Since the last time I blogged about Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, the book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. That win for Kingsolver's latest novel surprised me, in part. because the book is not very woke. In the prior passage that I highlighted, Kingsolver compares being called a "hillbilly" to being called the "n-word" in the sense that the maligned group has appropriated or reclaimed the term. But any comparison between, say, "white trash" or other not-quite-white folks on the one hand and Black folks on the other is not permitted in my uber-woke world.
Well, I finished reading Demon Copperhead this week and, in doing so, came across some similar comparisons. Here's one such passage where the comparison is not only to African Americans, but also to Native Americans, here the Cherokee. Demon, an adolescent Melungeon growing up in Lee County, Virginia, is writing about Tommy, a peer he met when they were both in foster care. Tommy and Demon had previously been partners in producing a cartoon that ran in the local newspaper where Tommy worked, as well as a few others in the region. Tommy has since moved to Pennsylvania to marry. Demon, in this passage, is recently out of addiction recovery and Tommy is prodding him to use his talents to produce a graphic novel about Appalachia.
What changed everything was Tommy calling me up, out of the blue. The History of our People thing, he hadn’t let go. Maybe homesick. Or having trouble explaining us rednecks to his new family, as you do. Anyway, so excited on the phone he doesn’t start with hello. Demon! I know why we’re the dogshit of America, it’s a war, and it’s been going on the whole time, and nobody gets it, not even us. You have to do a graphic novel about it. This, at three motherfucking o’clock in the goddamn morning. I said I couldn’t wait to hear all about it tomorrow.
Oh, I did. He claimed he was on the right track as far as the two kinds of economy people, land versus money. But not city people against us personally. It’s the ones in charge, like government or what have you. They were always on the side of the money-earning people, and down on the land people, due to various factors Tommy mentioned, monetize this, international banking that. The main one I could understand was that money-earning ones pay taxes. Whereas you can’t collect shit on what people grow and eat on the spot, or the work they swap with their neighbors. That’s like a percent of blood from a turnip. So, the ones in charge started cooking it into everybody’s brains to look down on the land people, saying we are an earlier stage of human, like junior varsity or cavemen. Weird-shaped heads.
Tommy was watching TV these days, and seeing finally how this shit is everywhere you look. Dissing the country bumpkins, trying to bring us up to par, the long-termed war of trying to shame the land people into joining America. Meaning their version, city. TV being the slam book of all times, maybe everybody in the city was just going along with it, not really noticing the rudeness factors. Possibly to the extent of not getting why we are so fucking mad out here. It took a lot of emails of Tommy telling me how far back it went, this offensive to wedge people off their own holy ground and turn them into wage labor. Before the redneck miner wars, the coal land grabs, the timber land grabs. Whiskey Rebellion: an actual war. George Washington marched the US Army on our people for refusing to pay tax on corn liquor. Which they weren’t even selling for money, mainly just making for neighborly entertainment. How do you get tax money out of moonshine? Answer: You and what army. It goes a ways to explaining people’s feelings about taxes and guns.
Tommy said the world was waiting for a graphic novel about the history of these wars. I told him the world could hold its horses then, because I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to do that. Then went to bed, woke up, and started drawing it. He fed me story lines like kindling on a fire. I wanted to call it Hillbilly Wars, but he said no, people would think the usual cornball nonsense, hill folk shooting each other. Plus he pointed out there were other land-type people in the boat with us. The Cherokees that got kicked off their land. All the other tribes, same. Black people after they were freed up, wanting their own farms but getting no end of grief for it, till they gave up and went to the city.
(pp. 522-23)
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