Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Encouraged by their reaction, the man said, “I was in Columbus, Ohio. Place is full of jigaboos. But up in Ohio they said to me, ‘You’re a hillbilly. You got one leg shorter than the other from stepping around the side of the hills.’”

“Took it as long as I could—just put up with it,” he said, of the term “hillbilly,” which is not the conventional jokey aside of television humor but contemptuous and bitter in the hill communities of Appalachia, implying poverty and ignorance. “Finally I couldn’t take no more. I says to these Ohio boys, ‘You got one leg shorter than the other too, from stepping off the sidewalk into the gutter’”—and he demonstrated this with his legs—“‘to let the niggers go on by.’”