Anna Vannoy is a freshman from Greensboro, NC, planning to major in Public Policy (with an English minor). This piece was adapted from an essay originally written for an English course taught by Professor Taylor Black in the American Experiences FOCUS cluster.

A remote, seemingly desolate filling station. Trees and weeds encroach on the gas pumps and the shack. Four men––Lewis, Drew, Bobby, and Ed––exit their cars, impatient to get on with their camping adventure. The men struggle to understand the station attendant, who has an intellectual disability and thick accent. This is rural Georgia after all, they think. Lewis, Bobby, and Ed joke about him. But Drew strums on his guitar, uncomfortable with his companions’ disdain and mockery for the man now filling up their cars. The sweet tones of Drew’s guitar are suddenly echoed. Lonnie, a local boy, comes out from the shadows of the porch, masterfully playing a banjo against Drew’s guitar. Lonnie is “probably a half-wit, likely from a family inbred to the point of imbecility and Albinism.” His white-blonde hair–including his eyebrows and eyelashes–and his pale, luminescent skin lend a spookiness to his demeanor. Something about him is wrong. Alien. Other. This moment, known as the “dueling banjos” scene, is one of the defining and most iconic scenes from the 1972 American thriller Deliverance, based on James Dickey’s 1970 novel of the same name.

Lonnie, the “demented country boy,” and the rest of the local people in this scene are portrayed as genetically, intellectually, geographically, and socially other to the protagonists of Deliverance––our four men eager to get on with their road trip. These backwoods locals become the object of ridicule, pity, condescension, and fear, for both protagonists and viewers. These are not people, after all––they are mountain people. Because of their isolation (both geographic and genetic) from the rest of America, indeed from the rest of the South, they are completely unrelatable beings to normal, sane, affluent, and liberal city dwellers——they may as well be extraterrestrials. This trope extends far beyond Deliverance. In a great deal of Southern literature—Gothic, Grotesque, and otherwise—poor white Southerners, especially children, are genetically, socially, and intellectually “othered.” Protagonists frequently both fear and try to save these “others.” When that doesn’t work, they sometimes try to eliminate them. Scholar Elisabeth Aiken explored this idea in a 2020 essay, “Tacky Mountain Cousins“, but this phenomenon has not just been observed in the academy. It is part of a larger cultural and political conversation that has been relevant in mainstream elite circles since at least 2015, and maybe 2008. Of course, the people who read and write pieces about poor, white, conservative Southern folks are often educated, affluent, liberal Northerners (New Yorker readers and Demon Copperhead “discoverers,” let’s say). These elites tend to strain all depictions of poor white Appalachia through a liberal and easily digestible filter, losing realism and often empathy in the process. As a political matter, liberal and progressive intellectuals and politicians often shoot themselves in the foot as they try to ‘diagnose’ the condition of poor white southerners, inevitably alienating those they seek to help. 

Aiken identifies this in her essay. She asserts that, historically, those who wrote about Appalachia from the outside characterized the place as a “‘strange land’… full of ‘peculiar people’– that is, people different from (and implicitly lesser than) [mainstream U.S. Society]”. In the American tradition of highly regional “local color” fiction (often actually written by those not from the Appalachian region) “hill people” are depicted as ubiquitously one-dimensional: lazy, unclean, socially backward, and lacking civilized culture and education. “Local color” writers try to imbue Appalachia with the color they want to write about: one that is strange and genetically dissimilar to “the rest of us” in Northern, cultured, often liberal America. Local color writers, Aiken’s essay asserts, are responsible for the myth-making and fictionalization of a very real region, filling it with caricatures instead of realistic characters, stereotypes instead of citizens, and fallacy-filled, half-hearted, condescending attempts at verisimilitude. 

Let’s zero in on the genetic trope in this fiction. In general, because of their literary association with the fresh imprints of genetic inheritance, children are a popular vehicle for tropes depicting alleged incestuous tendencies in Appalachian and broader Southern culture. Children are also more powerful and empathetic subjects for urban and civilized protagonists who wish to “save” the poor white Southerners they come into contact with, even when no one is asking them to. These protagonists often express a desire to take these children out of their destructive mountain society. Both Deliverance and David Sedaris’ “The Girl Next Door” feature this paradigm: a protagonist who thinks of himself as a sophisticated savior, and who takes on a poor, white, implicitly inbred Southern child as a project: something to save, without stopping to consider if the child or their guardian even wants this.

In Deliverance, we are supposed to see Drew (the guitar player with a moral compass from the beginning of this essay) as the best of the four men. He is shown to be deeply affected by the cruelty with which the other men treat the locals. When Bobby looks around the filling station in disgust, saying “Christ, Drew. Drew, look at the junk…”, Drew admonishes him by saying “…not so loud. Let’s not upset these people.” While Drew earns points for his concern, the way he says “these people” reveals that he is not as innocent or respectful as the movie would have us believe at first glance. There is a condescension there, an allusion to Drew and Bobby’s shared sentiments that they are superior to these people. Drew is implying not just that it is impolite to upset them, but that it is dangerous to do so, presumably because these wild local hill people are more prone to violence than civilized man. While the movie wants us to appreciate Drew’s good heart, in truth, he has a superior, patronizing, and callous attitude towards the group of people who, because of their genetic differences (proven or otherwise), ultimately just make him uncomfortable.

The fact that Deliverance so clearly wants us to admire Drew, to see him as the best of the four men, is connected to the issue of superiority put forth in Aiken’s essay and in media and politics today. Yes, Drew is kind to Lonnie and the other Appalachian locals. But it is condescension that drives that kindness. It is the belief he holds (exactly what Aiken details about the view of peculiar and implicitly lesser mountain people) that he is superior to these strange and genetically abnormal people who need his pity and quietly beg for his civilized saving, that allows and perpetuates the problematic stereotype of the genetic, social, and intellectual “otherness” of poor white Southerners.

Drew’s savior complex towards poor white Southern children is echoed in “The Girl Next Door” by the humorist David Sedaris, published in The New Yorker in 2003. The story is about Sedaris’ experience living in a cheap, junky apartment in the South, and the odd and ultimately antagonistic relationship he formed with his neighbors, a single mother and her nine-year-old daughter, Brandi. Sedaris’ description of Brandi eerily echoes the genetic othering of Lonnie in Dickey’s script for Deliverance. Sedaris writes that she was “blonde, [her] hair almost white, with invisible eyebrows and lashes… the girl appeared to have none at all.” These alien features, so similar to Lonnie’s, imply genetic inbreeding. Even if she doesn’t have a genetic deficiency, her features render her unreadably foreign and off-putting to our narrator, and by extension, to us. Of course, New Yorker readers trust Sedaris as a civilized and respectable guide into these peoples’ hillbilly tendencies and irresponsible lives–it is easy for readers of that magazine to adopt an even more supercilious and patronizing attitude toward Brandi than Sedaris

But Sedaris does forms a sort of connection with Brandi, a touching relationship which develops throughout the story. He fancies himself Brandi’s mentor, trying (and failing) to teach her about the world to “broaden her horizons” by teaching her things she does not learn in her terrible school. He even has her make art. And while I believe that Sedaris’ attempts to be a positive influence on Brandi do come from a genuinely kind and caring place, the fact that he feels the need to do so in the first place underscores how embedded the savior stereotype is in outsiders’ attitudes about uplifting poor white Southerners. Sedaris displays a kind of benign naiveté about Brandi, likely informed by other depictions of poor white Southerners in media intended for wealthy educated Northerners (although Sedaris was of course famously poor at the time, he later worked his way into elite liberal circles). Sedaris is completely blindsided when he discovers that Brandi has been stealing from him and destroying the trinkets he gave her as gifts. He had a romantic notion of poor white Southerners wanting to be saved, amplified by the fact that he was dealing with a child, and a female one at that. After Sedaris confronts Brandi and her mother, the nine-year-old child begins to taunt and bully him, using slurs and intimidating tactics. When Sedaris realizes the consequences of his attempts, that he cannot and was never able to “save” Brandi, he effectively eliminates her from his life. He calls in his mother, the maternal safety net that Brandi will never have, who helps him move out of the apartment complex. He cannot confront the fact that, as Aiken shows, his schema about poor white Southerners and their need to be saved was never workable in the real world. It was only a romantic notion about a sad, difficult-to-improve reality of poverty and neglect. 

I am not trying to make some sort of defense of the many unfortunate conditions of life for poor white Southerners. It’s understandable why outsiders feel a desire to save children brought up in such circumstances, just as we feel an obligation to help the destitute and despairing across the globe. Brandi deserves to grow up in a more stable and caring environment: the way she and her mother live is not healthy. But it is not Sedaris’ responsibility to help them, especially when they didn’t ask for help. Something more productive would be progressive social policies providing desperately needed support for poor white Southerners: a political solution based on hard numbers and realizable goals, not a cultural one based on elitist misapprehensions and condescension.

David Sedaris’ position as someone who once lived among poor white Southerners – and at one point was more or less one himself – but now resides among and writes for the elite New Yorker audience gives him a unique position in this conversation. But he is still a victim of the biases and easy stereotypes of mainstream culture, despite his genuinely good intentions. In many ways, Sedaris reminds me of Jeannette Walls, whose best-selling memoir, The Glass Castle, centers on her difficult, idiosyncratic upbringing in shocking poverty in West Virginia with her charismatic but deeply dysfunctional parents. Walls and her siblings had to fend for themselves from stunningly young ages, as their parents prioritized their own pipe dreams and lofty ideals, choosing adventures over stability. Walls eventually left her family and moved to New York, where she attended Barnard, became a journalist, and gained entrée to the educated and affluent New Yorker stratum of American society. In writing The Glass Castle, Walls, even more so than Sedaris, had to contend with how to produce an account of her lived experience in white Southern poverty that is both digestible for the educated New Yorker-type reader and also something they are proud to say about their past. That is a tall order: people who didn’t grow up in the South or experience Appalachian poverty might not understand how to reconcile the complex feelings of pride, community, and resolve of those living in these circumstances with the objectively sad and unhealthy lives they lead.

Drew, David Sedaris, and even Jeannette Walls have an inclination be saviors: that they want to try to save these poor, off-putting Southerners is rooted in the belief that because of their status as educated, wealthier, and liberal people, they know what’s right. But this is a delicate balance to strike: though poor white Southerners, in both media and real life, often live in unhealthy environments marked by despair and neglect, no character (real or imagined) in any of these works ever personally requested help from a non-Appalachian savior.

While the otherness we feel about the people of Appalachia may have some genuine root in their remarkable geographical and cultural isolation from mainstream American society, the extent to which the zeitgeist continues to traffic in tropes of inbreeding, intellectual disability, and general backwardness remains disproportionate. Its prevalence in media and culture today reveals a key reason why educated, affluent, and liberal political actors, including Democratic party politicians and strategists, are increasingly alienating those they want to help. The current political insularity of the Democrats—who too often repeat the errors of their culturally dominant constituency, which has a weakness for condescending to those who don’t share their educational privilege—has damaged the party’s popularity and, in turn, its power. Democrats must stop condescending towards poor white Appalachians (among other groups)–perhaps some new voices in Southern literature can help them finally understand this demographic on its own terms.

By Anna Vannoy