Kinfolks by Lisa Alther

mountain families took pride in ancestors who’d fought to free the colonies from Britain and were appalled by the notion of dissolving that hard-won union.
    In 1819, a Quaker named Elihu Embree founded the nation’s first abolitionist journal, the
Manumission Intelligencer
, in Jonesborough, the town in which my family’s farm is located. When Tennessee seceded from the Union, East Tennessee tried to secede from Tennessee, as West Virginia had from Virginia. During the Civil War, 30,000 East Tennesseans joined the Union army, comprising one-third of all white southerners who fought against the South. Guerrillas in East Tennessee burned railroad bridges there to cut Confederate supply lines. Mountain men called “pilots” led Confederate draft dodgers and deserters and escaped Yankee prisoners to the Union lines in Kentucky.
    My neocortex collapses into a whimpering stupor. Since I’m taking a creative writing class, I decide to write a short story set in East Tennessee to sort this out. As Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “The Southerner knows he can do more justice to reality by telling a story than he can by discussing problems or proposing abstractions…. It’s actually his way of reasoning and dealing with experience.”
    In the resulting tale, one character says to another, “Law, honey, where’d you get that hat at?”
    When my professor returns the story, she’s scribbled in the margin, “Real people don’t talk this way.” I’ve never before known that the people I grew up among weren’t real. This might explain why I’m so confused.
    Embracing my newly excavated Appalachian heritage, I buy a banjo and learn to play it badly. Ophelia plays a guitar, and our favorite tune is “They Are Moving Grandpa’s Grave to Build a Sewer.” The hallmate who’s sickened by southerners offers to cover our waitress shifts in the dining hall if we promise never to play it again. To punish her insolence, we sing eight verses of “Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” All around the courtyard windows slam shut. But even Ophelia good-naturedly ridicules East Tennesseans as white trash who make a laughingstock of the entire state.
    Undeterred, I continue to court my inner hillbilly, lounging around the dorm in bib overalls, an undershirt, and bare feet. When my housemother, Mrs. Bradner, complains, I accuse her of cultural imperialism. I explain to my profoundly uninterested hallmates that the Deep South is to Appalachia as mint juleps are to Pepsi. That if the plantation South is the land of moonlight and magnolias, the mountain South is the land of moonshine and magnum rifles.
    I take my final exams in the infirmary, where I’m incarcerated for a month with carbon monoxide poisoning acquired on a trip home from Cornell in a car with a faulty exhaust system. I also have mononucleosis from the stress of trying to function in such a bizarre place.
    But I do survive the cut my freshman year, despite feeling like the first amphibian ever to lie gasping on dry land. And I’ve learned the most important lesson of an Ivy League education: Ivy Leaguers are no different from anyone else — except for the fact that they don’t know this.
    Sealing my exit from the South (just as my grandmother has feared), I marry Richard from Cornell after graduation. The reception takes place in our backyard in Kingsport beneath a huge revival tent erected for free by an evangelist who’s one of my father’s many grateful patients.
    A New Jersey native, Richard is working at an ad agency in New York City. By bribing several Dickensian characters lurking in a basement office, we manage to rent an apartment with high ceilings and parquet floors in a prewar building overlooking the Hudson. The only drawback is that getting from the subway on Broadway to our building is like negotiating the no-man’s-land between the British and