ABSTRACT
Privileged-class white folks looked down on the poor white folks who lived outside the law, projecting onto them many of the same negative stereotypes they used to define black people. Many southern black folks long to re-capture a sense of the life lived in community with its value of relating, civility, courtesy, and mutual caretaking that most of the reader knew growing up. Like many folk returning to small-town southern roots, one of the most immediate experiences that calls the reader is the slowing down of everything. The insistence that the best and brightest of the Kentucky hillbilly country folk need to move elsewhere to become fully self-realized comes with no insistence that this elite group should return to their homeplace. Consequently a major human resource is taken away from this state. Symbolically, this is not unlike mountaintop removal.
