Hillbilly Elegy

(Rick Simeone) #1

after marrying, Papaw uprooted his
young family and moved to Middletown,
a small Ohio town with a rapidly
growing industrialized economy.
This is the story my grandparents
told me, and like most family legends
it’s largely true but plays fast and loose
with the details. On a recent trip to visit
family in Jackson, my great-uncle Arch
—Mamaw’s brother-in-law and the last
of that generation of Jacksonians—
introduced me to Bonnie South, a woman
who’d spent all of her eighty-four years
a hundred yards from Mamaw’s
childhood home. Until Mamaw left for
Ohio, Bonnie South was her best friend.
And by Bonnie South’s reckoning,

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