Between family research and reading my friend's book, Cumberland Bride, Kentucky has been on my mind lately. I love the place and wish I could spend more time there, but I can't live there. The cost of living and familial conflict are far too high.
It seems my family and I aren't the only Kentuckians who left the state for those reasons. A book titled Hillbilly Elegy was released in 2016. It has an Amazon rating of four-and-a-half stars with well over 11,000 reviews. I haven't read it yet, but judging from the description, the story of the author's family appears to parallel that of my own. My grandfather moved his family from the Cumberland Plateau in the 1920s for a better life and an opportunity to work on the railroad in the northern part of the state and in Ohio.
Reading it was a bit surreal. What I found fascinating though was the shared behaviors and attitudes of our families. The addictions and unwillingness to discuss their lives back in the Cumberland Plateau. Though my mother was born outside of the Plateau, she apparently adopted her siblings' attitudes about the region in which their entire family lived for nearly 200 years. I once asked why we never visited our great aunts there. Though she and her siblings spoke of the ladies with great fondness, my mother replied something to the effect that she didn't want to have anything to do with those hillbillies (at the time, we didn't know we were descendants of Squire Boone through Sarah.) As they covered the roots of their hair when the real color began to emerge, so did she and the others do their best to hide the roots of their culture and lives when those experiences and characteristics began to manifest themselves.
My generation of the family could never understand our parents and their attitudes. Elegy and the essay opened a door of understanding, and I hope to learn more.