My Ancestry is Hillbilly

But You Better Not Call Me White Trash

I have mentioned my hillbilly roots several times in this forum. I feel neither pride nor shame about it. I grew up a hillbilly from Pennsylvania, so what? Does that define me as a person? Only if I let it. However, I do not deny my hillbilly history is a part of who I am.

Some years ago, I read Hillbilly Elegy, by JD Vance, current Ohio Senator, Regressive Party Vice Presidential nominee, and Orangenosing MAGA moron. It was about his upbringing as a self-described hillbilly. I remember it as being an okay read, not great but not terrible. We had a few common experiences, I guess, but people who live a lower middle class or poor rural life are not all the same, just as folks who live a comfortable life in suburbia are not all the same.

And, you know, the labels we choose to accept or reject regarding ourselves are up to each of us as individuals. Folks with similar experiences as mine, might feel differently about being called a hillbilly.

I do not believe all rural people are hillbillies. People who live out in the country can be just as mannerly and urbane and sophisticated as city folks.

Some people might think that “poor white trash” and “hillbilly” are interchangeable. They’re not. We may have been hillbillies, lower middle class on the economic scale, maybe even close to the edge of being poor in the early days, and we were white, but we weren’t trash, and I’ll fight anyone who says we were. (It won’t be much of a fight, though, at my advanced age.)

Throughout my childhood, we lived in a trailer, out in the country, surrounded by dozens of junk cars. That, to me as a young lad, screamed that we were poor hillbillies.

Sometimes I wonder what my two brothers and two sisters think about it. I do not recall ever talking to any of them about the subject. It is very possible they would reject the label. Being the eldest, perhaps I was closer to the hillbillyness of our shared ancestry.

Our first trailer, a little 35 footer. That’s probably me on the tricycle.

This was the view out the front of our trailer. Junk cars everywhere.

At some point, to give our now family of 4 more space, a small, two-room building was attached to the trailer, providing a laundry/furnace room and a TV/living room. It was all we could afford, I guess.

After a few years, there were 6 of us, with another child on the way. It was getting pretty crowded in the old 35 foot trailer, so it was hauled away and a big, new 65 foot trailer was rolled into place and attached to the small, two-room building. And, being the oldest, I got my own room, with a real bed! I no longer had to sleep on the sofa bed in the living room. I was happy about that, of course, but after my baby sis arrived, we were a family of 7 living in a goddamn trailer. I often wished we could live in a brick house, with a nice yard, and a garage, and a basement, and zero junk cars littering the landscape.

Our big second trailer, attached to the two-room building.

We lived next door to my maternal grandparents, so they were part of our everyday lives. Not long ago, I learned that my grandfather was a moonshiner during Prohibition. If that doesn’t confirm my hillbilly ancestry, I don’t know what does. This was not a big family secret that had only recently been discovered. Family members had known about this for years, but it was a story that I had not heard, for one reason or another.

This is a simple still for making moonshine. I’m guessing my grandfather had something similar.

My grandfather sold his moonshine to speakeasies in Youngstown, Ohio, and it has been speculated that he was smitten by the daughter of one of his customers. The romance quickly blossomed, she got pregnant, and they ran off to get married. Problem was, my grandfather was 22, and his new bride, my grandmother, was 14. My grandmother’s family tried to have my grandfather jailed and my grandmother put into reform school, but she convinced them of their love, and they acquiesced to her wishes.

I suppose I could call my grandfather a rogue or a cad, but I do not want to romanticize him, because the unvarnished truth is, he was a raging alcoholic and an unpleasant old bastard. By the time I came along, his moonshining days were long over. He did not have a job and he was unwell, perhaps because he smoked like a chimney and was rarely sober. He died at age 62, from emphysema and the effects of being a hopeless alcoholic. I was 13, and I remember him very clearly, but not very fondly, I must say. He was a mean, sometimes violent, drunk, and there were a few incidents with him that I have not forgotten. Or forgiven.

My grandfather loved his PM Whiskey and Iron City Beer.

My mother and father met at a country music show when, due to the randomness of the universe, they were seated next to each other. I was told the venue in which they met was called Hillbilly Heaven, but I don’t know if that’s true or not. She was about 16, he was 24 or 25, and one thing led to another, and guess what? She got pregnant, with me, and they got married.

I know being a teen mom is not unique to the hillbilly culture. It seemed even less scandalous in those days for a grown-ass man to have a teen wife, at least in my family. Heck, as I mentioned before, my mother’s mother was 14 when she got married and started having babies, so what was she going to say about it? My mother had 9 siblings (no, that is not a typo), and one of my aunts told me that when one of the 6 sisters got married and moved out, they were happy because that was one less person with whom they had to share a room and a bed.

Good gosh, 6 girls sharing a room, and 4 boys sharing another room? How awful. The same aunt told me that when it was bath time before they got indoor plumbing, they filled up a big wash tub in the kitchen and the least dirty of the younger kids got to bathe first, and they went down the line to the dirtiest kid, one after the other. Sounds hillbilly-ish to me.

My aunt says they didn’t know they were poor because they didn’t know any better. The way they lived was simply the way life was.

Gee, the things I remember . . . Sometimes, a long suppressed memory pops into my head for no discernible reason, reminding me of my hillbilly roots. For example, I remember how we disposed of our garbage. We burned it out back by the tree line. I don’t know how we managed to not set the woods on fire. The pile of burned garbage got bigger and bigger, and every few years, it was hauled away by someone.

The sewage from my grandparents’ home and our place ran into an open ditch along the road. Occasionally, a baseball or a football would land in the sewage ditch. What did we do? Well, we fished it out, of course. We’d wipe it off as best we could and continue playing. As my aunt said - we didn’t know any better. We didn’t know it was unsafe and unusual to have an open sewer running between the road and your yard. Where did everyone else’s sewage go?

I imagine our mealtimes would have seemed chaotic to outsiders. Instead of saying, “Oh, dear brother, would you pass the bread, please?”, anyone who wanted bread would just holler out, “Bread!”, and whoever was closest to it would be expected to pass it along. Sometimes literally, as in tossing it to the other end of the table. Soup was slurped, plates were licked, lips were smacked . . . dang, writing this and seeing it in print makes us seem uncouth, uncivilized, and almost feral. I definitely had a lot to learn about how to behave in the non-hillbilly world.

I learned what I needed to learn, though. As I said before, it may have been different for my brothers and sisters. I was 15 when my youngest sibling was born. My experiences are not necessarily theirs. What does it matter, anyway? Near as I can tell, we are all doing okay, so whether we are hillbillies or not; whether our ancestry was something to overcome or was just a layer in the foundations of our lives, is meaningless to who we are right now.

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