Hillbilly Elegy

(Rick Simeone) #1

and she led us all to believe that the
daughter was born sometime after Uncle
Jimmy, Mamaw and Papaw’s eldest
child. Mamaw suffered eight
miscarriages in the decade between
Uncle Jimmy’s birth and my mother’s.
But recently my sister discovered a birth
certificate for “Infant” Vance, the aunt I
never knew, who died so young that her
birth certificate also lists her date of
death. The baby who brought my
grandparents to Ohio didn’t survive her
first week. On that birth certificate, the
baby’s brokenhearted mother lied about
her age: Only fourteen at the time and
with a seventeen-year-old husband, she
couldn’t tell the truth, lest they ship her

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