ABSTRACT
A memory from my childhood has recently begun to haunt me. Sometime during my sixth grade year, my little sister and I arrived home from school, as we routinely did, before my mother got home from her job at the nearby shirt factory. Inevitably, we would occupy ourselves by watching television. At that time, television reception in rural East Tennessee was limited, and we received only two channels, NBC and CBS. One of the stations broadcast reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies. It was one of our favorites. Growing up in a poverty stricken offshoot of the Appalachian Mountains called the Cumberland Bowl, we found the characters of Granny, Pa, Jethro, and Elly May to be vaguely familiar, as was much of their vocabulary and accent. Of course, we recognized the absurdity of their reactions to the situations they encountered, but there was something oddly reminiscent of people we knew. The memory that haunts me is of my mother coming home one day to find us watching the show. My mother, who was forced in ninth grade to drop out of school to work, immediately turned off the television and told us we were not to watch The Beverly Hillbillies. She explained that she had watched it a few times when it had originally aired and was offended-insulted. A child of the depression, with 13 living brothers and sisters, of whom 11 were younger than she, my mother was an intelligent, wise, dignified woman, and she recognized the portrayal of negative stereotypes about her lived culture and the people who called the mountains around us home. She strongly objected. She said, “Robin, they’re just making fun of people like us.” Her words now resonate with me.
