Arriving home that day, Vance remembers Papaw putting his head on Vance’s forehead and sobbing, the only time he’d ever see Papaw cry. Although his mother tracked him down, the homeowner had called the police, who arrived and arrested his mother. When she pulled over to beat him, he leaped out and took refuge at the nearest house he could find, telling the homeowner his mother was trying to kill him. She sped up, telling Vance she’d crash the car, killing them both. It all came to a head the day that, while driving in the car with his mother, Vance made a comment that sparked her temper. She apologized and promised that those things would never happen again.
She slapped or pinched her children, cycled through boyfriends, came home in the early hours of the morning, and said things for which Vance sometimes couldn’t forgive her. Nonetheless, Vance’s mother’s behavior worsened. Either way, Vance’s mother divorced Bob and moved back to Middletown, one block closer to Mamaw than before. This all changed, however, when Vance arrived home from school one day to learn that his mother had intentionally crashed her car into a pole, possibly attempting suicide, or as Mamaw saw it, a staged distraction from her marital problems, the result of both debt and a years-long affair with a fireman she met at work. “This thing that I hated had become a sort of drug.” Even so, Vance admits having a kind of love-hate relationship with the fighting, sometimes pressing his ear up against a wall to hear a fight better. “Seeing people insult, scream, and sometimes physically fight was just a part of our life,” he writes. He notes, however, that these violent family arguments were by no means uncommon amongst families he knew. Vance’s grades began to slip in school, and he began to gain weight from the stress. He had been taught the hillbilly way of conflict resolution. Later, Vance would interfere in a physical fight between his mom and Bob, ending the fight by punching Bob in the face. Like Mamaw, Bev never allowed herself to become a victim, and Vance recalls her not only initiating the violence at home but even during his youth league soccer games, pulling a woman’s hair when she insulted Vance’s playing. At age nine, his parents moved the family thirty minutes outside Middletown, devastating Vance (Mamaw and Papaw were his best friends) and exacerbating the already heated fights that had become a pattern for his mother and Bob.
Unfortunately, this fighting bled over into Vance’s home life. Although Mamaw later took this back-and “Mamaw never admitted mistakes”-she also endorsed fighting when Vance was sticking up for the bullied. There was one unofficial caveat to this, however: if someone insults your family, you may start a fight. Mamaw taught him never to start a fight, but to always end it if someone else starts it. “In the southwest Ohio of my youth, we learned to value loyalty, honor, and toughness,” Vance writes. On the other end of the spectrum was Mamaw, who encouraged Vance to learn the rules of fighting from a young age. “We didn’t have chess, but we did have football.” As a former salutatorian, Vance’s mother was, above all, a believer in the power of education, and Vance believes, “the smartest person knew.” Vance’s mother encouraged him to read and learn as much about football as possible, particularly where strategy was concerned she and Vance built models of football fields and used loose change to represent the players. Bev and Bob moved in near Mamaw’s house, and their jobs provided enough money for the family to live happily for a time. In an effort to erase any memory of Vance’s father, his mother changed his middle name from Donald (his father’s first name), to David, supposedly after his marijuana-smoking great uncle. With Mountain Dew mouth and a trucking job, Bob was “a walking hillbilly stereotype,” and Mamaw had expected her children to marry “well-groomed middle-class folks.” Although the couple’s marriage was initially peaceful, Vance imagines that Mamaw hated Bob because she saw herself in him. “After the adoption, became kind of a phantom for the next six years.” Vance’s mother remarried Bob Hamel, who would become Vance’s adoptive father but who irked Mamaw to no end.
“It was the saddest I had ever felt,” Vance remembers. While Vance admits he has few memories from before age seven, one of his most vivid is being told by his mother and sister that his father had decided to give him up for adoption.
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