ways, then you can essentially write them off.”
Isenberg sees echoes of this in many media depictions of the Ohio Valley and Appalachia region, and attempts to explain Trump’s appeal. She singled out the mean-spirited reporting of National Review writer Kevin Williamson, whose view of a “Big White Ghetto” paints a freak-show Appalachia with little mention of the exploitative industrial practices that have defined Appalachian history.
Credit Courtesy of the publisher.
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“We have to realize that class has a geography,” Isenberg said. “The place you’re born, your neighborhood, family, all determine your advantage.”
She cited a statistic that upper middle-class parents pass on 50 percent of their wealth to their children.
“What that means is that we are imitating old-world aristocracies where the most fundamental determinant of success was wealth and privilege from parents and ancestors,” she said. “Hard work is not enough to get ahead. That’s one thing Americans do not want to talk about.”
Election Focus But No Finale
J.D. Vance told me that his book’s success is largely driven by readers on the country’s coasts who are puzzled by Trump’s appeal in the Heartland.
“It’s unfortunate that people just don’t know these areas where Trump has support,” he said. “They think of these supporters as foreign exotic animals and they’re trying to understand them.”
The election has clearly put the condition of the white working class on the nation’s radar. The question now is whether anything will change.
“I am skeptical about a long-term, serious examination,” Isenberg said. “I’m not surprised that class is again at the forefront, but it is easier to retreat to the myths of American democracy and American ideals.”
Jones sees no quick solution to the deep divisions his book identifies.
“We’ve crossed a threshold fundamental to so many white Christians and their sense of what the country was,” he said. “No matter what the issue, the heat and apocalyptic rhetoric outstrip what we’re talking about.”
The white working class issues may be driving this rancorous election, but they certainly won’t go away on Election Day.
It’s been about 15 years since the opioid epidemic first hit Appalachia. And now, there’s a whole generation of teenagers in West Virginia and Kentucky who have grown up with drug addiction strongly affecting their friends and families.
Novelist Carrie Mullins grew up in Mt. Vernon, KY. After spending a number of years in Lexington, she returned home in 2003.
“And when I moved back, It seemed like there’s been an entire generation that’s just been decimated by… drugs. These were kids that I knew growing up. These were kids I had taught at vacation bible school. And it was across all class lines. It was everybody.”
"When you're addicted, I think it's hard to be human, in a way. And it's hard to see people who are addicted as human sometimes."- Carrie Mullins
So Mullins decided to write a coming-of-age novel based on the frightening realities facing many young Appalachians. Her debut novel is called Night Garden.
The protagonist is a 17-year-old girl named Marie.
“It’s a fictional book of course, but in a way I wanted to make a record of what’s going on in my area and with the people that I loved in my area,” said Mullins.
In her novel, Marie’s family suffers a tragedy, and her parents’ reactions push her to addiction.
“I know parents, brothers and sisters of people who’ve been addicted. It’s super hard to pinpoint how it starts and why it starts.”
“One thing you do when you’re that age could impact your whole life. That’s what I think about Marie. She made a couple of not so great decisions, and the outcome is gonna be with her forever.”
A grapevine clipping from the home of Pearl S. Buck, a world renowned author with West Virginia roots, just arrived in Michigan and soon will be planted at a high school literary garden.
It began as an idea last summer. Jennifer McQuillan teaches literature at West Bloomfield High School in Michigan, and she wanted to give her students something that would get them off their phones- and become better connected to the writing in decades old books.
“There are gardens that are devoted to Emily Dickinson or to Shakespeare, but there’s not been a garden in a secondary school setting that brings together important plants from American authors like this anywhere, to our knowledge,” said McQuillan.
Since last August, the garden has grown. Thirty-four plants have been sent from the homesteads of American authors, including Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway and Alice Walker.
McQuillan says she wasn’t quite sure if the students would connect the garden with the literature she was teaching them.
“The turning point came around December, when we were reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Buds and Bird Voices”. And he writes about a lilac bush out of his window. And we had that lilac bush growing in the literary garden. And that was the moment when the kids went, ‘oh my gosh, we have something really special here.’”
Fast forward to this summer. McQuillan’s garden will soon include a clipping from a 120-year-old grapevine that drapes across the front entrance to the birthplace of writer Pearl S. Buck
Kirk Judd, a board member for the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation, says Buck wrote about the grapevine. “She remembers being 9 years old, sitting on the upper level porch, reading her Charles Dickens, and eating grapes from the grapevine.”
Grapevine at Stulting House, Pearl S. Buck’s grandparents’ home where she was born,
Judd says that even though she spent most of her childhood abroad, Pearl S. Buck always thought of West Virginia as home.
Born at her grandparents’ home in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck was the first American woman awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, and her bestselling novel The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize.
She passed away in 1973. But the grapevine that she remembered so vividly from her West Virginia birthplace is very much still alive.
Jennifer McQuillan says it’s the first plant they’ve received from West Virginia. She teaches Pearl Buck’s writing in both her American and World Literature classes. McQuillan says she’s really happy to add Buck to the literary garden- both as an American and a world author who wrote extensively about China, her other home away from West Virginia.
“Because she’s sought both as a native author and as an author who is making her mark in another country as well. So I think that’s a really compelling story and I’m really excited to share that story with my students this fall.”
McQuillan will be working with her students to connect Buck’s writing to the grapevine they’ll be planting this summer, with the help of master gardeners in Michigan. She hopes both the grapevine, and a love for literature, will take root and grow.
