Battersea Boy Ted and the Hill Billy Elegy

I should confess that I didn't know what an elegy was and I was pronouncing it eulogy.  I am fortunate to have children who will correct their mother so as to prevent her from embarrassing them in public.  

But that malaprop got me thinking about these two words; don't they mean the same thing?  So I pulled out the OED and did a little research.  A elegy is a sad and sorrowful reflection like a poem, which can, but does not have to be, about a death.  A eulogy, on the other hand, is usually a tribute or celebration of a person who has died.  Hmmm.  I wish I had known the distinction before I began reading this book because it actually helps to understand why on earth the author, J.D. Vance, titled his book this way.

Vance's Hill Billy Elegy laments the passing of a way of life.  The proud Appalachia of his youth has been pillaged and robbed of its life's blood and has left behind the weakest and the most vulnerable to make their way in a world that has passed them by.  With no work or hope, Appalachia has come to mean poverty, unemployment, alcoholism and opioid addition, and, well, actual batsh*t craziness!  

All of this features in Hill Billy Elegy, but Vance does more.  He sifts through the bones of a once proud and hardworking culture that essentially fueled the industrial revolution in this country and made many people wealthy from the sweat off Appalachia's back.  These men worked the coal mines, hunched over in deep darkness, breathing in the coal dust that would fill their lungs and make young widows of their wives.  I was down a coal mine once, and left feeling profoundly grateful to the men who spent their shortened lives burrowing underground so that I might have electricity and heat.  It takes a brave heart and stout back to do this hellish work.

But Vance doesn't linger in, or make excuses for this walk through the darkness.  He has a different purpose.  He is looking for the treasure in all of this soot and dust, and he finds it.  The treasure is his family and each story told, filled with pain and human tragedy, crystalizes into an escape route for Vance.  His story is remarkable and one would be tempted to give all the credit to him.  But in the love story that he tells of his grandmother, mother and sister, you can see their single-mindedness to get their boy out of the mountains, out of small town Ohio and towards a life where he would have a chance.  These women are remarkable.  With all their craziness, addictions, tough love and weaknesses, they manage to launch Vance in to an education and a world that he wants as desperately as they do.  It's a story told with insight, and with heapings of love and respect for each hard won sacrifice given by these three women.  It is a story of grief and loss, but it is also a love story and a thanksgiving for those freely given gifts he used to walk above ground into the light of the day.

New Year's Day Elegy

I am laying by the fire on a cold New Year's Day, reading Hill Billy Elegy.  Behind me are 101 days of pandemic and I am feeling emotionally spent.  In July 2020, my aunt died.  The matriarch of our clan with a colorful and strong personality, she had lived a life defined by grit, endurance and single-mindedness.  I always imagined that I would be there in her last days to help my cousin and celebrate the woman whose influence on me is deep and wide.   The pandemic put that notion to rest and I ended up as an onlooker, zooming in on the tail end of the celebration of her life.  It was bewildering and my grief remains unexpressed.  Then, days after Christmas, my "uncle" passed away.  He too had lived a life making lemonade out of lemons.  His loss left me ragged and raging.  It was so quick and unexpected that it literally took my breath away.  Lying on the rug, wrapped in a blanket of sorrow, watching the flames leap and coil up the chimney, I just wanted the world to stop so I could get off.

Throughout that long day, I read the book in fits and starts, I couldn't help thinking about my dad, and my aunt and uncle.  These are people who share a similar back story with Vance.  Dad and Aunty Iris grew up in a family where there was no time for morals and ethics and the niceties of life.  Being prepared for life meant being on the look out for the next thump across the ear 'ole; hearing the warning sounds of shouting and crashing crockery.  Nothing changed from generation to the next and there was nothing to look forward to except more of the same grinding poverty, lack of education, lack of cash, lack of hope.

Like Vance, Dad got out of there, pushed out by a strong mother, and like Vance, he reached back to pull his sisters and mother out in to the light, and to care for his father in spite of the cursing and abuse.  There's a lot here to reflect upon and as I read, the words on the page nudge my mind into my own past, trying to make sense of it.  A therapist once told me to be unafraid of delving into the psyche.  "It will feel like a dark, cold cave," she said.  "You will find a pile of bones.  These are all your memories and life experiences.  It is your job to sift through the bones to find the treasure.  And you will find the treasure," she reassured me, "It's there, and once found, it will guide you through the rest of your journey.  The treasure will lead you to the light.

I have thought about these words often over the years, and they return to me on this melancholy New Year's Day.  My family's journey out of the violence and poverty of South London, the sifting of the bones brought them to a lighter place where the treasure lies.  My Dad found it.  Aunty Iris found it.  This is the treasure they have given to me so that I could walk into a better life.