Identity, Authenticity - Do they conflict?

[Dance-with-me]

Originally Posted by Martina

I have had a version of this one my whole life. Appalachian parents, raised in SW Ohio so less of an accent (none now) and higher education. The people being rudely surprised experience -- so been there..

My mom and her side of my family are all from the S/SW Ohio Appalachian diaspora -- mostly Ironton/Portsmouth area (ever hear of Franklin Furnace? it was my home base growing up, where my mom grew up and where my Granny lived until she couldn't take care of herself any more). More kin in Springfield, and many of the ones who "escaped" and "moved up" in the world went to Cincinnati (where I ended up going to college).

People say ignorant things to me about my lack of accent, as if it's some disability that I should be thrilled to not have to overcome, when there's nothing more that I'd love to hear once more than my Granny's thick accent grown in the hollers of eastern Kentucky. They don't get why I prize the sustenance scrap quilts my Granny made over the prize-winning magazine-cover quilts that my mom has made, or why the object I hope the most to inherit is the quilt my mom made from the bow tie blocks that my Little Granny pieced long after she went blind. They are quick to stereotype "trailer trash" and refuse to recognize that for many poor rural folk, a trailer is a big step up and a source of pride. They don't get why as a queer person and feminist and liberal I stay so close to cousins who are right wing conservative Christian, never getting that they are no more wholly defined by their political and religious views than I am by mine, and that I know sides of them that they can't fathom, including that any one of them would take me in, come rescue me, and be there for me no matter what if I needed that from them.

Sometimes the only way to be authentic to a part of your identity is to battle the stereotypes, but in can just get so exhausting when those stereotypes are so pervasive.

[Martina]

Originally Posted by Dance-with-me

My mom and her side of my family are all from the S/SW Ohio Appalachian diaspora -- mostly Ironton/Portsmouth area (ever hear of Franklin Furnace? it was my home base growing up, where my mom grew up and where my Granny lived until she couldn't take care of herself any more). More kin in Springfield, and many of the ones who "escaped" and "moved up" in the world went to Cincinnati (where I ended up going to college).

People say ignorant things to me about my lack of accent, as if it's some disability that I should be thrilled to not have to overcome, when there's nothing more that I'd love to hear once more than my Granny's thick accent grown in the hollers of eastern Kentucky. They don't get why I prize the sustenance scrap quilts my Granny made over the prize-winning magazine-cover quilts that my mom has made, or why the object I hope the most to inherit is the quilt my mom made from the bow tie blocks that my Little Granny pieced long after she went blind. They are quick to stereotype "trailer trash" and refuse to recognize that for many poor rural folk, a trailer is a big step up and a source of pride. They don't get why as a queer person and feminist and liberal I stay so close to cousins who are right wing conservative Christian, never getting that they are no more wholly defined by their political and religious views than I am by mine, and that I know sides of them that they can't fathom, including that any one of them would take me in, come rescue me, and be there for me no matter what if I needed that from them.

Sometimes the only way to be authentic to a part of your identity is to battle the stereotypes, but in can just get so exhausting when those stereotypes are so pervasive.

My parents both came up from eastern Kentucky to Xenia, Ohio. I went to college for a while in Springfield. My love of the culture is expressed through a love of the music although I admire the crafts. My mom has a lovely collection of quilts, but I don't know anything about them. We have to make a database of her stuff soon, so I know what is family stuff and what is stuff stuff.

I feel a real affinity with folks who grew up in places like Ohio or Texas or Illinois, but whose sense of cultural identity is mostly Appalachian. There have been a lot of amazing musicians who were products of the diaspora: Daryl Scott, Steve Earl, Troy Campbell, Rodney Crowell, Dwight Yoakam. I actually taught a course in Appalachian Studies (once) at the University of Michigan. I haven't kept up with the literature although I have read Silas House. (He also writes about music.)

I don't like to be reverse pretentious. My family is not from the hollers. My great grandfather on one side was a judge (notoriously corrupt). Another was a doctor. Lots and lots and lots of my relatives are or were teachers. I do have some relatives who live in trailers etc. But most of my relatives live in McMansions.

I have had less luck with keeping in touch. I fell out of touch for decades, and then took my dad back to the family reunion summer before last. He wanted to go one last time, and my mom couldn't both drive and care for him. So I flew to Florida and drove them up to Kentucky. My extended family on my Dad's side are beautiful to look at and fun to be around. They have attractive and accomplished children, nice houses and expensive cars. They have lived good lives. But the vast majority are evangelical Christians and Republicans. Only a few have been OK with my sexual orientation. In person they are civil; maybe three (not close relatives) are warm. When I connected with them on Facebook after the reunion, it wasn't pretty. In truth, these are not people who would help me or protect me as most Appalachian families do. My uncle who is gay is either hated or ignored unless someone wants money from him. He has lived in LA for forty-some years. I wish my family were a source of strength.

I have always felt a class difference even though my parents were school teachers. In Xenia, the "briars" were second class citizens. People made fun of my mother's accent. My dad altered his accent until he retired when it came back in a rush. So many "briar" jokes I heard growing up. We went "home" a lot of weekends and to the cabin at Lake Cumberland for the summers. We had a strong connection to eastern Kentucky. My parents went to college at Morehead, and they returned for homecoming most years. My grandmother went to Berea, and we took her there on visits too. People are pretty loyal to their alma maters down there. ANyway, Kentucky -- the food, the woods and lakes, the late summer nights -- it is all much more vivid in my memory than the neighborhood I grew up in in Ohio.

When I went to college in Ohio, the class differences weren't that meaningful, but when I got to graduate school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, yeah, wow. Huge differences. There is a big difference between the life I lived and the ones lived by my fellow students who came to Michigan from Brown and Yale. I tended to clump with other folks who experienced the class difference, if for different reasons. One friend was from rural Indiana, another from Nogales, Arizona. Another was from Detroit -- not the suburbs.

There's new research out that shows that putting kids from poor and working class backgrounds into elite universities does them -- and their careers -- a disservice. It may be good for the institutions, but it's hard on the students. There was a NYTimes article this week on what hell it is for poor kids (usually POC) who are recruited into elite prep schools. I don't compare what I went through in Ann Arbor to that, and certainly if one intends to be a professor -- which I did at the time -- elite is better. But it did exacerbate the injuries of class I had already received in Xenia.

When I was growing up, we had a colorful painting of the map of Kentucky in our family room as well as art by Kentucky wildlife artists in several rooms. We were proud and wistful and looked upon Kentucky as a sort of lost Eden. Yet my parents did not retire there as many of their colleagues did. My mom refused. The mountains made her feel claustrophobic. And even though she had never been super poor there and she faced no threat of poverty with her Ohio teacher's pension earned, she felt like it would have been a return to the life she had lived as a child during the Depression and WWII. She would not consider it. My dad was fine with her decision. The golf courses are open year round in Florida, and he learned to fish in salt water.

Anyway, I am rambling. My point is that even my parents have a love-hate relationship with Kentucky. But my parents are Kentuckians -- from EASTERN Kentucky. That's who they are. It's mostly expressed in screaming at the TV during basketball playoffs. But it's real. My mother's cornbread has no equal. It's the first thing I get when I go home: pinto beans and cornbread.

I never felt at home in Ohio or Kentucky although I loved Kentucky more. I got out basically -- out of both of them -- first to the liberal ghetto of Ann Arbor -- and then to California. When I visited Kentucky last year, I was struck by its beauty. There is no place like it. No place so green. No place where the food tastes as good. And it was wonderful to see people who looked like me and who talked like my parents. It felt like home, but it wasn't home. It's an idea of home that doesn't exist for me, that never existed for me. I am not alone in that experience. It is more common than ever.

I am reading Catfish and Mandala right now -- a memoir by a person who came to the U.S. from Vietnam when he was ten years old. His brother, a transman, committed suicide for reasons that have to do with being trans and coming from a violent family, but also because -- it seems -- he was so profoundly displaced. He had been more at home in Vietnam as a kid with his grandmother. He never felt at home after he left.

This sort of thing is a high end problem for me and many people, but it's not for some. It's certainly a fact of our age. I live in a town with many many immigrants from China and India. I see their children walk to school every day. While there are more differences than similarities in our experiences, it does remind me sometimes of my own relationship to Kentucky, which is more my home than any other place, but where I have never lived and where, in truth, I am unwelcome.

[Dance-with-me]

Martina, wow, thank you for writing that. Yes, our Appalachian roots are somewhat different but the experience of connection yet rejection and the deep love for the beauty and so much of the cultural heritage of that place is very familiar to me. My dad's family was edging towards white collar by the time he was born (g'mom was a school teacher - though with just a HS education - and g'dad was a supervisor at the plant where he worked), but my mom's was poor. My Granny really was raised in an eastern KY holler - two rooms, 7 kids, no plumbing or electricity. My gr-granny (Little Granny) was married when she was 14, Granny when she was 16, mom when she was 17. Mom spent half her life without indoor plumbing until my grandparents finally had scraped together enough money to build a house in Franklin Furnace in 1954 when my mom was 14, and there were people in that neighborhood who still had outhouses and hand pumps when I was a young teenager in the early '70s.

I could write so much more but I don't want to monopolize this thread. Thank you again. It's very good to hear from someone who really gets what that part of me means to me.

[Dance-with-me]

OH I did want to make one comment on the class issues at elite universities: I did a year of graduate school at Tufts (83-84) and I was completely unprepared for the class difference - at least a University of Cincinnati I was able to meet and bond with folks from a similar class background. I will never forget a meeting at the "Tufts Lawn and Garden Club" - their euphemism for the lesbian and gay club - where someone complained that the meetings need topics since all they usually did was just sit around and chat, mostly about their fear that mom and dad would cut them off if they found out they were gay. One person suggested that at the next meeting we discuss what it was like to be a gay person in the different countries where they'd traveled in the past year. I honestly thought that they were joking, until I saw the nods and heard others agree that was a good idea. I cracked up laughing and asked them if Kentucky counted as a foreign country -- because at that moment, to me, they felt as completely foreign to me as the folks in other countries felt to them. They looked at me like I'd had a psychotic break. I never went back.