Demon Copperhead: Every Redneck Deserves His Day
“People look at you, and they’ve got just the perfect little box for you, the perfect category. Call you a redneck. Call you a hillbilly. Like those were insults.” - Travis Tritt
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The “redneck” mountain man stands with a bullseye on his chest, the target of many stand-up comedians and comic artists who reduce him to a caricature drowning his sorrows in a “XX” branded moonshine jug. Devoid of humanity and individuality, he finds himself party to the sole “group” that is universally socially acceptable to ridicule.
Why, though? Nobody would endorse a stand-up comedian whose schtick was making fun of whatever disenfranchised group you’d like to plug in here.
Okay, well, almost no one.
But somewhere along the line, we have all collectively agreed that the Southern redneck is exempt from our standards of justice and is, in fact, the butt of jokes around the globe.
Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Demon Copperhead (finally) gives the redneck his voice.
Demon Copperhead, the novel’s eponymous protagonist, was born Damon Fields, in a single-wide trailer to a teenage single mother. He reminisces on his inauspicious beginnings by calling himself “a lowlife . . . born in the mobile home, so that’s like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash.”
Demon views himself as Appalachian and “Melungeon,” a term used to describe the mixed race heritage of a very isolated population in Central Appalachia.
Demon’s story, a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. leads the reader through a heartbreaking journey of poverty, abuse, hunger, loneliness, and addiction. Set in Lee County, Virginia, in the 1990s, Demon’s emotionally fraught life reveals the shortcomings of the Division of Social Services while simultaneously pulling back the curtain on the origins of the opioid crisis.
No one captures the essence of Appalachia like author Barbara Kingsolver. Nobody. Certainly not J.D. Vance whose politicized, legalistic, and reductive memoir Hillbilly Elegy minimizes the theft and appropriation perpetrated against generations of Appalachians. This is the same man who pledged to move back home after his education and help improve his community; he now resides in San Francisco.
No. Kingsolver to this day lives in the very region she delineates with unmitigated verisimilitude. A biologist, a mother, a thinker, and an activist, Kingsolver has produced a novel that finally exposes the gross deceptions committed by the “money-earning people” against the “land people” of the Appalachians.
The conflict between land people vs. money-earning people goes all the way back to the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Reaching as far back as George Washington, the industrialists harbored resentment against the land folks (read: country, mountain people) because they weren’t contributing to the economy by earning wages and were, for the most part, self-supporting. Trading and bartering were the mainstay for survival. The “money people” felt the need to wring taxes out of the country folks somehow.
The moonshiners and still owners proved to be an unusually formidable obstacle to federal intervention. These home-grown entrepreneurs didn’t take kindly to the taxes imposed on them by “outsiders” and showed their displeasure in violent ways.
The “money people” also came in and stripped us of all of our natural resources, primarily coal and timber, and shipped it out on one-way trains. Our goods were gone, but the people had to stay. With nothing.
And Demon learns, as do we readers, that poor Southern towns were intentionally targeted by pharmaceutical companies for the establishment of opioid clinics in the 1990s.
We were set up from the beginning.
Although Demon’s story isn’t “true” (it is a work of fiction after all), his narrative embodies more “Truth” about growing up in Central Appalachia than any work I’ve ever encountered. Demon’s experience reflects an absolute “Truth,” the kind that forces you to see that even though his specific experiences didn’t happen, they absolutely did play out, time and time again, across communities and towns populated with people just like Demon and his friends. Kingsolver’s work is capital “T” Truth at its core.
Demon learns that the label “redneck” doesn’t come solely from farmers getting sunburned in the fields; the term also derives from union members who wore red bandanas in the early 1900s during the coal rebellions.
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In spite of the shared flaws and shortcomings, there’s also strength and resilience in his lineage and in ours. “Hillbilly” and “redneck” carry much more meaning than the outdated stereotypes that have been assigned to us.
You can sense our pride as more of us embrace our mountain roots instead of finding shame in the humble hills of our upbringing.
You can hear our rich heritage and ancestry on the sweet strands of fiddle melodies, reminiscent of our Scottish and Irish forefathers.
You can see the rich tapestry of our mixed racial heritage in the quilts stitched by our grandmothers and great-grandmothers.
I’d like to think you can find Demon, who embodies all of these things and more, on a porch somewhere at day’s end as the sun lowers over the mountains and gently settles its violet and pink mantle over the ridges.
This article was originally published August 26, 2023, in the Southern Spice section of Times-Georgian.
