Appalachian Representation in Children’s Literature

Discussions about representation have been at the forefront for years, but the Appalachian experience has been largely ignored, especially in children’s literature. 

Literature about Appalachian life and culture is often relegated to a punchline about poverty, drug abuse, or lack of dental care. Experts agree that children need exposure to diverse media in order to gain critical thinking skills, including media about their own lives, which Appalachian children are desperately lacking. 

Books like “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins and “Blue” by Joyce Moyer Hostetter are helping to bridge this gap by writing stories that not only serve as an education on the culture of their protagonists but a love letter to the mountains themselves.

Humanium author Arianna Braga argues that broad exposure to representation “helps children to understand the reality they live in or to discover other cultures,” aiding in both introspection and building empathy for others. Through the representations that my classmates and I were exposed to in our youths, and the ones we weren’t, we quickly learned that our unique experiences weren’t worthy of being written down. 

In third grade, our class reading was “Blue” by Joyce Moyer Hostetter, a novel about a fictional girl named Ann Fay Honeycutt in Hickory, North Carolina during the 1944 polio epidemic. Though the events are concurrent with WWII, the war takes a back seat, only explaining why her father is away from home while polio sweeps her town. 

Over the course of the novel, Ann Fay loses her younger brother to the disease and falls ill shortly after. Under the care of an emergency hospital, Ann Fay learns to cope with grief and her loss of mobility while making friends with an African American girl on her ward, Imogene. 

Later installments in the series follow Ann Fay’s long-term recovery from polio, her younger twin sisters’ very different reactions to their father’s post-WWII trauma, their teenage neighbor Junior Bledsoe’s struggle with grief over his late father, and Jackie Honeycutt’s fight to remain friends with an African American boy, Thomas Freeman, through the growing civil rights movement.

As tragic as the story was, I vividly remember how comforted I felt by the portrayal of my history and culture. It was a story about perseverance, grief, learning to forgive yourself, and kindness surpassing all. In a book involving only Appalachian characters, there is no room for shame in not fitting traditional American norms.

Several years later, while in bed with the flu, I listened to the audiobook for the newest soon-to-be movie adaptation, “The Hunger Games.” Its protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, lives in a post-American dystopia called Panem, separated into 12 districts and a central Capitol. Her home, district 12, is a coal mining town nestled deep in the heart of Appalachia.

The series (and a later prequel) follows Katniss when she leaves her home as the result of a drawing mandating one boy and girl from each district must fight to the death. Her experiences and history, while framed through this world’s dystopia, are uniquely Appalachian. The community is small, divided by class and race, and set up so that even the most wealthy are hardly getting by.

The wealth trickles down from the Capitol, which rules over the districts and hosts the aforementioned fight to the death: The Hunger Games. Katniss’s perspective allows Appalachia to be the story’s home base, so the more traditional, “American,” Capitol becomes the cultural other that Katniss learns to navigate. 

Katniss’ history provides rich cultural knowledge to the reader on Appalachia. Her mother is a folk healer, music provides her with meaning, and poverty permeates their lives but does not stifle all inklings of happiness. In the prequel, “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” traditional folk songs such as “Down in the Valley” and “Oh My Darlin’ Clementine,” are still sung.

Appalachia’s tragedies can be seen, too, in moments where Katniss’ wealthy friend, Madge, explains that her mother uses opiates habitually, provided by Capitol doctors. Her unnamed father passes in a mine accident 5 years before the book is set, and her mother experiences catatonic grief. Her best friend, Gale, has three younger siblings and his single mother to provide for despite not yet being old enough to legally work.

Even books about tragedy can be written from a place of warmth and love. Ann Fay learns the world extends past her town’s wisteria vines and one railroad line. Katniss finds comfort in the mountains that kept her alive. They persevere, and so young readers can as well. 

Traditionally, the Appalachian experience is told by those who seek to push it down. “Hillbilly Elegy” is a 2016 memoir by J.D. Vance that depends on the reader believing that the mountains are somewhere one should want to escape. Its commercial success influenced the cultural zeitgeist, bringing Appalachia into the forefront as a region to be ignored, pitied, and mocked. 

In the years following its release, there has been a significant increase in interest involving Appalachia. However, much of that increase has come through ideas of Appalachian culture and language being primitive or falling behind current western standards. Matthew J. Hernando in the Hattiesburg American, a southern Mississippian newspaper, describes how “hillbilly culture” ultimately leads to “rootless and apathetic young adults who are hard-wired for conflict, seldom attend church, and struggle to maintain stable relationships or hold down a steady job”  in his book review of “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Hernando goes on to say that while critics of Vance may say he is blaming the victim for circumstances out of their control, there is merit to the argument that Appalachians “are responsible for how they respond to those changes, and they can do better.” This drastically contrasts the view of Appalachia in books meant to educate while not judging the region, such as “Blue” and “The Hunger Games.”

Other Appalachian writers agree that the memoir doesn’t accurately represent the region. Atlantic author Cassie Chambers Armstrong says in her critique of “Hillbilly Elegy,” “I don’t think of Appalachia as somewhere I escaped. I see it as the place that shaped who I became.” 

Media that offers a glimpse into the life of an otherwise ignored population should understand the precarious perch that it sits on. Books do not have a label forbidding some to read them and allowing others, so it should be understood that realistically, people from all cultures and walks of life will come across them. Books such as Moyer Hostetter’s and Collins’ understand this balance.

Both stories weave in the understood fact that amidst the poverty and tragedy of Appalachia, there are both bright shiny hopes and oppressive systems that fight against the residents. They recognize the co-existence and present it to children (and adults) in a way that is palatable enough to digest while still poignant enough to make a lasting impression.

These shows of diversity are not lost on the children they affect, especially Appalachian children who may be seeing the first version of their lives in media that has not been condensed to the title “Hillbilly.” Now, they can see themselves in Katniss Everdeen, Ann Fay Honeycutt, Peeta Mellark, or Junior Bledsoe, and know that their story is just as worth telling as everyone else’s.