Authors Note: I wrote this several years ago, but I saw this “cuckservative” joke come up on far right sites again and it just made me remember this essay. Despite it’s imperfections, I still think it explains the power fantasies within American Culture. I’ve shared it on Patreon before, but never widely. Please note that there is no quarter given to liberal or conservative as this is a skewering of white politics, period. And if you can, give me some grace for my past self’s still raw feelings, some of the publishing stuff feels much less personal than it did when I wrote this.
I’ve always known I was a redneck, but I don’t know I am white trash until the day my editor calls after acquiring my debut novel.
She phones from her Manhattan office, and I answer in a cold barn, perched on a haybale with a cat poised above me and four horses looking on—three things I’m allergic to. I have written a novel about the kind of power men claim in motorcycle clubs, and how the girls they both value and objectify dare to claim power for themselves. I sniff like a cokehead from my allergies, expecting to talk about my lyrical writing, my unconventional journey to it, or even my history riding motorcycles.
I don’t remember her first question. I remember the eager, titillated tone. The realization that sweeps over me, leaving me blinking in surprise. She thinks I was a motorcycle club girlfriend, and wants to know what it was like to be that woman.
I have not anticipated this question. I haven’t ever dated someone in an MC. I know about them because, as one of the main characters in my book says, “it pays to know what kind of men your world is made of.” Men in motorcycle clubs were always in my world, even if I wasn’t in theirs.
I pull my boots under me and stare at piles of frozen shit in the pasture. “No,” I say bluntly. My allergy-stricken voice makes me sound like a divorcee with a pack-a-day Virginia Slims habit. “No personal experience.”
Which isn’t true. But it is true for what she is asking.
“Oh,” my editor replies, disappointed when it’s clear there was no wind-swept, romantic story to tell.
I desperately want to make a good impression and sense the entire conversation might wrench out from under me, that tell-tale wobble in the tire. I scramble for something. “I really wrote it about me and my best friend.”
“I see,” she says.
After the call is over, I hang up and sit there, confused. The haze of allergies isn’t helping. Who exactly does my editor think I am?
I thought I knew who I was. I was the kid in the backseat when we got pulled over and the deputy came, gun drawn. I was hollering out the window when we ran over a rattlesnake and my dad threw the van in park and dove into the bushes after it, yelling promises of rattlesnake stew. I once knew three girls with the middle name “Jo” (Bobby Jo, Holly Jo and Carrie Jo—two of these were cousins). I was the girl giving dirty looks to the cop who’d made her push her dirt-bike home after catching her “trespassing”, and who had a crush on a boy who owned a gen-ui-ine replica of the General Lee. (He eventually ran off to work on a barge on the Mississippi, and when I saw him at my sister’s wedding, years later, he’d ridden his motorcycle from Missouri.) Once, a six-pack in, I made out with Joleen on the plaid porch couch, for an audience that included her ex, who proceeded to shoot his new bow up into the tree. Even when I lived in black West Baltimore and realized being white meant something, there wasn’t this feeling of my entire sense of self going squirrely underneath me.
I wipe my snot on my sleeve, and squint at the horse eyeing me, trying to see myself from my editor’s perspective. “I think she wants me to be Lana Del Rey in the Ride video.” All tragic and a wild woman, wearing a suede jacket like my mom used to have, except my mom wore hers with blue eyeshadow and teased red hair.
He neighs and rolls his eyes. (I swear to god, horses are bastards).
I like that video, problematic content aside. Full of innocent optimism, I leave the barn with the determination to treat publishing like any other unknown road, tasting both the excitement and the fear as it unfurled ahead. But over the next two years leading up to the book’s publication, I learned that to step into the world of publishing—middle and upper class establishment—meant stepping into a role already waiting for me. An identity I didn’t know existed.
I was a Cuckbull, gripping the counter and telling myself to get hard.
Here we are, for research purposes, meeting up somewhere classy like a Ramada Inn with burgundy carpet and a king-sized bed. This is a fetish. It’s not good or bad, it’s just a variation on a theme. Like custom paint on your truck. You may not be into it, but someone is.
THE CUCKOLD sits at ease in nice khakis. The person he’s with is preemptively naked, studying their nails because they know they’re about to be fucked. They get no cool title. Then there is THE CUCKBULL, a lustier, more virile version of the Cuckold, to do the actual fucking. The whole point is the fantasy. The fantasy of fucking another man’s partner, of being fucked by someone other than your partner, and of being humiliated watching your partner be fucked by someone other than you.
The bull is shirtless, though their belt remains fastened because they’re into this, totally, but when they turn, you see the whites of their eyes just a little too clearly, a steer trying to wheel away from the chute last minute. The Cuckbull has a come-to-Jesus moment in the bathroom, gripping the sink dramatically and eyeing themselves in the mirror while they reframe this story for their friends at the bar. Then they stride back out into the room, blood pumping with Jack Daniels and goddamn purpose.
The sounds of the interstate drone in the silence and Jesus Christ, it’s awkward, so the person getting fucked slaps the clock radio and fumbles around until they find something benign and noisy on the airwaves. This gives the Cuckbull time to undo the belt and strip the jeans down past their socks. Everyone looks away while they two-step out of the tangle of denim, belt buckle clinking.
It’s weird at first, sure, but after a little bit, it’s like any other time, and the Cuckbull is balls deep, flesh slapping to the noise of the radio. As long as they are careful not to look out of the corner of their eye, it’s just another sloppy hookup from the bar.
But in this particular situation, the Cuckbull catches the eye of the person they are fucking. It’s a terrible moment, deep in this Ramada Inn. The resignation of the person getting fucked. The wild-eyed nerve in the person doing the fucking. They both look away quickly. To the walls. The weird stain on the carpet. The bedspread. The ceiling.
They both try very hard not to look at who is sitting in the chair.
In the lead-up to publication, I drive up and down the East Coast, going to festivals and crashing afterparties, hopping over the white rope for a party on the lawn at Decatur in my denim miniskirt, cut-off Johnny Cash T-shirt and visible bra. My friends talk up my book, making it impossible for me to get escorted out.
If you’ve ever been in the car with me for one of those trips down Interstate 85 in Virginia and North Carolina, you have likely already heard my “The Great Dismal Swamp Lecture,” which I deliver with maniacal redneck fervor in a camo hoodie, swilling a large iced coffee from the South Hill Dunkin Donuts. I’ll try and replicate it here, but it’s better with the drone of my shitty Chevy Cobalt over endless straight asphalt through pine and cypress swamps. It will give you the feeling not much has changed since the colonists arrived. Even from the highway it’s clear The Great Dismal Swamp is the kind of place that holds thick sunshine in dark pockets and dark pockets in blazing sun.
At its peak, this area spanned nearly 2,000 miles of Virginia and North Carolina, where temperatures hang out in the wet-blanket range of a humid hundred degrees. Even now, the whole place remains full of poisonous snakes and swarms of flies that bite the second-god forbid-you leave off the military grade Deet. The panthers are all gone though.
William Byrd II, a wealthy, educated Virginia planter, wrote an entire book about his travels in this region, painting a gruesome, dark tale like a colonial Deliverance, complete with descriptions of (white) people with “Custard Complexion,” fucked up noses and palettes, who ate so much pork they were “extremely hoggish in temper,” constantly had the trots, and were “slothful in everything but getting children.”
My people!
This colonial planter stomped around the swamp with all the hubris required to be openly masturbatory about the idea of turning this “vast body of mire and nastiness” into a “Great Empire” of profit. Everything in the swamp was fertile for income, including leaves of a strange bush he thought the ladies would like for a high-priced tea (bush is unknown), the oil of the nuts the hogs eat, and the runaway slaves he’s always telling us he didn’t rape, though he wanted to, lol.
The swamp was refuge to more than just shockingly impoverished white people because, as Byrd mentions, here also was a place for escaped slaves to hide in relative safety. Called “Maroons,” these communities of elevated cabins were built on patches of higher ground deep in the thicket of thorns, bald cypress and tupelo that afforded insulation from outsiders.
Byrd’s proposed solution to build his “Great Empire” of profit went along with the common beliefs of the day. At the time, it was largely believed that people’s very blood was influenced and infected by stagnant water and unproductive land, and that if they drained the swamp and restored the “fertile” land into something “healthy” and “productive,” the people would also be restored.
Yes.
Yes, you read that right.
The 17th century cry of “drain the swamp” was, and still remains, the promise of restoring “degenerated” whiteness to productive labor, instead of fucking and the trots. Draining the swamp meant adding to the profits of land-holding gentleman and investors, in addition to restoring lost black economic value to its original owners. If you don’t get that, you can get out of my car and walk your ass back to Richmond.
Appalachia, where I’m from, remains a rocky, not swampy, haven of “degenerated” whiteness, built explicitly on the myth that our heritage is some kind of preserved Scots-Irish clan culture. We are O.G. White Trash. Apparently due to our isolation, in-breeding, and insulation, our genes are literally less evolved than the rest of white America, and our land is worthwhile only when it can be economically productive for outsiders. In his book, Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance sells this false narrative wholesale by saying Appalachia’s people “increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it” and claims “we pass that isolation down to our children.” Let it be fucking known that J.D.’s work only reflects the wave of other white land-owning venturers writing for political gain, like Jim Webb in Born Fighting (2004), and Colin Woodward in American Nations (2012). All three of them rely on modern Nazi historians and Neo-Confederate thought for academic scholarship.
White Trash is a slippery identity term. Really, anytime you begin talking about class in America, everyone gets uncomfortable. Let alone the intersection of race and class where “White trash” resides. It’s part of the American myth—we have no real class boundaries for enterprising and hard-working individuals. It works in conjunction with our myth that whiteness is also meaningless. All men are created equal, and all that bullshit.
Any kind of reading outside of government approved texts will burst this myth faster than a pitbull with a balloon. The colonies themselves started as a potential cure for the many poor in England, where “waste people” and “waste land” could simultaneously be converted to economic assets. Though when it looked like the experiment would actually be profitable, it went a little sideways for them with the whole revolution thing.
“White trash” come from more places than just Appalachia and The Great Dismal Swamp. Every place has its enclaves of waste people. All throughout American history, poor whites have played a role in the tension between races and classes, condemned for our proximity to blackness and chided for our disgrace from middle and upper class whiteness. In our politics, but also in our culture. There’s a whole chapter about us “degredaded” whites in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We’re the bad guy in To Kill a Mockingbird and Deliverance. We’re outlaw country and NASCAR. From Elvis and Dolly Parton—yes, she wasn’t always an icon, just white trash—to Anna Nicole Smith and Roseanne, Paula Jones, Kid Rock, and Sarah Palin. Right up to the Kardashians, the “trashy” family with a complicated relationship to black beauty aesthetics, and whose stardom is not “backed up by any discernible talent.” The Washington Post once wrote that Peg Bundy, the classic white trash mom from Married…With Children “might not be someone to emulate, but her potential bad influence is what makes her so fun to watch.” Which is as good a summation of my existence as I’ve ever heard.
I am not cut out for this author life, I can feel it.
Once, I’m asked to leave a hotel in New York City, because they believe I’m a prostitute. I’m also escorted out of a conference by security in Las Vegas—but to be fair, I was sneaking in to that. I’m quick on my feet, but this world is so different from what I know, I end up walking around in a panicked daze, wishing I could get high and lie down.
In Vegas, I end up at a dinner with exactly the kind of authors whose assholes I’m supposed to be crawling inside and trying to hatch. I’m not telling anyone at this table that up until this year the nicest restaurant I’ve ever been in was an Olive Garden. I nod along to a discussion about Japanese whiskey like I don’t happily wreck myself on Jack and cokes back home, but I’m distracted by the shapewear I’ve put under this tight sheath dress and the way it slowly folds into my waist. I need to crawl under the table, rub out of this dress like a snake scratching out of its skin, and smoke a joint in my underwear outside one of the service entrances.
The son-of-a-famous author literally orders half the menu.
“Let’s just go with all of this,” he says, sweeping his hand down the side of the list.
My brain short circuits trying to calculate my portion of this bill. I drink more whiskey and screw on a sober-face when the food arrives. I stare at the platter the waiter lays before me, mouth dropping open.
Did you know that when pork belly is $80, it is served—in the utter fucking hubris of rich people—
RARE?!
Eating this goes against everything I’ve ever known in my life, and I’ve eaten roadkill. It’s like running around with the safety off, the knife pointed up and no brakes on the bike. What riotous, bold risks rich people take. Holy FUCKING hell. This is living on the edge and I’m never one to turn away from the edge. I slice off a piece and put it in my mouth, chewing raw goddamn pork like I’m William Byrd II.
I’m so high on the raw pork and whiskey and the idea that I am somehow pulling this author thing off that I relax and make a mistake—I tell a story that’s always a fucking hit with a bunch of rednecks. I tell them about the time I was kidnapped by the attorney I worked for, about how he gave me a tour of his empty “plantation” home outside of Bedford, Virginia, which included a basement of red-tinged light and nothing but mirrors, and about how somehow, in the utter absurd, I returned to town unscathed.
No one laughs except for me.
When the bill comes I go to the bathroom and lock myself in a stall, peel off the dress and shapewear, and stand there naked, ordering myself not to throw up the pork I was stupid enough to eat.
The first—and only—time I use the word “Affrilachian” on a panel, the entire crowd gasps as if I just said the n-word.
By this time my book is out and we are post Trump election. I think there is a picture of me on this panel at Marshall High School in Falls Church, Virginia, but I don’t remember anything but the gasp, which jolted 9am-panel-me awake faster than any coffee or cocaine ever could.
I’ve never had a poker face and dropping all pretense of an educated, liberal writer, I drawl, “Wut?”
No one looks me in the eye. Not the audience. Not my fellow panel attendees.
My neck is red, but so is my fucking face. “Y’all, this is a real term.” But I am suddenly scared to explain how Frank X Walker, a black poet from Kentucky, came up with this word to highlight the contributions of black Appalachians. I thought everyone just knew and now I doubt my knowledge. I doubt everything.
I look to the moderator, a white lady who sits blinking rapidly. “I’ve never heard it,” she stammers.
“Okay, well it’s real,” I say with fake confidence, and everyone shifts uncomfortably. I dig deep into my redneck will to soldier on with the rest of the panel as if nothing has happened.
This turned out to be no rare occurrence. In 2017, a white librarian interrupts a whole-ass panel in Memphis in order to correct—collect—me for saying “white supremacy” instead of “white, cis, male, hetero-normative supremacy.”
“Yes, that’s what I said, white supremacy,” I say into the microphone. “That it’s all of those things is understood.”
A woman of color has to agree with me before she sits down.
In Jungian archetypes, white trash—waste people—are the shadow of American consciousness, the “moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality”.“Americans not only scrambled to get ahead, they needed someone to look down on.” writes Isenberg. Even now, maybe especially now, we need someone to blame.
After another disastrous panel, I sit in the author green room, contemplating, how exactly, I’ll get all one hundred forty odd pounds of myself into a bottle of Jack Daniels like I was a Writer in a Bottle to be displayed in someone’s summer home. A Muslim author who was on the panel with me and saw me torpedo my own boat once I realized it was sinking, pats my hand and murmurs something encouraging. The grandfatherly Latino author who was also on the panel looks me over with such pity, I feel true shame for the second time in my life.
Back home that summer, I sit on my parked motorcycle in my bikini, cicadas buzzing in the heat as I try to tell my agent what is happening, but just end up feeling crazy.
“If people thought badly about you, I would hear it,” she says. And I don’t know how to explain it’s not like I’ve done something bad, it’s that I am something bad. Like mayonnaise that’s been left out a picnic too long, but no one is going to tell the person who brought it, they’re just going to avoid it until someone mercifully, quietly, puts it in the trash and returns the container.
Part of the mindfuck is that I am the Cuckbull. I’m the stereotype of white trash, full stop. My best self is this version—blunt, crass, dramatic single mom and blue-collar laborer, who looks like trouble and will bully you into playing--and it’s what made my voice so noticeable in the first place. I easily managed to make myself known during my debut year, a time where every author is desperately trying to make themselves known. No one wanted me as a role model, and in that way, I enjoyed more allowances to be complex in a way that’s different from what was afforded the white establishment. And because no one wanted me to perform my pain, I was allowed to be complex in a way that’s different from what is afforded Black women and women of color. The road had some turns I hadn’t expected, but I thought I could stay loose and figure it out.
But the more these incidents happened, the more clear it was that I was wrecking, that I had hit the pavement, this was taking all my skin off, but it hadn’t stopped, and all I could do now was try to control the slide before I ended up crossing the center line and hurtling into another vehicle.
So I tried to bury the Cuckbull, the stereotype, and become the man in the chair. I had been actively anti-racist, but now I tried to mimic the performance of it. I copied displays of middle-class values, aesthetics, and identity language. I gave up the denim skirt and cut-off Johnny Cash t-shirt and exchanged them for a blazer (my entire idea of a professional white woman) with jeans and a pair of heels. (They were probably still too high, but at least they read like classy hooker, not stripper). But I had no real middle-class coding, so the whole thing sat on me like glitter on a possum playing dead in a kindergarten trash can.
Why are you here? Even though I knew the American Dream was a myth, I was still buying into it. That if I could win the game, I could break the game. Walking in right before the 2016 elections, into the Ramada Inn off the interstate, I thought I was capable of playing this game in order to get some money, some power, and to be heard. It took me awhile to understand that no matter what I said or did, or wore or didn’t wear, I was still white trash. I was always managing this identity perception. You can never break what you’ve bought so deeply into.
I could have sat in the chair if I’d embraced doing it without my integrity. If I’d told everyone that I represented something authentic, something that reinforced what they already wanted to think about people like me. About themselves. If I’d told them it was only me who could stride into this situation and fuck the way it needed fucked, and that others like me could never do it because they never tried hard enough. If I’d told them I was the one with the power, the dick, the drive. The real voice here because I did not hold them accountable for anything. Then, maybe, I would have been successful. It worked for J.D. Vance.
If you’re starting to feel uncomfortable with the optics of this situation I’m describing, good. Don’t look away now, you pussy. Because now it’s personal. It’s one step away from the idealized fetish situation, and it’s getting real. I was asked to step into a role for the promise of a reward. But who benefits from this arrangement? The whole point of me being here is to play the shadow. To play the virulent man taking ownership of something that belongs to a weaker one.
To play you.
* * *
Who is to blame for the results of the 2016 election? If you've skimmed the news articles, you know the answer is white, working-class voters. In a November 9, 2016 NPR interview with J.D. Vance, simply entitled “Examining Trump's Appeal to Voters,” they talk about the election as if Appalachians were solely responsible for the outcome. Yes, voter turnout was disproportionately white, but never mind that in 2016, the G.O.P gained the most ground in middle class communities, and that most white working-class voters—just the working class in general—don’t vote. As Hunter S. Thompson once said, “As we found out last fall, registration is the key to freak power.” Obviously voter suppression and mobilizing reluctant voters are actual issues we need to address, but it’s easier to pick a curdled milk candidate who appeals to those white people who don’t like to talk about politics except to assure us they voted for Obama, they think. The same white people who quietly voted for Trump. And it's easiest of all to blame Appalachia.
I don’t trust myself to go anywhere near Hillbilly Elegy except to point out it sold an immense amount of copies and was acquired by Netflix for $45 million with Ron Howard attached, so there’s the Jungian shadow flex. For me, a less emotional example of middle-and-upper-class-maybe-voted-for-Trump-but-says-they-didn’t sensibilities is Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Published in 2018, it spent 20 weeks on the New York Times Fiction Best-sellers List, was one of Barnes and Noble’s Best Books of 2018, and was no. 1 for 2019 on Amazon’s Most Sold Books in fiction. It was also selected for Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine book club.
The main character is a wild “marsh girl” who—despite being abandoned to her own devices—raises herself with class and southern woman dignity. She establishes herself as a preeminent biologist and artist, which is all explained after we find out that her mother’s kin were landowners (she’s really a lady, y’all). The town calls the main character white trash and isolates her, and in the end, we find she is also as “savage” as they’ve declared her to be. In an ironic twist, the Wikipedia entry for Where the Crawdads Sing has a picture of the Great Dismal Swamp attached, a location nearly two hundred miles inland from the Outer Banks, where the book is actually set. The only black people in this 1950s coastal North Carolina setting exist in service for the main character, allowing white people to talk about black people without involving race. Likewise, Hillbilly Elegy completely erases black people in Appalachia, and both are stunning reminders of Where We Are as a culture in the year of our fucking lord 2019.
But apparently, it’s low class whites who are to blame when things go bad. Despite the statistics clearly indicating that middle and upper class whites are the ones responsible for voting Trump into office. 71% of voters in 2016 made more than 30k/year, and in fact, 33% of voters made more than 75k/yr, while a full fucking 85% of non-voters made under 75k/yr. Despite the fact that it’s middle and upper class whites who are the first to cry for “civility” when people’s lives are at stake and run Nazi puff pieces. Despite the fact that it’s middle and upper class whites who are our gatekeepers, our tastemakers, our tone-setters, our news-writers, our headline creators, our culture drivers. The Cuckbull is the one actually doing the fucking, after all.
“The most ardent proponents of racial hierarchy have consistently succeeded in implementing new racial caste systems by triggering a collapse of resistance across the political spectrum. . . . largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American hierarchy.” Writes Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow.
The great con of the man in the chair, the cuckold—the one who has not done the fucking, has not had to get naked, who sits, fully clothed and smoking as he derives pleasure—is not that he isn’t there, but that he is weak, he is benign, his hands are tied, he is impotent. He is the victim, whether real or lay. But out of everyone there, the cuckold is the only one whose pleasure is assured. This is his fantasy, first and foremost. And isn’t victimhood the real white middle class fantasy?
It was there from the beginning of this essay. The moment you knew I was a woman and that I was sexual, I indicated that I’m standing at the glorious intersection of being a White. Trash. Ho. My great contribution to culture is that, one time in Miami, I described a Syrian-American coworker teaching me how to say fuck me in the ass in “Syrian” and the entire car of non-white friends reminded me it was “Arabic.” In my drunken shame I crawled under the seat and declared myself a WHOT, White Ho Over There, which at least made everyone laugh.
But being a white trash ho is another crucial component at the intersection of politics, identity and class.
Seventeen-year-old Norma Padgett, the white trash ho who accused four black boys of rape in Lake County, Florida in 1949, is at the center of the case excellently covered in the Pulitzer winning book Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King. King details Norma Padgett at two points in her life. Before the alleged incident, Norma is known as a white trash ho—she’s been out drinking, she’s known for being “a bad egg,” she’s in a tumultuous marriage with a non-land owning man, and—most damning of all—she’s from Florida. She’s white trash, and even in the newspapers, her family the Padgetts, are described as being “clannish.”
But when the middle class establishment needed a willing Cuckbull to fuck over the black community and ensure white supremacy, Norma Padgett was brought from the fringes of Lake County whiteness in a nice dress, youthful and carefully groomed, “chin held high, shoulders back, she strolled more than strode to the witness box.” She was exhibited as the kind of white womanhood American politics has guarded so fiercely since the end of the Civil War, and after her damning testimony, she “left the witness box as confidently as she’d taken it.”
Girl came ready—ready to be seen, to be recognized, to get her moment, and do the dirty work that was required for it. But as the case goes on, part of the breakdown that happens is Norma’s inability to retain social standing. People start talking, saying the girl and her husband “were acquainted with the four colored boys” and “came from poor whites.” By the time the second trial happens, Norma enters the courtroom at nineteen with “the bent carriage and the shuffling walk of a woman three times her age.” She’s described as that gaunt, white thin with lank, lifeless hair and shoulder blades rising out of a tight dress, and in all of this, both in herself, her community and the newspapers, we see her inability to hide her class.
Lynching in the south was built on the intersection of sex, race and politics. The idea of a cuck in America, even in our current porn, almost always goes back to racist ideas from the Civil War that has since driven American politics forward. “Rape symbolized the loss of virtue as well as a failure of southern manhood” and “White women all over the south had been left unprotected . . . . dismayed by the failure of southern manhood, and traumatized by war and the threat of sexual violence. They compressed these sentiments into a postwar narrative in which rape was the dominant theme.”
Within that dominant theme is the tension of being a low-class white woman in the south. As detailed in Crystal N. Feimster’s fucking amazing book Southern Horrors:
“In the antebellum South, poor white women were seen as the polar opposite of the pure and virtuous elite white woman . . . . To lack property or profession in the slave-holding South was to lack honor and respectability and to be regarded as a social parasite and a potential threat to social harmony and order. Poverty was particularly shameful for white women because it violated norms of white femininity. Lower class white women who labored alongside slaves were an absolute contradiction of the southern lady, who symbolized leisure, luxury, wealth and refinement. Thus elite white women sought to maintain a ‘clear and often militant defense of their class privilege and their distance from lower-class women’ . . . . When poor white women suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of white men in the antebellum South, they, like slaves, often were blamed for their victimization and denied legal protection.”
Even the legal system reinforced these class beliefs. In a rape case in the antebellum South, a white woman had to prove she was “a woman of previous good fame” in addition to other strict requirements showing she fought back. “Such requirements meant that poor white women, who were already perceived to be sexually voracious, were effectively excluded from the class of women who were deemed likely victims of rape.”
But after the war, the dynamics of this landscape shifted. During this brief period of black mobility, threatened white southerners weaponized these lingering fears by arguing that “assault on white women was a new feature of black activity after slavery.” Of course, the con is that then, as it is now, rape is a hallmark of entitled white men.
Not all lynchings in the south during this time were black men accused of rape, but all lynchings during this time were about victimhood. Both black women and poor white women were also targeted by mobs, accused of making white men their victims of violence, usually attempted murders or poisonings. (Though don’t think for a second the rates were comparable—let’s not Irish slaves this.) These mobs did not target middle and upper class white women. The narrative was that white middle and upper class women—and men—were always the victims of black or low-class white women. The violence of lynching served as a weapon to police racial, social, and sexual class, to threaten people who dared stand against white supremacy. “Under the pretext of protection, lower class white women who challenged white male supremacy risked being pulled from the beds, stripped naked, flogged and sometimes even lynched.”
If one were to squint at Norma Padgett, one might see that being caught alone at night and acting friendly with four black men put her in a position of great insecurity. This led her to invoke the southern white woman cry of “rape,”, the punishment for which had to be reinforced during this era, regardless of Norma’s standing. It is not a stretch to say that ultimately some of the “justice” received was due, in part, to the breakdown of her standing as a “reputable” white woman. But of course, explanation is not an excuse, and four innocent lives were lost as a result of this violent soil on which we tilled.
I call myself redneck, always with a grin. I know who I am. I grew up in the coalfields of northern Appalachia, and redneck is a word associated with labor war. The United Mine Workers used the term and a literal red bandana to “build multiracial unions of white, black and immigrant miners in the striking coal fields.” In the middle of a town near where I grew up stands a thick-walled fortress of a jail, where one of these labor stories unfolded. I visit it the year before my book comes out, while making jokes on Instagram about returning to District 12.
Between trips to Vegas and L.A. for author work, I visit my twenty-five-year-old brother, who is working in the same factory I’d worked in at eighteen, supporting two children and a wife on nearly the same pay as I had made a decade earlier. This is two weeks before Trump would be elected. My brother is white and my sister-in-law is black, and both dislike Trump and wrestle with the idea of voting because of their beliefs regarding abortion. (My brother would go on to become a big Trump supporter). We fight over politics, sit on the kitchen floor to eat so the kids can eat at the table, comb through my brother’s patchy garden for anything the frost hasn’t killed, talk about the upcoming hunting season, and watch our kids play on the streets we once rode our dirt-bikes down. When we get sick of being in the house, we go tour the Old Jail.
The hangings of the accused Molly Maguires in Carbon County, Pennsylvania is a familiar story, even if you haven’t heard it. In 1877, Irish immigrants mine workers, who resisted predatory mine company control and forced conscription into the Army, were accused of being terrorists and disloyalty to the United States. It’s a long, dramatic story that remains unclear to this day, but the coal baron, Franklin B. Gowen, hired the Pinkerton detective agency to dismantle attempts to unionize and ensure a clear path to acquiring $40 million worth of coal rich land.
At the height of the conflict, four men were arrested and jailed behind thick walls while the gallows were built in the center. When they came to hang Alexander Campbell, he slapped his hand on the cell wall, declaring that his handprint would remain there forever as a sign of his innocence.
The gallows are still there.
And despite paint, lime, cleaner, and literally building a new wall overtop the old one, the handprint still remains.
In mine camps, black laborers and white laborers were segregated, but in the dark they worked side by side (except for management positions). Between 1900 and 1947, 1,000+ to 4,000 miners died annually, and in death all are equal. In 1921, The Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest show of armed resistance since the Civil War, consisted of 13,000 white, immigrant, and black men and women who came together to protest predatory labor practices in the coal mines of Logan County, West Virginia. One miner wrote “I call it a darn solid mass of different colors and tribes, blended together, woven, bound, interlocked, tongue and grooved, and glued together in one body.” A private army was hired by the mine company and federal troops were ultimately brought in to suppress the uprising. The workers were gassed, fired upon, and bombed. (The NRA would later praise the private army for its firepower.)
On weekends, when he wasn’t working at Westinghouse Steel in East Pittsburgh, my grandpa used to sit at the breakfast table, shirtless, with a belly comfortably out and his Marine Corps tattoos visible. He’d linger over coffee and burnt toast, looking into the woods outside his home. He’d sing and whistle, and one of the songs he sung over and over, ingraining them in my head forever, was Merle Travis’s “Sixteen Tons”:
Sixteen tons/what do you get?/Another day older and deeper in debt/St. Peter don’t you call me, cuz I can’t go/I owe my soul to the company store
Profit trumps people is the simplest way to describe American history. Profit trumps justice, always. There are men in power and men in power protect themselves. Anyone adjacent to that power protects themselves and that power, and everyone without that power stomps on the necks of everyone around them to reach that power. I spent my childhood roosting black silt with my dirtbike and running from cops who policed destroyed land. Entire neighborhoods outside my high school could light their water on fire and my town of immigrants tried to outlaw immigrants. This fall, miners in Kentucky blocked a coal train for two months in protest of defaulted wages. When I take my kids to rock climb in West Virginia, we drive past mountains that are just flat-out missing. Our war is ongoing.
In the 1890’s, the Populist movement attempted to briefly align southern poor white and black interests against a “common oppressor”. This resulted in unprecedented victories for equality and political power throughout the region, and “it is altogether probable that. . . . Negroes and native whites achieved a great comity of mind and harmony of political purpose than ever before or since in the South.” But the populist movement morphed into something that could not achieve any solidarity. This period ended with a return to “Redemption” era terror, violence, and fraud, and segregation proposed as a bribe in that it would ensure poor whites better standing and protection from segregationist laws that applied to them (literacy laws, for example).
A question that is always asked is why do they vote against their own interests?, but aligning with white supremacy is in our best interests, the establishment has made certain of that. We have to buy into overt white supremacy, or completely revolt, there is no middle-class, moderate, “civil”, liberal option. We revolt, and we get bombed by a private army, and there is no justice, but we die fighting for a better world, instead of dying being used.
Three weeks after that visit with my brother, I finally meet my editor in person at a book festival in Charleston, South Carolina. We’ve fought tooth and nail over the writing in my book, which she claims is too niche, too risky. I claim it’s important to carry on a tradition of living language and living people. I understand that she is trying to make the most commercial book possible, catering to the tastes of middle-and-upper-class book buyers. Our fights were between profits and people, and she didn’t realize I’d grown up in this war.
But in this moment in Charleston, she catches me vulnerable and myself. I am overwhelmed by having to hatch in everyone’s assholes and escape from an after party to have a smoke in a dark alley. My editor finds me there, taking in my bare legs in the thigh high boots, gold chain my dad brought back from South America when I was a small child, and the shirt-dress that makes it seem like I just forgot pants. The look on her face makes me feel like I’m a celebrity, and it is disconcerting.
I’m in no mood to pretend I am a nice, white woman or to hide how fucking exhausted I am by these performances. I bring the smoke to my lips, making steady eye contact under the wane light of flickering gas lamps. “The party is up there,” I dismiss her in a rush of smoke, pointing with the glowing tip of embers in the dark. She meekly walks away.
I know who I am. I’m a single mom living below the poverty line, surviving on the generosity of friends and the penny-pinching I learned in poverty as a child in Appalachia. I know I am ignorant, uneducated and unconnected, but that I am resilient, curious and willing to learn. I know my best self can be seen as my worst one. My motorcycle sits in the front yard and a box of parts sits on the porch chair. I work in construction, and the only time I’m not in Carhartt and steel-toes is when I’m in cut-offs and a bikini (or sweatpants in the winter). My hair is long and lank down my back. I work all day and then lie in the hot sun, listening to the wind through the marsh reeds. I ride my kid's bike with a beer in one hand as the wind lifts the sweaty hair off my neck. I am lonely, loved, feral, sedate, sharp and tired. I scrub toilets to pay rent and listen to music and write, write, write. I'd love to return to my role as an author, but I no longer care when I make a crowd uncomfortable and I don’t pretend to be a middle class white woman.
I almost had it right with my read of my editor wanting me to be something romantic and wild like Lana Del Rey in the “Ride” video. What I failed to understand is the appeal in that video, of Lana herself, is the narrative of an upper-class woman fallen. I tried to use that narrative for myself, but did not understand that I had never fallen, I’d just been born here. I could never be restored to something I’d never been. And in order to rise anywhere at all, I’d have to stomp on the necks of everyone around me.
I certainly never felt like I was Norma Padgett, but since my whiteness came of age in black West Baltimore, I’ve been aware that I could be. I have been given chances to save myself at the cost of Black people and people of color. I’ve been given chances to align with White or align with Other. This isn’t a one-time choice, it’s something I have to choose over and over. Most times, all that is required to align with White is my silence. The old labor war question still rings in my ears—which side are you on?
Aligning with White gave me a chance of being the person in the chair, clothed and smoking, the one with the power. The victim. But fucking people over doesn’t put you into power, it doesn’t put you in the chair. It does leave you a victim, but not that kind. For a moment you are angry and maybe even extremist, but ultimately it leaves you exhausted and used. It leaves you Norma Padgett, forced to lie to the end to save your own skin, telling a clemency board in 2019, “I’m not no liar.”
I’m the Cuckbull. But what happens when you don’t want to fuck at the pleasure of someone else?
As a group of underclass whites, we are locked in a tense dance, in public and in private, between the competing interests of our communities and the white establishment who would use us. At our worst we are everything we are accused of, feeling the reverberations of desperation while we wild-eyed fuck anyone the cuck asks us to. At our most vulnerable, we are catching the eye of the one we’ve been asked to fuck, experiencing the skin-crawling horror of thinking that maybe not everyone is into this. We are here, but we are no longer sure why or whether this is worth it.
And at our best?
We throw off our condoms and break the fucking chair.