Squeal Like a Pig
Sunday, August 15, 2004 at 2:53PM 2 Comments Last week we saw Cold Mountain and Deliverance, two movies where Hollywood commence to depictin' Southerners on film, and in quite different ways.
There are still small pockets of real hillbillies in the Carolinas and Georgia. I can drive about forty minutes south of Charlotte, just fifteen to twenty minutes south of Rock Hill, and see trailers with rebel flags hanging outside and trucks up on blocks. Now, these aren't hillbillies, they're just rednecks. For hillbillies, you've got to go a bit further.
There's a scene in the 1990 Tom Cruise NASCAR movie Days of Thunder where Tom the hotshot driver goes to lure Reobert Duvall the wizened crew chief or some such thing out of retirement. The screen says Charlotte, NC. There's Duvall running his tractor on his vast farmland in front of rolling mountains. Huh? Not in Charlotte. No farms. No mountains. I have to drive two and a half hours to get to the mountains.
But if you do go to the NC mountains, you can still see real hillbillies. I went to a party once in Boone when I was in college there. We drove up a windy road outside of the town, on the NC-TN border, way up to the top of a mountain to where somebody had a house that was so remote that the cops wouldn't bust you. On the way up that mountain, I saw REAL hillbillies. There were tons of them, standing around the side of that mountain. And they looked EXACTLY as they did in Deliverance.
There will always be rednecks. Not just in the south, but all over the country. I'm probably partly one, myself. But I think real hillbillies are an endangered species. We should enjoy them while we still can.
Reader Comments (2)
you know they filmed Cold Mountain in ROMANIA?!?! uh... yeah, okay. nothing captures the essence of the Carolinas quite as much as Romania.
i think the biggest population of hillbillies is still in West Virginia, though. that accounts for about half the population. the rest are generally rednecks.
my friend at work has a hat that say: "73% Redneck... the rest is beer." yes, he's from South Carolina.
DON'T BREAK in line at a Shoney's breakfast bar in or around Asheville, N.C. I don't remember why I know this, but in July 1998 a fling person and I flung ourselves to Asheville for a weekend thing at a cheap motel. That cost bloody $125 a night. Before leaving the scene for Columbia we stopped in a Shoney's for food.
Plunked the newspapers on the table and we both went for the food. I found where the eggs were and nudged myself to get me some.
"Where are your manners, sir?" asked a tall bearded man wearing a skull-tight camoulflage hunting cap. The rest of his goings-on I can't remember, but he dressed me down because I 'broke in line' at a Shoney's on a Sunday morning when all the families of the south disregard their rustic homes to make breakfast/brunch after church.
There really is nothing to this memory. I just can't get it out of my head that a man with a beard and a baseball cap stuck on his head indoors questioned buzz-cut me about my manners, all of which were ingrained sometimes violently by my southern father. Further, I have to admit that I really didn't know there were codified lines leading up to the breakfast bar, where one could get watery grits and melted cheese, over-spiced sausage, stale or soggy french toast, runny scrambled eggs thawed and poured from a carton onto a griddle. I thought that as a courtesy to being subjugated by poor income to lackluster fare, one did not have to be further humiliated, led like cattle to the slaughter, or Ryans'ed.
Is there hillbilly in all of this? I wish. At least they know how to cook, and dumb as they supposedly are, family is everything. They're actually less likely to show up at a Shoney's and ruin a slag's life for ever and ever.