Jackson, Kentucky

Jackson, Kentucky, is more than a destination in the memoir: it is a homeplace whose meaning changes with the person returning to it. For the narrator, it offers kinship, stories, and a refuge from instability in Ohio; for Mamaw, it is also the place she fled. Through that contrast, the memoir makes Jackson a point of connection between family memory, Appalachian migration, and the unequal opportunities that shape lives in the region.

Setting and Migration

Jackson belongs to the eastern Kentucky landscape from which Mamaw and Papaw migrated to southwest Ohio along what the memoir calls the Hillbilly highway. The narrator’s childhood travels had taken him to several states and cities, but those journeys largely kept him among people who looked and acted like his family. The apparent difference between the South and the industrial Midwest did not erase shared habits: families ate the same foods, watched the same sports, and practiced the same religion. Jackson was thus part of a wider social geography carried north by migration, not an isolated point of origin left behind.

A first trip to California made that familiarity visible by contrast. Uncle Jimmy flew the narrator and Lindsay to Napa, California, and the narrator’s friends responded first with disbelief that their uncle could afford to fly two children who were not his own. The six-hour flight from Cincinnati to San Francisco opened onto experiences unlike his earlier family road trips: a visit to the Castro District, a winery, and a high-school football practice. People heard a Kentucky accent in the narrator’s voice. Looking back, he understood that his sense of kinship with families he had seen in a courtroom came from a shared background among hillbilly transplants. Jackson was one source of that larger inheritance, which crossed state lines while preserving familiar ways of life.

A Homeplace for the Narrator

The narrator’s attachment to Jackson is bound up with the security he found there. It meant uncles, chasing turtles, and relief from the instability of his life in Ohio. The journey itself mattered: a three-hour drive with Mamaw gave them time to tell stories and listen to one another. In Jackson, he was known as the grandson of Jim and Bonnie Vance, a familial identity that made him feel located within a community rather than defined by the unsettled circumstances of home.

That sense of belonging also helps explain why the narrator initially took the decline in visits so hard. After Mamaw Blanton died, trips to Kentucky gradually became less frequent; by the time he reached middle school, the family went only a few times a year, and then for only a few days. Living with Mamaw later allowed him to understand that the reduced visits were connected to a family rupture, not simply a loss of interest in the place. Her sister Rose was kind, but the two had fallen out over what should happen to their mother’s old house. Mamaw hoped it could serve as a shared base for family visits. Rose thought it should go to her son and his family, since relatives living in Ohio and Indiana rarely came. Each position had a practical logic: Rose emphasized actual use, while Mamaw feared that without the house her children and grandchildren would lose a place to stay in Jackson.

Two Incompatible Memories

The dispute over the house reflects a deeper difference in what Jackson represented. To the narrator, it was somewhere to escape to: a place where his connection to Mamaw was strengthened by shared travel, family stories, and a welcome sense of recognition. Mamaw’s memories were harder. She had sometimes gone hungry there as a child, left in the aftermath of a teenage pregnancy scandal, and remembered friends who had lost their lives in the mines. The same homeplace could therefore promise refuge to a child whose Ohio life felt unstable and recall hardship to an adult who had once escaped it.

This generational contrast does not make either person’s attachment less real. Instead, it shows how a place can hold opposed histories within one family. The narrator’s desire to return was shaped by the safety and companionship he found there; Mamaw’s reluctance was shaped by the poverty, stigma, and loss associated with her earlier life. Her wish to preserve a family base in Jackson could coexist with the fact that returning was, for her, a duty to endure rather than a pleasure. The location’s meaning is consequently relational: it depends on who remembers it, what they experienced there, and what they need from it now.

Family Origins and Return

Jackson also connects the narrator’s maternal family history to the parallel story of Don Bowman. Don Bowman’s father migrated from eastern Kentucky to southwest Ohio for work, then died suddenly after marrying and starting a family. Don Bowman’s mother remarried, and he spent much of his childhood in eastern Kentucky with his grandparents. Because Kentucky meant something similar to both father and son, the narrator found in Don Bowman an understanding of his own attachment to the region. The memoir describes Don Bowman’s later home as a recreation of that remembered childhood: fourteen acres with a pond stocked with fish, fields for cows and horses, a barn, and a chicken coop. Gathering eggs, catching frogs, and chasing rabbits echoed both Don Bowman’s childhood and the narrator’s time with Mamaw in Kentucky. The precise landscape of a family home could differ, yet the remembered rural life carried across generations.

The family’s funerals turn that inherited connection into a physical return. Mamaw, like Papaw, wanted a visitation in Middletown for friends in Ohio, followed by another visitation and a funeral in Jackson, at Deaton’s. After the funeral, the convoy continued to Keck, a hollow near where Mamaw was born and the site of the family cemetery. The place held an older layer of family history: Mamaw’s mother was born there, and her younger sister Aunt Bonnie owned a log cabin on the same property. A short hike up the mountain led to a relatively flat burial ground where Papaw, Mamaw’s mother, and many relatives—including some born in the nineteenth century—were buried. The narrow mountain-road journey made the funeral a return not just to a town but to a lineage.

From Local Memory to Social Analysis

Jackson’s significance also belongs to the memoir’s movement from family recollection toward social interpretation. At sixteen, the narrator read William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged, a study of communities left behind when factory jobs disappeared and people with wealth, education, or connections moved away. He recognized something of his home in Wilson’s account, although the book addressed Black people in inner cities rather than Appalachian transplants. He found a similar resonance in Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, while recognizing that neither book could explain the whole experience of his community. His questions about addiction, abuse, and family life required attention to psychology, community, culture, and faith as well as policy.

The memoir later places such local experience beside research showing that opportunity is distributed unevenly across the United States. Poor children’s chances of upward mobility were especially limited in the South, the Rust Belt, and Appalachia; the cited analysis identified the prevalence of single parents and income segregation as two important factors. That evidence concerns broad regions rather than Jackson alone, but it helps situate Jackson within the geography of opportunity the memoir describes. The narrator resists the idea that a single government program could resolve problems rooted in family, faith, and culture. Instead, he emphasizes the many people who helped him and the possibility of putting a thumb on the scale for those at the margins.

Narrative Significance

Jackson gives the memoir a way to connect intimate memory with histories larger than one family. Migration explains why people in distant communities could feel familiar; family conflict explains why returning to an ancestral place could be both desired and painful; burial customs make that inheritance visible in the landscape. The narrator’s attachment to Jackson is not a simple celebration of home, because Mamaw’s memories insist on the hardship that the child’s refuge can conceal. Nor is the place only a symbol of deprivation: it contains kinship, practical care, stories, and continuity across generations. Its changing meaning makes the book’s central tension tangible—people inherit both the resources and the wounds of the places from which their families come.