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ALL THAT’S UNSEEN: An Appalachian Memoir, by Emilee Hackney
Emilee Hackney’s achingly intelligent memoir, “All That’s Unseen,” opens with a scene at Deliverance Christian Church in Tazewell County, in rural southwest Virginia, where she was born and raised. Five-year-old Emilee stands beside her mother, watching congregants flood the altar and fall to their knees, weeping and moaning and speaking in tongues. Emilee feels a “great, urgent energy” pressing down on her shoulders. Her knees buckle and she sinks to the ground, held there by a “mysterious and all-consuming force.”
In the following scene, she’s in the back seat of her parents’ car, pressing her face to the window as they drive into the hollers of the county next door, where both sets of her coal-mining grandparents live. Emilee strains to see the “confining and comforting” mountain ridges surrounding her: “I am dwarfed by their magnitude and majesty,” she writes. The holy but terrifying presence she felt in church has been replaced by a more benevolent kind of grandeur.
This migration between landscapes spiritual and topographical, as Hackney disentangles the oppressive mores of her church and culture from a family and region she cannot help loving, is the dialectic within which her singular story unfolds. As she recounts growing up in the literal shadow of the Appalachians and in the figurative shadow of the Pentecostal church, she asks: Is salvation in ministry or mountains, pulpit or place? Do I belong to one or the other? To both or neither?
It’s been 10 years since the publication of “Hillbilly Elegy,” by Vice President JD Vance, and we finally have an Appalachian memoir worthy of its origins, by a Gen Z writer — an eighth-generation Appalachian — who is too smart, and too authentically of her place, to reinscribe stereotypes.
Hackney’s mother is a kindergarten teacher, a Baptist-raised Pentecostal who believes in the Big Bang theory and listens to NPR — in other words, a unicorn. Her father is a gentle aspiring history teacher who holds down a string of low-paying jobs. He works as a police officer until he can no longer handle the distress of pulling over meth and heroin users with small children in the back seat, and takes a job as an overnight security guard at a junkyard.
After Hackney and her brother, Erik, notice their piggy bank savings dwindling, their parents admit to “borrowing” the cash; they pay it back after Hackney’s father secures an administrative job at Knox Creek Mine. To celebrate, he takes the family on a shopping spree, where Hackney, now a few years older, is allowed to pick out clothes from TJ Maxx and Target.
At a sleepover, she tells her friend’s parents that she has to leave early the next morning because she’s going shopping. The friend’s father raises his eyebrows. “Christmas was just last month,” he says. Hackney begins rejecting her parents’ gifts and hiding her new things: “The shame of being poor was nothing like the shame of being rich,” she says.
By the time Hackney is 16, she’s engaged to Sam, a fellow congregant at Deliverance Church four years her senior, who intends to become a preacher. When he asks her to submit to a practice known as “domestic discipline” and associated with some conservative Christian subcultures, Hackney has to Google the term (as did I). It turns out that Sam wants to “spank” her any time she disrespects his authority. Though Hackney suspects the practice might be “sneaky justification for domestic abuse,” she agrees to try it. When Sam hits her, she weeps — more from embarrassment than pain.
The passage is difficult to read, but Hackney is too good a writer to cast herself wholly as a victim. She questions the “twisted sense of intimacy” she feels afterward. Soon she is asking to be spanked on a regular basis as a way to expiate a generalized sense of guilt: “I felt that the spanking had righted — at least temporarily — my sinful wrongs, tamed my defiant, disobedient nature. I was Jesus on the cross, shamed and ridiculed, sacrificing my pride and body for eternal sanctification.”
The crisis that precipitates the rupture between Hackney and Sam arrives as a devastating shock, but it sets Hackney on a course of self-discovery that, through doubt and loneliness and often painful separation from the religious culture of her upbringing, eventually propels her out of Tazewell County and into Harvard.
To her great credit, Hackney refuses to let her story become a bootstraps narrative. The valedictorian of her high school, she struggles in her Harvard classes: “Every lecture, every assignment and every conversation left me feeling outpaced, off-kilter, as if I were broadcasting at a slightly different frequency from everyone else.” She also misses home. Prejudices she’d hoped to leave behind, she now experiences from the other side: Her peers make assumptions about her education and political views simply because of her accent, while in her hometown she’s considered too “liberal” and elite to fit in.
Flannery O’Connor’s Catholic critics found her work insufficiently religious, while her liberal critics thought she wrote too obsessively about “religious freaks.” O’Connor’s life and work took place in the no man’s land between these poles. That no man’s land is Hackney’s aesthetic terrain. She understands, with prescient insight, that beauty and truth inhere in the gray-toned middle spaces between blacks and whites.
In Hackney’s telling, there are no welfare-state villains or hard-working heroes. There are only individuals: living, breathing humans with all their nuance and complexity. When it comes to writing about rural Appalachia, Hackney’s memoir proves that an elegy is the last thing we need.
ALL THAT’S UNSEEN: An Appalachian Memoir | By Emilee Hackney | Penguin Press | 368 pp. | $32
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