![]() This and more still yet to be learned by an excited kid watching his Years since, I’ve been amazed to see how much more daylight gets flung around in theįlatter places. “Living in a holler, the sun gets around to you late in the day, and leaves you early. So didn't Demon have enough trouble without being considered "non-White?" in this county of about 20,000 people, 94% of whom are white.Įven the sunshine was limited in his world. Historically, the Melungeons were associated with settlements in the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia, which includes portions of East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and eastern Kentucky." And Melungeon? A new word for me - Wikipedia: "an ethnicity from the Southeastern United States who descend from Europeans, Native American, and sub-Saharan Africans brought to America as indentured servants and later as slaves. Whoa, rehab? So we've learned Demon's mom was a druggie. Supposedly he had the dark skin and light green eyes of a Melungeon, and red hair that made you look twice." She had no "people." Demon explains his parentage and name "One of Mom's bad choices, which she learned to call them in rehab, and trust me there were many, was a guy called Copperhead. The world Demon was born into was definitely not any kind of his "choice." His single, teenage mother was raised in Virginia's foster system. Kingsolver tells this story in first person from the title character Demon's point of view. Kingsolver "gets it." She paints an unflinchingly stark and, at the same time, beautiful portrait of the countryside and poor people in Lee County, Virginia. The most important thing that I learned working in that job was that it is NOT true that people are whatever degree down-and-out they are because they're lazy or they make "poor choices." Or they're just "worthless and so was their whole family." I repeat, this is not true. But, for the most part they were not bad people. The people I worked with were people who had fallen on hard times and had basically no place to go and no way to get there if they did. Small business owners did as well as they could, but even their medical insurances came with high deductibles and copays and, for the most part, pay for their employees was low and medical insurance was the employees' own look-out. The major grocery stores and Walmart at least offered medical insurance for full-time employees. ![]() The two largest manufacturing businesses in our town were the furniture factory and the casket factory. There were jobs for people without a high school education, but not many and not well-paying. It is 30 plus or minus miles from Oklahoma City and there was (and is, as far as I know) no public transportation available for those who would work in The City. What were the possibilities? Guthrie's population at that time was 10,300 plus or minus. Logan County where I lived and worked was not the poorest county and our town Guthrie was not the poorest town in our State, but economic opportunities were very limited. ![]() I was a caseworker for the Oklahoma welfare department back in the late 1970s and early 80s. This novel is serious about serious subjects - poverty, the oxycontin epidemic, the region-wide loss of livelihoods, and the generational loss of hope. She is, in my opinion, the best writer working in the United States today. Demon Copperhead is Barbara Kingsolver's most recent novel. ![]()
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