By the time the children of the Hillbilly Highway migrants came of age in Detroit, the world their parents had moved into had already begun to fall apart.  Their parents, the first wave of Appalachian migrants, had left Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia, in troves from the 1930's through the 1950s, running from racist one drop laws and poverty, seeking work in the booming auto factories of Detroit.  So many Harlan County KY residents migrated to Detroit MI in the 1950s, a bus route between the two regions had to be created and it ran daily, bringing thousands of Melungeon migrants to Michigan's urban epicenter, every year. They settled in neighborhoods like Brightmoor, Delray, and Hazel Park, building tight-knit communities where mountain traditions persisted despite the urban setting. For a while, they found stability. The factories paid decent wages, allowing some to own homes, even if they were in rougher parts of town. But these families were never quite accepted by middle class white society, the discrimination persisted, and after a short time, the poverty did too.  By the time us 80's and 90's kids came along, the world our parents and grandparents had built was collapsing.  The phenomenon of "white flight" had already begun to strip Detroit and its smaller outskirt towns of their middle-class tax base, and the auto industry started collapsing under the weight of foreign competition, automation, and mismanagement. Factories shut down, work dried up, and neighborhoods that once held promise became abandoned and crime-ridden. For the Melungeon and Black families left behind the new normal was being stuck in the ruins of a city no longer offering opportunity, generational poverty, and a struggle to survive in a place that is still bleeding jobs and hope. When the early 2000's came forth, we found ourselves caught between two worlds. Our parents clung to mountain values. emphasizing deep kinship ties, a do-it-yourself mentality, and a distrust of outsiders; a HUGE distrust for outsiders; but us kids had been urbanized. We speak with a hybrid accent, Appalachian twang mixed up with Detroit slang. We grew up on bluegrass dripping out from smoky bars, but also Motown and hip-hop blasting from the subs in a passing caddy. Many families still keep chickens in their backyards, still can food for the winter, and still rely on home remedies before they trust doctors. Yet, we were also city kids, scrappy and street-smart, learning to navigate a world of gangs, drugs, and failing schools. Work, or the lack of it, defined so damn much of our reality. Some of my peers went into skilled trades if they were lucky enough to have connections. Others turned to hustling. Sheenying, scrapping metal, fixing cars in backyard garages, or selling drugs or stolen goods to make ends meet. The rusting shells of old factories became playgrounds and hideouts. Crime was sometimes survival, but always an inevitability. Despite the hardships, us ditch kids carved out a unique new culture. We formed our own kind of identity cause we not quite mountain folk but we sure ain't city slickers either, we are something in between. We have kept the storytelling traditions of our ancestors alive, spinning yarns on porches and garage parties, mixing haint stories from the hollers with urban legends from the streets. Today we are watching as gentrification begins to erase what little is left of our communities. But even in the ruins, our legacy endures: we are a people shaped by migration, survival, and the stubborn refusal to disappear.