What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

Conservatives believed that Elegy would make their intellectual platforming about the moral failures of the poor colorblind in a way that would retroactively vindicate them for viciously deploying the same stereotypes against nonwhite people for decades.

There are many authors who have written about the people and problems of Appalachia and similar environments who don’t have eugenicists for pen-pals and mentors. Some of them even anchor frank discussions of social problems within moving personal stories. Otis Trotter’s Keeping Heart, a memoir about growing up poor, sick, and Black in Appalachian Ohio springs to mind, as does Rick Bragg’s All Over but the Shoutin’. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is the story of a dysfunctional West Virginian family and finding the courage to leave. Linda Tate, in Power in the Blood, tells of the re-discovery of her Cherokee roots, and Creeker, by Linda Scott DeRosier, is yet another memoir about coming of age in Appalachia.

There are many things that have come to Appalachia that no one wanted, but how we respond to them once they’re here is important.

Ours is a region that makes graveyards for mountains, because companies have made our mountains into graveyards. “In his hands are the deep places of the Earth; the strength of the hills is His also,” one gravestone reads, quoting Psalms.