The only thing standing between me and a diploma is a Senior Thesis for my last few history credits. Since I am tired of hearing about dead rich people, and am interested in poverty, urban history, and race relations I have settled on writing a paper about Urban Appalachian migration to Cincinnati.
This is no happenstance decision: a lot of my mother's family were/are Appalachian migrants out of Kentucky and Southeast Ohio. I grew up on the cusp of Ohio's Appalachian territory raising livestock in 4-H, my best friend is a fat hillbilly from Southwest Virginia who is regularly found to be unintelligible by Cincinnatians on account of his accent, and I have always regarded Appalachia as a sort of cultural homeland. My favorite people as a child were old hillbillies and farmers. Their resilience, independent spirit, and resourcefulness were amazing to me. My heroes were the people with weatherbeaten faces who knew how to survive anything, build and fix anything, and live off the land, growing and hunting their own food, providing almost everything they needed themselves. People who can do things like this are plugged into a reality that most of America has forgotten about. My generation is filled with kids who were reared on fast food and video games - even out in the country.
Nathan and I have a recurring conversation about the strange spectacle of rural families in which the grandparents resemble WPA photograph subjects, the parents have mullets and listen to classic country, and the kids listen to hip-hop and sport saggy jeans and urban street fashion - though they are anything but urban. Globalization and ubiquitous media make for surreal reality sometimes. I had high school classmates who were simultaneously really into both rap and confederate flags. Cultural production blurring cultural meanings?
We are losing the old timers; and their entire world along with them. Me and some friends had a conversation recently about the current economic quagmire America has slid into and frequent media statements comparing the debacle to the Great Depression. As a people, we survived the Depression years because most Americans lived on farms and could pretty much provide for themselves. If the shit hits the fan again we will most likely all starve. Even out in the country, all most young people really know how to do is consume. And I include myself in that assessment.
Anyways... I headed down to the Urban Appalachian Council (photo above, next to a storefront church) today in search of the archives rumored to be there. I found a shabby office in an old railroad flat on West 8th occupied by a crew of friendly working-class middle-aged women. They told me that they had a library, but no librarian, so I was on my own. The library, then, consisted of a wall of shelves in a conference room weighed down with yellowing texts on Appalachian culture, and history, sociology books on race, urban issues, poverty, and the like. A collection of musty periodicals from the 70's through the early 90's occupied a few shelves. I stumbled onto a disorganized card catalog system - the like of which I haven't seen in years, and the remains of what must have once been a fairly popular collection of LP's. You can peruse the materials at the UAC library but you can't check them out. I found evidence that this used to not be the case and wondered about who was checking out records of Roscoe Holcomb and the like three decades ago. I pictured hillbilly teenagers growing up on State Avenue, listening to bluegrass LP's on huge 70's earphones while sporting shaggy sideburns and bellbottoms. It's nice to know that someone was trying to help them feel proud of being hillbillies in a city that mostly laughed at them for being poor and backwards.
As I browsed, the staff in the next room answered phone calls, referring clients to various social service agencies. One elderly woman had gone blind and needed meals on wheels. Another client wanted someone to force her landlord to deal with the mice infestation in her building. The more time I spent searching the library and absorbing the aura of the place, the more I sensed that the UAC's heyday had passed. The organization's apex seemed to be back someplace in the 80's. The books were all old, though I recognized more than a few. The offices seemed to be a cheap conversion job done in the early 80's involving lots of cheap wood-grain-veneer paneling. Some of the light fixtures and other decor dated from the era when the building was originally electrified. Places where those details are still intact are an endangered species, leftovers from the era of urban decline in the 70's and 80's. Today's urban political economy is being reshaped by the forces of reinvestment, rehabs, and gentrification. I met at UAC staff member who gave me a copy of an article she wrote for The Appalachian Connection about how her 80-year-old mother was being kicked out of her longtime home in Over the Rhine by gentrifying landlords.
God Bless the Gateway District. I hope it makes money for the city at least, since there is no stopping gentrification.
I had a hard time finding what I needed at the UAC (namely primary sources about migration and settlement patterns) but I liked the feeling I got there a lot. Everyone seemed really down to earth and I recognized the slow-paced speech of country folk in their elocution. I have recently become aware that most of the educated folks I am around in college speak with a crisp newscaster-like elocution that involves more enunciation than I am used to. Apparently educated folks don't drop the 'g' on the end of verbs like 'running' and actually use proper grammar in a sincere way, because it is natural to them. The slightly fractured speech, thrift-store decor, and simple friendliness of everyone I met down there was a comforting shift from the bank-teller professionalism that characterizes most of my interactions with others in the ivory tower of tertiary education.
I have wanted to be involved in the UAC for some time, and it felt really good to get down there finally. My hillbilly compadre Nathan told me that some of the staff of the Appalachian Festival had last year entreated him to come work with them tutoring kids, or something to that effect. The prevalence of high school drop-outs has long crippled the Queen City's Appalachian community. I asked about opportunities to volunteer with kids and they said the only thing they had like that was an adult GED program in Price Hill. I felt kinda frustrated; what about working with kids to stay in school to begin with?
Nevertheless I really respect what the UAC does. They even had a mural painted on the side of their building, above a community garden, depicting the migration from coal country to the city. A group of multiracial smiling kids was clustered on the bottom left below the skyline of Price Hill.
As I thought about it this seemed to make sense. Appalachian migration to Cincinnati peaked in the 40's and 50's. The urban Appalachian friends I have grew up here and are fairly assimilated into urban culture. Some have become lower middle class, many are in college, some are high school dropouts destined for a life of working poverty - like a cousin of mine. As the "invisible minority" Appalachians can meld pretty seamlessly into the fabric of a blue-collar neighborhood in a single generation. I know a girl in her 20's whose parents came to the city as small children, growing up in Over the Rhine before settling as adults in Price Hill. This chick has relatives in Eastern Kentucky that she can't even understand because the culture has been all but lost.
Such is assimilation. And now Lower Price Hill includes a Hispanic enclave. The process continues.
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