On Moving Back to Appalachia
I noticed my accent thickening in conversation just before I moved back to Appalachia. I was calling rental agencies in Western North Carolina (WNC) incessantly, trying to thread the needle of ending a lease in central North Carolina, where I had lived for three years, to move to WNC in time to start a new teaching job August 1. My partner lived in Asheville already, which made it easier, but had already put in notice at their apartment to move to central NC by the time I heard back from the one job in WNC I had applied to this year, fulfilling a promise I had made the moment we started dating.
Nearing panic, my accent rang through on the phone. Please don’t think I’m a tourist or a trust punk kid from the Northeast, I begged implicitly with my elongated Appalachian vowels and pleasantries before and after the business of our conversations. Please believe me that I belong here, that I can be one of you.
Of course, I didn’t belong here at all. Not really.
**
I’m uncomfortable with how Appalachian identity works in the media and in academia, both because I think it’s a problematic identity that I hold too dearly and because I think I’m faking it.
First: Appalachian identity is rooted in white settler colonialism, like any regional, state, and/or national identity white people hold outside of Europe. Even if we point to the commonly-held mythology of disenfranchised poor Appalachians, or the leftist historical lens of labor organizing in the region, white people making their whole thing about being born on stolen land is white supremacy. Of course, this is true for every identity (New York; LA; the entire continent of North America), but because I’m Appalachian and say as much about myself, I’m thinking about it more closely.
It doesn’t help that I don’t even have a fake genealogy to cling to, no Scots-Irish great-great-whatever who came to America with just the clothes on their back. My family is white, and my only known immigrant ancestor was Italian. Some Appalachians like to say that their accent is the closest thing to Shakespeare that we have left, because Appalachians were so sequestered through history after immigration from the British Isles – this is a lie, thoroughly disproven by research, and one that, alongside the devotion to Scots-Irish “pure white” identity, was built and perpetuated to hold white Appalachians as the last great white people, the whitest white people, unsullied by the immigrants that flooded cities. Of course, all of Appalachia has always held immigrants of all ethnicities and races, but how the general public conjured an “Appalachian identity,” and that white Appalachians then parroted it back to ourselves to feel special within a greater American context that mocked and joked at our expense, perpetuated white supremacy, and does to this day.
If I’m comfortable acknowledging all that baggage and still want to identify as Appalachian – because I believe a regional marker of oneself can be useful in organizing with others; because I believe in identifying with a unique geography rich in biodiversity and robbed by barons of industry from the outside, leaving ragged scars on the landscape and psyche of a people for whom identity is so often wrested away and placed upon them; because as a queer Appalachian, I have turned this braided identity into a rallying cry of twice-marginalized and maligned in the greater American conversation – I still don’t always think I should identity as Appalachian.
Because I don’t do anything “Appalachian.”
My great-grandmother quilted, sure, but she died when I was seven, taking her skill with her. My mom cans vegetables, but mostly, with two working parents, we had quick meals. Sometimes we ate fried cabbage with pork, but more often we had taco kits, hamburgers, spaghetti, pizza, Shake n Bake chicken with steam-in-bag vegetables. Most of what I point to as an Appalachian state of mind (a yearly vegetable garden; my dad’s purebred show chickens; my great-grandfather’s cattle farming and land; our isolation from cultural centers) could also describe rural upbringing anywhere else in the country. Nobody in my family picks a fiddle or plays a dulcimer; I have never once foraged for wild food or hunted.
I bring this up to other people in the Appalachian intellectual circles sometimes, and they look uncomfortable. I grew up listening to pop music, wore Hollister polos with American Eagle jeans and Converse sneakers, and didn’t participate in the cultural systems around me that were meant to make me know I was Appalachian. If you didn’t look out the window, large swaths of my childhood and teen years looked like any other rural life. There were some clubs, I think, or some classes about Appalachia that I could have taken, but I didn’t. I was living it. And I wanted to get out.
**
So, I left when I was twenty-two years old, and I settled in Charlotte, North Carolina, a couple of years later.
In Charlotte, I found out you could have a Southern city not feel Southern. I also discovered I didn’t love living in cities; I had loved getting drunk with people, earlier, and the messiness of coming out as queer while living in a neighborhood with three gay bars. As soon as I slowed down for the first time in a decade, I realized that I wanted to get back into Appalachia, and that I missed the slower pace of smaller-town life, the affordability and closeness of it all.
I met my now-fiancé on Tinder while I still lived in Charlotte’s city center. According to Tinder, exactly ninety-nine miles separated our living room couches, 1 mile short of the Tinder limit. If they had lived on the other side of Asheville, we would have missed each other entirely.
**
I promised my fiancé that I would always try to get back to Appalachia. I applied to jobs every spring – teaching jobs, mostly, but some in administration, too. My college contract was year-to-year, and I never trusted that I would be hired back. My fiancé was set to finish a master’s degree in May 2020, and as soon as we met, we agreed they would move to me, despite wanting to stay in Asheville. One day, we’ll be back in the mountains, I promised. But I can’t leave this job unless another comes up.
The week that lockdowns began in March 2020, I applied to the job in WNC. I submitted the application and then settled into my partner’s couch, where we watched Dark Waters, a movie based on just one instance of extraction capitalism and extreme pollution in Appalachia. “He sounds like me,” I said at points. We stared at our phones and watched COVID-19 shut the whole world down. And we waited.
**
Our new house, near Asheville in either a rural area or a suburb, depending on who you ask (for the record: it’s a suburb. You can get to Whole Foods in twenty minutes), overlooks the mountains. One of my charmingly accented calls worked – the house I had called about renting wasn’t available anymore, but the woman on the line hesitated, veered off script, and asked what I was looking for. We put in a rental application within an hour of the listing going live, two days later. Some insider information. Some damn good luck.
I’m in these mountains now, a few hours from where I grew up on my great-grandfather’s land. He bought that land after World War II, no doubt bolstered by the programs for returning veterans that weren’t available to Black vets. Black people, activists, and scholars have been trying to get white people to see this reality, the very fabric of our society, forever, that racism is part of every story that white Americans tell themselves. My great-grandfather grew up in poverty and worked hard, yes. He fought for his country, sure. But he bought land in Appalachia that wouldn’t have been mortgaged to a Black man of his exact same credentials. And that land allowed his children to finish high school, not drop out to support their family of origin.
Parts of that land were parceled out for two of his children and one of his grandchildren – my dad – for free. Both of my parents finished high school and, while paying only a small mortgage and both working, completely supported both my sister and me through high school, leaving us able to focus on our studies and get into good colleges.
In this way, I grapple with the “Appalachian” identifier now.
My Appalachian identity depends on a certain kind of foil. I’m Appalachian only in a room of people from outside the region, most likely from Northeastern states. I am most Appalachian when I sound unlike others, and when they note that accent. I’m very Appalachian as a faculty member using “y’all” in lesson videos, and when I compare my upbringing to that of some of my more privileged contemporaries in graduate school (although certainly, not all). I am Appalachian as much as I was raised blue-collar and working class, as much as most of my male family members worked in factories for most of their lives. To say “Appalachian” is to conjure for my audience a particular kind of self – the blue-collar, the accented, the of-the-land.
And again, to say I am a “queer Appalachian” is meant to disrupt both those terms. Not queer as in urban; not Appalachian as in homophobic or conservative. Here, I work within the stereotyping and the false dichotomy in order to push against it. Why else place these words together, other than to say so much about what I think the audience thinks and throw it back at them, defiant?
I want to finish this piece by giving my readers a conclusion, but I don’t have one. Can I keep calling myself “Appalachian,” or can’t I? Should I claim an identity based only on the geography of stolen land, without the broadly accepted cultural touchstones to show my in status? Do food traditions, a regional accent, and an affinity for a certain speed of life do enough to make an entire identity? And if so, is it worth perpetuating stereotypes, these juxtapositions that do so much work for me while I ostensibly attempt to take them down?
I don’t know. But I’m thinking about it.
Author’s Note: For more information about white supremacy and Appalachia, I encourage you to follow activists and groups in the region who discuss racial justice, such as the STAY Project, Y’ALL for ASA, 100 Days in Appalachia, and others, on Instagram and Twitter. You can also read books like White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg or Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon by Anthony Harkins, just to name two of many, for conversations about the intersections of race, class, and whiteness in American popular culture and imagination.