A culture of poverty, drugs, and domestic violence

As I was reading Sing, Unburied, Sing, I was able to make many connections to a memoir title Hillbilly Elegy, which I read for my non-fiction independent study in AP English III last year. In this memoir, the authors JD Vance tells us he was able to overcome poverty and family crises in the troubled, white, rural working class of Kentucky and Ohio and then pass high school, join the marines, make it into Ohio State University, and then into Yale Law school to become a successful law clerk.

Just like Jojo and Kayla, JD grew up with drug-addicted parents. Contrastingly, JD was physically abused by his mother and father regularly. JD's mother had gone through numerous cycles of relationships with boyfriends and husbands, filled with violence, anger, and abuse with J.D. and his sister as the scapegoats. As a result, J.D. had no real father or mother figure in his life. Instead, he relied on the care from his older sister and his strict-yet caring grandmother. His mother started to take prescription drugs in large quantities in order to cope with the stress of her boyfriends, the death of her father, and duty of parenting her children. The rehabilitation facility she was forced to live in did nothing to stop her addiction, as she later became hooked on heroine.

The area in northern Kentucky and southern Ohio that he grew up in is filled with poor, white families who make their living working in mines or manufacturing plants. This is very similar to Bayou Sauvage, MS made up of mostly farmers and agricultural dependent labor. Almost all of the families from these areas are filled with some form of conflict, substance abuse, or violence, so it is not surprising to see the connection between these two novels.

Vance uses his struggles and hardships faced within his family to demonstrate how much of the rural working class also experiences the same reality. He describes how husbands and wives could not get along, children were physically and verbally abused, and how families were not making enough money to stay out of poverty. Some of the families took to asking for federal assistance and lived on welfare and subsidized housing, while others kept their blue-collar jobs that were slowly beginning to disappear. His main point in telling us his story is to convince the reader that government is not to blame for the terrible economic and domestic problems of his society. While public policy can definitely help, the main problem is with the "hillbillies's" attitudes and values and how they raise their children, which is conflict many do not have the solution to fixing. Where as with Sing Unburied Sing, Ward seems to use the story of Jojo and Kayla to push for racial equality and prison reform and to recognize the drug problem.

Here is an article by the New York Times on the memoir and is worth a read.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/books/review-in-hillbilly-elegy-a-compassionate-analysis-of-the-poor-who-love-trump.html