What if JD Vance Had Known He Was Melungeon?

An Open Letter from a Melungeon Cousin

Terra Vance, distant cousin of JD Vance and actual hillbilly from the hollers of West Virginia, confronts JD on the harm inherent in Hillbilly Elegy and how he continues to exploit the legacy of their ancestors to throw Appalachians under the bus.

Terra Vance will be on the “Moment of Truth with Ami Chen Mills” radio show and podcast, live at 6 pm Pacific Time, Monday, Oct. 21. Livestream at the KSQD website, download the KSQD app or listen over the airwaves. Or, subscribe to our podcast at Apple or Spotify.

Unofficial Melungeon flag designed by a Melungeon artist (source: Wikipedia)

JD,

Openly, in front of the world, you have tried to understand yourself and your hillbilly roots in the American context. You bore that very painful journey in front of the mainstream, and they largely propped you up as whatever kind of token benefited their agenda.

In your book, Hillbilly Elegy, you tried to quantify and understand the cultural differences between yourself and your grandparents, and between post-hillbilly transplants and the rooted hillbillies still on their ancestral turf.

I am related to you through several lines, including the Vance line that goes back to Bad Jim. Also the Bunch and Bowman and Sizemore lines. That ain’t even all.

You have McCoy in your tree, though—which might be what’s wrong with you. You are a walking feud at war with yourself.

Just kidding.

I mean, you do have McCoy, but so did most Hatfields. Your internal feud is something else.

You got closer to getting it than you realized. Let me help you get a little further.

In the coal camps, our story isn’t anything like the rest of American history. You can’t understand that if you think you’re Scots-Irish. You think that because you don’t realize how much the Yarvin-Musk-Posobiec-Thiel (et al.) mentality has been the status quo since at least the Middle Ages.

One needn’t look any further than Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism to find that the Unhumans book you blurbed is essentially a serf-and-turf war playbook lifted straight from Spencer’s dystopian fever dreams.

I’m Melungeon, and so are you. I’ve done hundreds of Melungeon family trees, including yours, for people from the coal camps. You are all the way Melungeon and not very Scots-Irish. That’s important to remember.

In fact, you and Barack Obama and I descend from Virginia’s first enslaved African family, the Bunch family. If I did more cross comparisons, I would maybe find other direct ancestors you share with Obama.

But, across the border into West Virginia (same hollers your Vance family came from), there were some political differences that changed our trajectories and circumstances by our grandparents’ generation. You need to understand those.

The state of West Virginia was formed as a result of class and racial warfare. People who aren’t from here never get it quite right because they try to understand it through an “American” lens, or a Southern lens, and without the context necessary.

Most regions are not made up of an underclass who lived for centuries in isolation as a closed culture resisting assimilation.

West Virginia became a state because, in Virginia, as much as 20 percent of the population was “free people of color,” and there were a lot of mixed ethnic Melungeons, Romani, and Natives who were recorded as “white” on the census but who didn’t see themselves that way.

With Virginia’s resources depleted during the Civil War, the “mongrels” and “amalgamists” and “miscegenists” (as my and your ancestors are regularly recorded in historical texts) essentially staged a coup, and were given the mountainous region of Virginia as their own state: West Virginia.

Of course, that’s not the whole story, but it’s the part that matters regarding our cultural differences in central Appalachia’s coal camps. We were the “hillbillies.”

We hated the North and the South. We called ourselves mountaineers because we didn’t want to be the North or the South. We just wanted to govern ourselves.

While slavery was abolished on paper, though, it was not abolished effectively as far as our lives were concerned.

Before the coal camps, and before the Civil War, “Free people of color” didn’t usually fare well and enjoy the rights they had on paper. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, we were at risk of being captured and enslaved at any time, and since we weren’t allowed to defend ourselves in court, we had no way to contend with that.

“The True Cost of Coal,” by the Beehive Collective. Check them out at www.BeeHiveCollective.org

Our ancestors couldn’t always open businesses, couldn’t legally start families; they had to compete for work against the unpaid labor of slavery; they couldn't pass on an inheritance to build generational wealth, and had no way of achieving the “American dream.”

So, we went into the deep woods, set up militias, built cabins by hand, formed our own communities, fed ourselves by hunting and foraging, mined our own coal, made our own booze for use as currency, and had plenty of blacksmiths and tradespeople in our ranks.

Horses couldn’t tackle the dense and steep mountains. We as a people were semi-nomadic, very skilled at animal husbandry and horse training and riding. We knew our hills and trails and had them signposted in ways only we could read so that only we could navigate our terrain. Outsiders didn’t see it as worth it to “try that in a small town.”

Soldiers couldn’t get past our militias. We even had our own internal government. A lot of our infamous feuds were a result of our own people selling out and using the broader American systems of government and business for profit or against insiders.

Your mamaw was what I call “Old Ways Melungeon,” and you tried hard to reconcile the differences between her generation and your own.

You got close a few times.

“I recognized that though many of my peers lacked the traditional American family, mine was more nontraditional than most. And we were poor, a status Mamaw wore like a badge of honor but one I’d hardly come to grips with.” (From Hillbilly Elegy)

You tried to keep your Mamaw from being seen when she would pick you up and drop you off and lied to your friends about her, claiming you lived with your mom and you two were mamaw’s caregivers.

You can’t get in the headspace of a person from a culture with a history that’s fabricated.

First, there is the difference between being Poor and being broke, which is an extreme divide you missed, even though you managed to document and illustrate the differences in some nuanced ways.

As the Ohio-born generations you and other post-hillbilly transplants in your town represented, you write:

“This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we’re upper-class.”

In another section, about your grandmother:

“When Mamaw picked me up from school, I’d ask her not to get out of the car lest my friends see her—wearing her uniform of baggy jeans and a men’s T-shirt—with a giant menthol cigarette hanging from her lip.“

At least she didn’t pull a gret ol’ big hawkin’ chaw of tobaccy from a buckskin pouch she kept in her bra, JD, right? 

As I write this, I’m wearing an oversized men’s WV t-shirt with a mine hat, shovel, and pickaxe on it. It’s been worshed so many times, the threads are unraveling at the base.

I bet your mamaw used to cut all the unraveling threads off the rags and towels and clothes as soon as she saw them, right?

Yes, we may wear the same raggedy clothes for a long time, may continue to keep a rusted vehicle on life support for a decade past its prime, and we aren’t trying to look like or act like we are anything but Poor.

You said,

“I recognized that though many of my peers lacked the traditional American family, mine was more nontraditional than most. And we were poor, a status Mamaw wore like a badge of honor but one I’d hardly come to grips with.“

Yes, being Poor is a badge of honor because we refused to participate in the myth of the American Dream or run on that treadmill expecting to get anywhere. We instead solidified a culture, an amalgam of a tribe and a labor union.

We knew way before Ronald Reagan that no crumbs of trickle-down economics were going to reach us, and we weren’t trying to sit beneath the bottom rung of the class hierarchies and beg.

Being Poor was better than being delusional. We didn’t need to look like success. Our success was measured in how free we were from caring about what others thought about us.

You were broke, JD, and so were your parents. Your grandparents were Poor. That’s the aching difference.

Coal Mined Mountain. Photo by Pavel Neznanov on Unsplash

Thanks to “dewokeification” (to use your word) efforts, our schools erased all our true history from history books because it made the states “look bad” and might lend to future uprisings if people knew what their ancestors fought for so we could all have it better.

And now you’re trying to do even more of that. You want to take from our children the truths they deserve to offer some sanitized version of history that excludes dissenters—and dissent is rooted in our culture because without it, we are giving away our free will.

I mean … you have a book with over 3 million sales about white, Scots-Irish Poors, and no one even countered it. You look white enough. You blamed ignorance and poor education on hill people’s problems and cited a cable news report about “mountain dew mouth.”

In the same chapter, you wrote about Mamaw’s first time almost killing someone. 

“When she was around twelve, Mamaw walked outside to see two men loading the family’s cow—a prized possession in a world without running water—into the back of a truck.”

That’s right. That cow was necessary for survival. We didn’t have water or electricity for 50 plus years compared to the rest of the country, even though we mined the coal that powered everyone else’s homes. We also made the glass for sodie pops, a Royal Crown treat discounted and for sale at the company store. We could buy it with scrip.

Your people still don’t have water, JD. The mines have ruined it, and you want to deregulate the mines even further so billionaires can cut corners.

You said of mamaw,

“She loathed disloyalty, and there was no greater disloyalty than class betrayal. […] She’d tell me, like a general giving his troops marching orders, ‘There is nothing lower than the poor stealing from the poor. It’s hard enough as it is. We sure as hell don’t need to make it even harder on each other.’”

That’s right. That’s the Melungeon honor code. That’s another core difference between the Poor and the broke.

Most white Americans are broke, not Poor.

You almost caught that, too.

You mentioned two books you read as a teen: William Julius Wilson’s book, The Truly Disadvantaged, and Charles Murray’s Losing Ground. 

You wrote,

“Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly. That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia—he was writing about black people in the inner cities.”

Murray was also writing about the Black American experience. You find those so relatable for the same reason I’ve spent my life outside of the coal camps primarily in community with Black folks—because Melungeons have a similar history and we culturally co-existed until Jim Crow as mixed people until we were Black or White. Native wasn’t even on the census.

I couldn’t relate to a white American experience, either.

You were close, JD. You mention the disdain, distrust, and disconnect from politics and police, too.

We were a closed culture, JD.

It was us against the slave owners, us against machines, us against Indian Removal, us against corporate mine oligarchs, us against day schools and residential schools—and we fought hard.

You almost got there.

You said,

“Not all of the white working class struggles. I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores and social pressures. My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. My mother and, increasingly, the entire neighborhood embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.”

You said these conspiracy-theory-believing, lunatic, white, post-hillbilly people were no longer capable of participating meaningfully in society, and now you are pumping them full of the same drugs you identified in your book—the “social heroin” you accused Donald Trump of being.

Is this what our ancestors fought for, JD? Photo by Tiziano Brignoli on Unsplash

But here’s what I really want to address.

In an article you wrote about your conversion to Catholicism as conceived by neoreactionaries, you said this: “And I realized, eventually, that I had already been exposed to that worldview: it was my Mamaw’s Christianity. And the name it gave for the behaviors I had seen destroy lives and communities was ‘sin.’”

Boy …

Your Uncle Pet would’ve gotten out the electric saw on you for that. You better warsh your own mouth out with soap.

Your ancestors hated rules and law and order. You made them seem like patriotic, police-championing Southern white nationalists at your RNC speech.

We went to war because it was far safer than the mines, where we had a 50 percent chance of survival, not because of some idealistic sense of duty to protect the myth of the American Dream.

We had guns because we had to defend ourselves.

And now, here you are, shucking corn for billionaires and being the utterly dishonest hype man, managing PR for exactly the kind of men who have always tried to buy people like you, to infiltrate your ancestors.

You’re a scab.

You just endorsed a book that divides people into “haves” and “have nots” and claims the “have nots” are communists who will rape and kill the innocent, virtuous “haves” if they’re not reigned in and neutralized. “Crushed,” it says.

You are trying to manipulate people into thinking they have a messiah in Trump and Elon Musk.

Your Mamaw would be disgusted that you made her legacy into everything she stood against, priming people to support a police surveillance state that sees forced assimilation and dehumanization as the best way to empower billionaire oligarchs.

You tell people the way forward is to follow a book that advocates the following:

“So mock the unhumans. Humiliate the unhumans. Ridicule the unhumans. Disgrace, debase, and deride the unhumans. Put the unhumans to shame. Tease and taunt and parody the unhumans. Scorn, scoff, and sneer.”

And despite this despotic approach to “have nots,” it also reads:

“One more thing: Never apologize. Ever. You will not express remorse. You will not explain yourself. You will not ‘add context.’ This is your life; the unhumans come to destroy it. Imagine saying you’re sorry to them. Couldn’t be us.”

You are promising poor white people a seat at the company table with “Great Men” like Elon Musk if they do the dirty work of “crushing” “have nots.”

You told that RNC story about your mamaw joining the ancestors and there being 19 guns in her house. You know why?

Let’s talk about another Harris. Mary Harris, also known as “Mother Jones”—the kind of “communist” revolutionary the Unhumans book claims wants to “rape and murder” and “kill, steal, and destroy.”

Mother Jones is a saint in the coal camps, like John Brown and Bill Blizzard and John Henry. Here’s what she said of the hillbillies:

“Here the miners had been peons for years, kept in slavery by the guns of the coal company, and by the system of paying in scrip so that a miner never had any money should he wish to leave the district.

“He was cheated of his wages when his coal was weighed, cheated in the company store where he was forced to purchase his food, charged an exorbitant rent for his kennel in which he lived and bred, docked for school tax and burial tax and physician and for ‘protection,’ which meant the gunmen who shot him back into the mines if he rebelled or so much as murmured against his outrageous exploitation.

“No one was allowed in the Cabin Creek district without explaining his reason for being there to the gunmen who patrolled the roads, all of which belonged to the coal company. The miners finally struck – it was a strike of desperation.”

[Mother Jones says then, of the time she came to West Virginia:] “I … spoke to the crowd and … said, ‘Go home now. Keep away from the saloons. Save your money. You're going to need it.’

"’What will we need it for, Mother? someone shouted.

"’For guns,’ said I. ‘Go home and read the immortal Washington's words to the colonists.’

“He told those who were struggling for liberty against those who would not heed or hear ‘to buy guns.’”

You waited until your Mamaw was with the ancestors and you tokenized her just like you tokenized yourself to do the work of the “haves” and demonize the “have nots.”

Yes, you are now the “oppressor class,” and you are perfectly entitled to lick boots of company men all the way to the top—but you are erasing the ancestors and their struggles all the way to a future that your and my ancestors would have, and did fight to their last breath to prevent.

Shame on you. You advocate against even apologizing for dehumanizing people who don’t want to live under authoritarian rule.

You’re not a hillbilly. You are a Pinkerton.

And no matter how hard you try, and no matter how destructive the black hole of your ambition and arrogance is, real Vances aren’t bending a knee to billionaires and disrespecting our ancestors.

Not yesterday, not today, and not in a technofuturist hellscape where some California edgelord gets to play god at their expense.

If you knew who you were and how badass your ancestors were, would you still have sold them out? If you had an identity, would you have tried to discover your worth in IQ points or billionaire endorsements? Would you have waged a war against have-nots who organize against authoritarianism and exploitation?

Would you still be driven by shame? Would you still be hiding your mamaw because she looked too low class?

You’re the performative identitarian you scapegoat, putting on costumes and exploiting identities to be someone else.

And you won’t even apologize for it.

You’re never going to fall for your own garbage, and no self-respecting Melungeon would, either.

Terra Vance is a writer and community organizer from the coal camps of West Virginia, with a passion for practicing and preserving her Melungeon culture and heritage. She is the founder of NeuroClastic, a nonprofit that centers underrepresented voices in neurodiversity advocacy. Find more of her writing and commentary here.

Terra Vance will be on the “Moment of Truth with Ami Chen Mills” radio show and podcast, live at 6 pm Pacific Time, Monday, Oct. 21. Livestream at the KSQD website, download the KSQD app or listen over the airwaves. Or, subscribe to our podcast at Apple or Spotify.