In Vance’s ‘Hillbilly’ home, his story rings true — but not always his message (2024)

Three decades ago, this home sheltered a young JD Vance as he fled a tumultuous life in Ohio to spend summers with his grandparents — a period he cited as pivotal to his success in his speech last week accepting the vice-presidential nomination. Today, the battered house sits amid a community that has suffered deeper decline since Vance described the region’s ruin eight years ago in “Hillbilly Elegy,” his bestseller, which was turned into a 2020 film.

Vance’s experience with a dysfunctional extended Appalachian family here and in Ohio formed the backbone of the book, as he recounted how generations of abuse and violence had shaped him and his relatives. It includes tales of his uncle nearly killing a man by slicing him with an electric saw and his grandmother soaking his grandfather with gasoline and lighting him on fire.

Those dramatic stories primarily involve Vance’s close relatives — who are either deceased or did not respond to requests for comment. The incidents aren’t documented in court records in a community often loath to involve authorities in family disputes, but numerous friends and neighbors who are close to Vance’s family said they don’t doubt that the stories are broadly true.

What many in Jackson take issue with, though, are the conclusions that Vance reached in “Hillbilly Elegy” about the root causes of the area’s poverty and violence. In the book, Vance argues that a lack of personal responsibility is partly to blame, writing that “Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us.”

In fact, many in Jackson say government help is a key lifeline in a distressed region. At Jackson’s city hall, on a downtown street near closed-up storefronts, Mayor Laura Thomas ticked off the recent run of calamities that have required help from federal agencies: After the steep decline of coal-mining came the pandemic and then two successive historic floods in 2021 and 2022.

“Unfortunately, I would say that since I’ve been in office, we’ve had one disaster after another,” said the mayor, who is starting her sixth year in the nonpartisan job. “So it’s been hard to govern.”

Although registered Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans in Breathitt County, Trump won the 2020 vote here by a margin of more than 3 to 1, according to election records.

Vance himself has seemingly shifted his rhetoric on what ails Jackson and other poor, mostly White parts of the United States, a change that mirrors the Republican Party that once preached personal responsibility becoming one that has focused more on the populism of former president Donald Trump, in which elites can be blamed for the problems of the working class. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last week, Vance blamed big businesses for decimating towns where he grew up — not the residents who live there.

“America’s ruling class wrote the checks. Communities like mine paid the price,” Vance, 39, told the crowd in Milwaukee.

Vance’s spokesman did not respond to a list of questions from The Washington Post for this story.

For those still living in Jackson, as Vance’s family did for generations before his grandparents moved to Ohio in search of better opportunities, his stories in “Hillbilly Elegy” echo truths about life in this hardscrabble region — but don’t offer the easy answers for relieving them that his political career has harnessed.

An escape to Kentucky

Vance describes “Hillbilly Elegy” as “a fully accurate portrait of the world I’ve witnessed,” writing that while he changed the names of some people, there are no composite characters. Where possible, he wrote, he “corroborated the details with documentation” such as letters — but noted, “I am sure this story is as fallible as any human memory.”

Vance’s family traces its roots deep into rural Kentucky, back to legendary fights between the Hatfields and the McCoys. One ancestor was a powerful Democrat and county attorney, another oversaw the local jail, but most were poor. Times were so bad in the 1940s that Vance’s grandparents, Bonnie and James, whom he calls Mamaw and Papaw, left Jackson for Middletown, Ohio, an industrial town 200 miles away. His grandmother was 14 years old and pregnant and his grandfather was 17 years old, Vance wrote. The baby died days after birth.

But life in Middletown could be as violent as it was in Jackson. Vance wrote that Mamaw warned Papaw that “she’d kill” her husband if he came home drunk. When Papaw did exactly that and fell asleep on the couch, Mamaw “calmly retrieved a gasoline canister from the garage, poured it over her husband, lit a match, and dropped it on his chest,” Vance wrote. Papaw “burst into flames” and was saved by a daughter who doused him. (The incident, which may have happened more than 50 years ago, was not found in available court documents.)

Vance’s mother, Beverly, was raised in Middletown and gave birth to Vance in 1984. Vance writes bitingly about his mother’s failings, particularly her heroin use, and she married five men who often were absent in his life. (His mother has been sober for a decade, and appeared with Vance at the Republican National Convention last week.)

In what Vance described as a turning point in his life, his mother got so angry while driving with him that “she pulled over to beat the s--- out of me.” Vance escaped to a nearby house, where he said he told the resident that “My mom is trying to kill me.” His mother was arrested on charges of domestic violence, a misdemeanor, Vance wrote. But when the case went to court, Vance said he lied to keep his mother out of jail, saying nothing happened, and the matter was dismissed. The Post could find no records of the case.

The confrontation with his mother led Vance to move in with Mamaw, who lived in a nearby house in Middletown. Vance said that during his early childhood, he traveled every summer with Mamaw to Jackson, a pilgrimage he made until he was 12 years old. Vance wrote that while his childhood address was in Ohio, he considered “my home” to be the ancestral homestead “in the holler, in Jackson, Kentucky.”

“Most of the horrific episodes were in Middletown,” Michael Rose, who has long known the family, said in an interview at the department store Rose’s family has long owned in Jackson. “That’s why this place was special to him, because he was getting away from them here.”

Vance’s great-grandmother lived in the modest brick home in Panbowl Branch, with a large screened porch through which Vance regularly dashed to the nearby creek. And it was here that he heard tales of his family’s brutal past.

In one episode, Vance wrote about a man he called Uncle Pet, who he said got in an argument with a man nicknamed “Big Red” who called him a “son of a bitch.” Pet “pulled the man from his truck, beat him unconscious, and ran an electric saw up and down his body. “Big Red nearly bled to death” but didn’t press charges, Vance wrote. Pet was identified by family members who spoke to The Post as Vance’s uncle Blaine Blanton Jr., who died in 2007. The identity of Big Red was unclear.

The story was so sensational that it prompted Stephen Bowling, the Breathitt County library director whose cousins lived across the road from Vance’s ancestors, to research court records and newspaper archives for any evidence. He found none.

“That doesn’t mean that didn’t happen, because numerous members of the family said it did happen,” Bowling said in an interview at his Jackson office. “It’s hard for people who aren’t from here to understand. There’s a mountain chivalry where you might assault me today, I’m not going to press charges, but the opportunity will present itself when I can repay the favor. So there are lots and lots and lots of those type of incidents that aren’t reported.”

Indeed, Bowling said Vance was “rather generous” in writing about his family and could have told about much worse incidents — a view shared by numerous others here. Mark Wireman, a Jackson resident who has long known the family, said the book was “tame” based on his knowledge.

‘Immune to hard work’

As a Yale law student, Vance organized a reading group to study why many in the White working class, unlike his grandparents, did not leave Appalachia. Writing in 2013 to classmates, he said they should learn “why these general trends seem to affect the white working class so acutely,” according to an email reviewed by The Post.

Three years later, those same musings were woven into the fabric of “Hillbilly Elegy,” which uses tales of Vance’s tumultuous family to draw broader conclusions about what afflicts the White working class.

In the book, Vance writes with deep sympathy for those who couldn’t escape the cycles of poverty, as he did, but also argues many of the community’s enduring problems are self-inflicted. He tells the story of a man he calls “Bob,” whom he met one summer working at a tile factory. The 19-year-old with a pregnant girlfriend missed work, was often late — and then blamed managers when he was fired. There is no way to verify that story, which Vance argued demonstrated there are “too many young men immune to hard work.”

As the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies, it resonated deeply with conservatives — particularly as Donald Trump ascended to the White House on a swell of White working-class support. Vance was called a Trump interpreter, even though he was highly critical of him at the time.

But in his ancestral hometown, some Jackson residents who know Vance’s family said the experience he described in the book didn’t reflect their own and said some of his conclusions perpetuated unfair stereotypes.

While the book may be an accurate portrait of Vance’s family, “that does not mean that it’s a portrait of my family or every family in Appalachia,” said Bowling, who is also a leading historian of the area. “It became so easy in 2016 for pundits to extrapolate, ‘This is the Appalachian experience. This is what happens to everybody who’s raised in the mountains.’ And that’s not the case at all.”

Anthony Harkins, a professor of history at Western Kentucky University who has studied Appalachia for 30 years, said that Vance did a disservice to those trying to build opportunities in the region by relying on anecdotal tales and discredited economic theories.

“The idea that he should be a voice of an entire 13-state region with differences, that his own story is indicative of a broader society, I find that very problematic,” said Harkins, who co-edited a 2019 response to Vance’s book called “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy.” “He reinforces stereotypes of poverty and frames it as an individual choice instead of larger socioeconomic forces.”

Vance also faced some blowback for never being a full-time Kentucky resident — a view captured by a 2016 opinion piece in the Lexington Herald-Leader titled, “Author too removed from culture he criticizes.”

But few in Jackson have bristled at that part of Vance’s identity as he’s risen to U.S. senator and now Republican vice-presidential nominee while claiming the “hillbilly” mantle.

Rose said he believes the criticism has come mostly from local residents who reacted to the title without fully reading the book. “People here, we can call ourselves ‘hillbilly.’ Somebody else calls us hillbilly, it’s go time. So if they see a book that says ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ they think, that’s somebody from up North attacking us,” said Rose, noting that instead, Vance had deep roots in the area.

With Vance now potentially poised for higher office, many in Jackson are wondering anew what his elevation could mean for a region that remains desperately poor.

The coal-mining backbone of the economy, still evident on scarred hillsides, has long since declined. An epidemic of addiction, overdoses and deaths has swept the region. Breathitt County is often listed as one of America’s 10 poorest, and the most recent unemployment rate was 8.4 percent, compared with 4.1 percent nationally. Hundreds of residents have left the county in recent years, mainly in search of jobs, just as Vance’s grandparents did 80 years ago.

Thomas, the mayor, said the message she heard from Vance is that “He came from a bad situation and he has become very successful, obviously on his own, without the government propping him up. And so why aren’t we doing that more here?”

But that kind of leap isn’t possible for many without some aid, especially when economic and natural disasters repeatedly assail the area. “We can whine about who was the poorest and who walked the furthest barefoot and all that stuff,” she said. “I get the message, but I also get that you have to have some basic level of support.”

While stressing that she wanted to sound positive and hopeful, Thomas said she wondered if places such as Jackson will still receive Vance’s attention now that he is a national candidate.

“Given his agenda, do you think that’s on his list?” she asked, adding, “I would certainly hope so.”

Bowling, the library director, said that while the region had become “dependent on aid” through federal programs, there is a real need for government to be a “regulating, calming, encouraging entity.”

As Vance has shifted from Trump critic to full-fledged MAGA vice-presidential candidate, he’s embraced Trump’s protectionist and populist views on the economy. While accepting the vice-presidential nomination last week, he castigated President Biden for supporting trade deals that “destroyed even good American middle-class manufacturing jobs.”

His speech didn’t touch on the individual failings of people like “Bob” who featured in the narrative of “Hillbilly Elegy.”

‘His blood’

Miles away from the now-dilapidated Vance family ancestral home outside Jackson, around hairpin curves and past some mountain homesteads, his family’s cemetery is all but hidden in the woods, holding a spot where Vance has said he wants to be buried near his Mamaw and Papaw. Their graves are marked with a large headstone with the name “Vance” and the phrase, “Beyond The Sunset” — the title of an old country song about the hereafter.

On the afternoon of Vance’s acceptance speech, Wireman, the family friend and the mayor’s brother, visited the remote site and said it proved wrong those who said Vance is not really of this place.

“The pushback that says he’s not from around here, he’s not one of us,” Wireman said, shaking his head. “But we’re standing here. Right there’s his people. His blood.”

Alice Crites and Hannah Natanson contributed to this report.