a hint of cinnamon (or: privileged)
Friday, February 11th, 2005I’ve actually been to the Warren County fair, though I suppose I don’t count since I’m not in the class. My family tended to stick with the St. Louis County Fair and Air Show, though; the only real reason we had for going to Warrenton was the outlet mall, and even that fell below our standards after a few years.
My idea of “trash” is more akin to yours than a New Jerseyite’s, but, because I spent much of my formative, impressionable youth in West Virginia, the notion to me is closest to the depiction of hillbillies in “Deliverance.” (Aside: Non-West Virginians assume the whole state is one clan of hillbillies (much like they’ll assume Missourah is one giant cornfield), and that I’m the result of incestuous union. If New Jersey is the armpit of the country, what does that make W.Va.?) We only lived 30 or 40 miles from Charleston, the capitol, but if you were blindfolded and abandoned there, you’d think you were in a much poorer country.
My mom and dad grew up in South Charleston, with my dad literally on the wrong side of the tracks. They weren’t high school sweethearts (he asked her to prom and she said no), but my dad worked his way through college — West Virginia State, a predominantly black school — with double-shifts at a tiny corner grocery store and eventually got a job at a coal mine. Not mining, but office work. He used that to pay for grad school at Marshall and, I suppose, to prove to my mom that he was worth marrying/could support a family/not “trash”/etc.
I went to West Virginia for the first time in four years in August. My mom and I drove to my aunt’s house in Roane County, which is probably the most economically depressed area I’ve ever seen. Houses roughly the size of my room at 226 Warren Square dotted the side of the county road; most of them were vacant, burned down or just in disrepair.
Now my dad makes maybe $120,000 a year. My mom didn’t see, but I cried a little as I looked out the window of her Jeep and listened to my iPod.