Weekend musings …

I love it when a novel teaches me things I didn’t know or had only a vague idea about.

Demon Copperhead tells the story of poverty in Appalachia, specifically Lee County, Virginia.

I knew vaguely about the opioid addiction crisis and the various initiatives to bring industry to the area but knew little about it’s history and the unique set of circumstances that made the people resist efforts to become “wage slaves and tax payers”.

As early as the 18th century, Appalachians were fighting about having to pay taxes and after the Civil War refused to pay a tax placed on whiskey by the new American government, leading to many whiskey/bourbon makers migrating to Kentucky and Tennessee where the industry could flourish.

I knew a bit about the history of “rednecks” and why they’re called that (said to originate with American coal miner union members who wore red bandanas for solidarity, before it became a derogatory term) but I’d never heard of Melungeons, a group of people from Appalachia who predominantly descend from northern or central Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans and Native Americans, specifically Cherokees, in a mix dubbed a mélange and described as “small groups of people, preferring the freedom of the woods or the seashore to the confinement of labour in civilization.”

A stunning passage in the book describes the feelings of the central character as he recovers from his addiction in Knoxville (the City) about the difference between poverty in the city and poverty in his rural home town, Jonesville, i.e. the difference between the money economy and the land economy.
“Up home it’s different. I mean yes, you want money and a job but there’s a hundred other things you can do to get by … tomato gardens, hunting and fishing, chickens and eggs. Having some ground to stand on, that’s our whole basis.”

He also talks about “juice”, a sort of shorthand for neighbourliness, kindness, love and attention, that is given freely in the country and rarely in the city.

It’s a stunning book; brutal and tender, heart-breaking and life affirming.

Barbara Kingsolver references Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield and the description of effect that institutional poverty has on children but I’m looking at it through the lens of finding out about why so much of America is a mystery to folk in the UK. It’s not just the geography: the fierce independence, the gun culture, the resistance to authority are all here in a complex mix that most of us in the UK (and perhaps people in other parts of the US) are unaware of.

In discussing this book with the erudite Joseph Braun https://substack.com/@josephbraun I also discovered that the Scottish Highlands, the Appalachians, and the Atlas are the same mountain range, once connected as the Central Pangean Mountains:
https://vividmaps.com/central-pangean-mountains/

This links to a character in the book, a scholarly Black school teacher, educated in Chicago, who plays a banjo in a Bluegrass band. When his appalled parents urge him to give up this aberration of what they see as a throwback to life on slave plantations he explains that “their people” had been playing a version of the banjo in Africa long before they were enslaved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banjo#Early_origins

I think I got a lot more than a good story from this book!