Southerner

Heat, sweat, rednecks, and slaves. Beer cans floating on molasses rivers. Preachers throwing bibles at demons, deacons visiting widows. Mint Juleps, porch swings, pines, and red clay. Big trucks, battle flags, country tunes, and white lightning. Such is the South, to some.

I was born in Tampa, Florida, southern by geography not culture. My grandfather once told me that Florida was not a southern state, it was North Cuba. I believed him. The truth is a bit more complicated, however.

Whenever a Georgian friend boasts about his grandmother’s cornbread, I can taste my mother’s. Whenever they tell of confederate family heroes and the lost cause, I remember my great, great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Marmaduke Hobby (a damn good southern name!). He lost a leg somewhere between Georgia and Virginia, between glory and bitter defeat. When college-aged southerners apologize for the bigotry of their elders, I do the same. My Sicilian blooded, southern raised grandfather made the best country biscuits I ever had, and taught me the worst racial terms, terms I used until I knew better. I don’t know where I fall on the spectrum of southerness, but I do somewhere.

Still, southern identity is more than racism. There is a shared culture between all races born from the chalky clay.

The south, however, is an impression. New York TV executives pick a southern family from a hat of nut jobs and give them a reality show. The show embarrasses many southerners, but others embrace its message out of rebellion and misplaced pride. We act out fantasy, we play the part of bigot, idiot, ignorant, and incapable. Manipulated, shunned, sequestered, and packaged for consumption. Such is the South, to me.

Pride is a funny thing. It is bad and good.

A young, stupid, boastful, man-boy spoke up in class today. He defended his father’s paternalism toward his family’s “help” in 1960’s Alabama. “My father told me they treated their help like family,” he said, as if he were there. He is blind to history and his infantile attachment to his father’s “truths.” If he were the only one of his type in the south I would be less concerned. He is not.

The story of the “New” South reads like fan fiction. All the important characters and plots are still there, but the authors are less passionate, less aware, and less focused than their forebears, which scares the hell out of me.

Change occurred. Not all southerners fit the mold. There are anomalies, but there always were. Anomalies force reckoning. Lillian Smith, William Faulkner, Janisse Ray, and Wendell Berry are all examples of Southerners who embrace the South but reject its lesser qualities. They force us to consider which traditions we should guard, and which should rot.

I take neither offense nor comfort when someone tells me I am not a Southerner. I am accustomed to being an outsider. The South is a place I love and strive to protect, especially the rivers. I proudly live here with mid-day thunderstorms that can spin tornadoes, rich, red clay that cracks under temperate August heat, pecan trees, and Copperheads. The beauty and myth of what this place was, and could one day be, might outweigh the threat of a few insolent citizens. As a southern environmental historian, I hope to prove it to the world and myself.