Living Here in the Middle of It

I have lived in the South all my life. When I was a kid, I found it embarrassing. We traveled a lot, and I always wished my parents wouldn’t tell people where our home was, because I felt like the listeners judged us for being from a place no one else would ever want to come. I’ll never forget visiting a cousin in Florida when her boyfriend asked to speak to me on the phone. He talked to me for a few minutes and then told me to put my cousin back on--he had just wanted to hear what a hillbilly sounded like.

In college, when my roommate said she could never imagine living outside the greenery and rolling hills of our home state, I stared at her, wondering at her complete lack of imagination. I could imagine living anywhere but there, and it never had occurred to me that anyone might find this area beautiful. 

It was also the first time I started to realize that the South was gorgeous--riotous with wildflowers, show-off sunsets, looping moss, majestic trees. All four seasons are extreme and wonderful in their colors and expressions of nature. Two hours in any direction brings you to something new and fabulous, whether from cheesy tourist shops, local festivals, weird shrines, or perfect national parks. Down here, people let their freak flags fly, and you can find proud evidence of passion for all sorts of strange and sometimes bizarre things. I love the corner groceries with a collection of old men doing who-knows-what, the painted tractor tires overflowing with colorful flowers in front yards, and the way everyone except me has a pickup. 

We used to drive on Sunday afternoons, sometimes in the back of my grandpa’s truck. We’d whizz along back roads and gravel roads, over quiet creeks and past giant farms, stopping at old cemeteries and collapsing buildings. My grandpa showed us the remains of the one-room schoolhouse where he used to go. Inside on the crumbling blackboard, classmates had written messages on their own visits, making the building itself a cemetery of sorts. Everywhere you turn has a memory and is constantly reinventing itself. 

My parents and grandparents shielded me from a lot of the unique people. Once, driving with my dad, an old man stopped us at our mailbox. He leaned into the car over me to talk, and when my dad caught the beer on his breath, he politely but firmly ended the conversation and drove on. I didn’t even know what the sweaty, slightly sweet scent had been, and I wasn’t told until we were gone. I always felt safe to wander my road on foot, or to roll over the fields and back roads with my family. Nothing could get me while they were there.

I was an adult before I realized that not everyone was so safe down here.

I thought the South was the friendliest place, where people always spoke to you and you didn’t pass anyone driving without waving. I didn’t know that that friendliness was still dependent on the color of your skin. In high school, one of my best friends was Black, and I knew that she had experienced racism, but I thought that came from redneck idiots, not from nice people. I knew racism was alive, but it seemed so outdated, so dumb. I wasn’t racist, and neither was my family. End of story.

I didn’t understand my privilege that let me ignore it all, and I still have so much to learn.

Richard Grant’s book, The Deepest South of All, came out last week, and it deals with this duality of life in the South. The book examines the town of Natchez and opens with characters straight out of a Flannery O’Connor story. It contrasts the upper crust life in Natchez with the slavery that built the town (the second largest slave auction in the country was located in Natchez) and is largely ignored today, although that is starting to change.

There are a million things that frustrate me about the South, and Grant points out so many of them. At the top of the list is the inherent racism and the unwillingness to admit that the racism even exists, as well as the desire to cover it all over with religion. I’m bothered by the desire to glorify the antebellum South instead of recognize how the damage begun there is still spreading today, and the absolute resistance to change.

But Grant also points out so many of the things I still do love about this area: the emphasis on tradition, the willingness to always put on a show with our real lives, the nuance and duality in each person. We expect our villains to be thoroughly villainous, but you see clearly here that for many people, they are trying to be good but refuse to look over their shoulders at their giant blind spots. You get the sense that the whole end of the country is a work in progress, straining at the seams, trying to grow but desperately afraid to let go of what they believe is foundational. The Red Sea is parting, but they want to stay and take their chances with Pharoah, thank you very much.

I’m here in the middle of it: living here, worshipping here, loving here, and trying to teach my kids to grow and change and think differently while also trying to teach myself. I’m messing up the opportunities to love my neighbors of all races every day, but I will keep trying again tomorrow, and someday I will get it right. I will never stop trying and learning, and I am grateful to authors like Grant who paint a portrait of these blind spots and help me see.