“The Beverly Hillbillies” ran for nine years and — crossing the decade demarcation between the 1960s and the 1970s — raised an entire generation with a certain image of Appalachia in their minds. It had award-winning episodes, received Emmy nominations and had the highest ratings of its time. The Clampetts — Granny, Jed, Elly May and Jethro — were a transplant family not just in cosmopolitan Beverly Hills, but in TV sets and family dinners across the United States airways. They were guests in every home, and almost always the butt of the joke. They were the “dictionary definition” of Appalachians: poor, white mountaineers. Today, poor, white mountaineers are the butt of new jokes — the urge to bite back at a region that has a long, complex history of bigotry makes it so easy to label Appalachians as confederates, cousinfuckers or — as COVID-19 deaths in the region soar — an example of natural selection at work. But satirizing the region’s propensity for racism and homophobia ignores the very existence of its victims: the Black Appalachians, the queer Appalachians, the indigenous residents who will never stop calling the mountains home.
The same people who will never be included in its image.
Appalachia is the name given to a region that has never been clearly defined. Ostensibly, the Appalachian region refers to the land surrounding the Appalachian Mountains — the eastern mountain range in the United States. Borders of Appalachia are drawn as a circle around the mountains, which range from southern Pennsylvania to the northernmost part of Georgia, and debates about how far that circle extends have gone on for years. Some maps consider the cultural influence of Appalachia to extend from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi river, drawing connections from city to city like a giant constellation covering the entire eastern United States. You can ask two neighbours in West Virginia where Appalachia starts and ends, and you’ll end up with two different answers and an argument.
Most people agree, at least, on what the region is known for: a beautiful mountain range, nestling the most biodiverse forests in the United States. Fall colours and summer fireflies draw in more tourists to the Great Smoky Mountains than any other National Park. The same mountains that inspired authors and Presidents and war poets continue to draw fascination from the outside to this day. The mountainous nature of the region allows for seclusion to occur easily — people live in pockets, houses are built on top of mountains with no neighbours for 30 miles; I’ve walked the entire length of a creek from my grandmother’s backyard until it emptied into the Clinch River, and have never seen a single other soul. Laurel hells, the Blue Fugates and the Southern Gothic tradition are what the outside world sees as the mountain tradition, sequestered away from a more “modern” world.
The hillbillies who never struck oil and moved to Los Angeles, who instead remain in their family home with an oral history dating back to the Revolution. The reality of rural poverty makes it difficult, nigh impossible, for some families to leave the region even if they want to. Plenty of families, however, view themselves as the victors in a long fight to exist in Appalachia. These are the grandsons of union coal miners, the granddaughters of farmers resisting government seizure: they faced threats from corporations, the government and the natural world, and still remain standing in the shadow of a mountain. To many, even those who live in the more urbanized areas of the region, Appalachia is more than a spot on a map or a region defined with blurry lines: It is a place we’ve had to fight to call home.
This complex, isolated nature generates a sort of fascination with the people living in the mountains. Americans look into the region with binoculars, trying to catch a glimpse of how their rural brothers and sisters really live. Classism, however, blurs that lens, and people cannot look past the lack of money and modern resources invested in the region. They see the thick accent, the health issues, the bigoted and archaic beliefs, and attribute it all to an inherent fault in the region. The politicians selling out their people to corporate interests, the history of social efforts failing to uplift citizens out of poverty, the discouragement of community organizers and activists attempting to call back to the union protests and Civil Rights activists of days-gone-by — these are all ignored and glanced over by those who find it easier to automatically dismiss the region. Appalachians are not viewed as deserving of aid and social resources as anyone else in the country, but rather as an enemy to a progressive, modern way of life. We are culturally and economically othered, reduced to the bare minimums of a stereotype: white, sunburnt neck, hateful heart.
So what happens when that stereotype is confronted?
The same cultural othering white Appalachians experience, Appalachians of color experience with another dimension: not only do they face cultural and regional stereotypes, they face the literal erasure of their identity. They are a forgotten people inside of a forgotten people, the issues of living in a rurally isolated region with few opportunities for advancement compounded by the effects of Jim Crow and white supremacy. Black Appalachians are rewarded with invisibility for overcoming all these obstacles to remain connected to their home in the mountains — an existence in the liminal space in most white peoples’ minds between “Black” and “Appalachian.” “Appalachian,” in fact, was defined in Webster’s Dictionary as “a white resident from the mountains” well into the 1990s — there was, literally, no place for BIPOC in the definition of the region, despite the centuries of cultural contributions from Black and indigneous Cherokee residents.
The banjo in our bluegrass music — the backbone of folk and country and rock — was brought to the region by West African slaves. The methods of cooking Southern delicacies were first recorded in a cookbook by an African American woman, Malinda Russell. My hometown of Maryville, Tennessee lacked a newspaper until William Bennet Scott founded the Maryville Republican, which ran with the mission statement, “‘All Men are Created Free and Equal.’ — Universal Liberty, Universal Suffrage and Universal Prosperity.”
Scott would later become our first Black mayor, elected five years after the Civil War ended. Maryville High School was built on the grounds of Maryville’s Freedman’s Normal Institute, founded by Scott and maintained for 30 years. I went to football games not 10 feet from where the Normal Institute stood, unaware that I was standing on history. But all of our land is history — and the history of my home in the mountains could not be told without including Scott’s contributions, just as our region would mean nothing without the contributions of hundreds of Black creatives. Appalachia is a space for them just as much as it is for me, and we need to start defining it as such.
As in many cases, the first step toward changing perception is found in art. A literary canon of Appalachia has existed for years — Black and white, with 19th-century poets such as Effie Waller Smith and Walt Whitman both capturing the beauty of the region. In art and literature, you can represent your world how you wish to and tackle issues that you may not have the resources or even language to express in reality. Art is how we communicate with the world, and Black Appalachians have a lot to say after years of living as an “invisible minority.”
30 years ago, poet Frank X. Walker coined the term “Affrilachian,” defined as an African American resident of Appalachia, as a response to the exclusion of Black artists from Appalachia’s image. Appalachia, endowed with a rich cultural history of Black creatives, was the perfect setting for the birth of Affrilachia, an artistic and cultural movement seeking to uplift the voices of long-ignored Black residents in the region. Walker’s 2000 book of poetry grappled with the themes at the forefront of the Affrilachia movement: the tension between the Black and Appalachian identities, the struggles of existing as a minority in a very white-dominated region, but also the beauty of the Appalachian region and the traditions that form the Affrilachian cultural identity. Walker, alongside numerous other Affrilachian creatives, were featured in the documentary “Coal Black Voices” on PBS, which depicted the history of Black art, poetry and prose in Appalachia. On a national level, the voices of Affrilachians were finally being heard, and hopefully, we will never stop hearing them.
Thirty years after Walker ignited the spark of Affrilachia, there is still work to be done both in and outside of Appalachia. I can think of hundreds of politicians in the region who need to hear their residents’ needs, focus less on reelection and money and more on improving the education and medical systems meant to keep their constituents free from harm. Preserving our environment, reforming our criminal justice system, healing from centuries of racism — these are not easy tasks, and they’re only made harder when we try to accomplish them with little support from outside progressives, who dismiss our region as a hotbed for bigotry.
If you want to do your part to educate yourself and support Black Appalachians, I recommend the Black in Appalachia podcast. Listening supports the hosts as they tell the stories of a largely forgotten cultural history, and Black in Appalachia as an organization does great work sharing materials for citizens across the country who want to educate themselves. “Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets” is an anthology of Affrilachian poets that was published in 2016, and has a permanent home on my shelf. There are also thousands of online samples of Affrilachian poetry for anyone who wants to take a passing glance into a truly unique artistic movement.
I love Appalachia, and with that love, I understand its faults, its ragged history and its hurtful present. I also understand that to describe it as a region of harm and hate is to erase the thousands of residents fighting to preserve its rich history, as diverse as its forests and as difficult to map as its mountains. Don’t let the Beverly Hillbillies rule your perception of us — not all of us are mountain doctors with a “white lightning” brew. A lot of us are people who love our home.