White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

A certain ambiguity remained. Redneck, cracker, and hillbilly were simultaneously presented as an ethnic identity, a racial epithet, and a workingman’s badge of honor. A North Carolina journalist neatly summed up the identity confusion: “If you think you’re a redneck, you think you’re hardworking, fun-loving and independent. If you don’t think you’re a redneck, you think they’re loud, obnoxious, bigoted and shallow.” Added to the article was a pop quiz featuring questions about NASCAR, food, and TV’s Hee Haw, as if by a simple computation right answers could distinguish the “real Bubbas from the wanna-bes.”3

To be sure, breeding remained paramount in considerations of identity. In 1994, one irate journalist insisted that the Georgia politician Newton Leroy Gingrich was no redneck: he was born in Pennsylvania, had no southern accent, had served as a college professor, and got elected to Congress by suburbanites of Atlanta, many of them Yankees. This newsman’s expertise came from the fact that he was “kin to a great many of that breed.” Besides, he chided, “Gingrich wouldn’t last half an hour in a room of genuine rednecks.” You were a dyed-in-the-wool redneck or you weren’t. By this measure, neither Gingrich nor David Duke, the former Klan member who ran for governor of Louisiana in 1991, was a redneck. Duke was disqualified because he loved un-American Nazi salutes. Submitting to plastic surgery to make himself too pretty was also out of character. “No good ole Southern boy would dream of such a thing. It’s unmasculine, un-Southern.” This was the view of Jeffrey Hart, a conservative intellectual from Dartmouth College and former speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Reagan.4

? ? ?

Redneck was no longer the exclusive province of country singers. It had become part of the cultural lingua franca, a means of sizing up public men, and a strangely mutated gender and class identity. Nor were women silent in this debate. Two prominent female writers earned acclaim in the modern genre of white trash fiction. In the tradition of William Faulkner and James Agee, Dorothy Allison and Carolyn Chute offered unsparing accounts of rural poverty. Allison creatively reconstructed the conditions she knew from her early years in Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), while Chute, a working-class, college-educated writer from Portland, told of trailer trash in rural Maine in her breakout book, The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985). What set these writers apart was that they wrote from within their class, not as outside observers; they were outing themselves, and knew precisely how to describe poor women’s experiences. Class and sexuality remained their dominant themes, and neither sugarcoated her subjects as good ol’ girls. What they showed instead was that women cannot wear “white trash” or “redneck” as a badge of honor.5

Allison is the better writer. That said, a spare prose may have been intentional for Chute. She captures events as they are happening, offering few insights into the inner life of her white trash subjects. The Beans are a sprawling extended tribe who take over the underbelly of Egypt. They are an assorted lot. There is Beal and his mother, Merry Merry Bean, the latter of whom is crazy and kept locked in a tree house. Reuben is a violent drunk who ends up in prison; Auntie Roberta pops out babies like the rabbits she skins and eats. Reuben’s girlfriend, Madeline, endures beatings at his hand. The characters’ only talents are shooting and procreating. Beal sleeps with Roberta, and some of her children may be his. She, meanwhile, would never win any awards for mothering, allowing her babies to roam at will and to spit, hiss, and swallow pennies. Beal rapes (or doesn’t rape) his neighbor Earlene Pomerleau, who becomes his wife, though he continues to sleep at his aunt’s. Madeline parades around in flimsy halters that let her breasts fall out.6

Earlene is a step ahead of the Beans in class terms, at once disgusted by and attracted to them. She compares her first sexual encounter with Beal to being mauled by a bear. She is horrified by his large feet. As she completes the sex act, she “pictures millions of possible big Bean babies, fox-eyed, yellow-toothed, meat-gobbling Beans.” Beal injures his eye at work, loses his job, and is racked by pain and a range of physical disabilities, but still he forbids Earlene to get food stamps. He refuses to go to a hospital until he is finally carried away by rescue workers. “I ain’t worth a piss,” the broken man says, scowling. He dies in a hail of police bullets after shooting out the windows of a wealthy family’s home. Earlene watches him fall, the gun clasped in his hand.7

The Beans are waste people. Their women are breeders. They talk about Bean blood, and they all look alike. Earlene’s father damns the Beans as uncivilized predators: “If it runs, a Bean will shoot it. If it falls, a Bean will eat it.” Earlene’s father is superior to these “tackiest people on earth,” he believes, because they inhabit an old trailer, while he built his own house. As to the womenfolk, he singles out Roberta, muttering that there should be a law that after nine children with no husband, “you get the knife,” that is, “tyin’ the tubes.” And when Reuben is taken away by the police, he voices the hope that they will “hog-tie the rest of the heathens.” What he means is: round up the children and exterminate them before they become “full-blown Beans.”8

In The Beans of Egypt, Maine, class warfare is played out at the lowest level. The middle class has no meaningful presence in the book: all that distinguishes the Pomerleaus from the Beans is Gram’s religious discipline and the fact that Earlene’s dad possesses artisan skills. Class is vividly shown when Earlene’s father insists on patrolling the driveway dividing the two properties. He commands Earlene, “Don’t go over on the Beans’ side of the right-of-way. Not ever!” But of course she does. He loses his daughter to the other side.9

Chute’s reception as a writer was often conflated with the life she led. With some condescension, she was praised for her “apparent ignorance of literary tradition,” which magically preserved a “vigorous originality.” Though compared to Faulkner, she had not read a single one of his novels until after reviewers noted the similarity between her Beans of Egypt and the Mississippian’s work. A reviewer for Newsweek saw her characters as “candidates for compulsory sterilization,” where “malevolent infants of doubtful paternity litter the floor.” In interviews, Chute talked about her impoverished past, and insisted that she retained a personal bond with “my people.” She explained, “Your material is what you live.”10

Her husband, Michael, an illiterate laborer, was a conduit to “her people.” The stories he told of rural characters influenced her writing. She herself had worked on a potato farm, in chicken processing, and in a shoe factory. Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in a suburb of Portland, she dropped out of high school, later taking classes at the University of Southern Maine. Her father was from North Carolina, which gave her southern roots. All of this contributed to the deeply political underpinnings of her books. She rejected the idea that anyone could escape the cycle of poverty—not if it meant leaving one’s “homeland,” “family,” and “roots.” The tribal nature of poor whites was their strength. The sense of place and of land was their only ballast.11

Nancy Isenberg's books