southland

The porch at Grandmother's house.My cousin lives there now

All of this white supremacist action—storming statehouses and demanding to "go back to work," not that I'm convinced many of them actually have worked, has me aghast and in a quandary, as I've said before here. As well as written about for years. But it's getting worse now, with the Klan and others in jackbooted lockstep with the-coronavirus-is-a hoaxters, not only in the South, but everywhere and gaining power. I have tried to parse my deeply conflicted feelings about the South.

Pulling into Walmart

My daddy was from Alabama, and so was his daddy and his mama, and their daddies and mamas and so on back to the circuit riding Methodist preacher Zachias Asbury Dowling and James Elizabeth Glenn, who tried to convert the Cherokee. Needless to say, they had very Christian households. During the Civil War, their prayer was said to be, “Dear Lord, please keep us safe from the Yankees and the Baptists.”

    My father busted out of Alabama in WWII, to Okinawa in the Marines, and then to get his PhD in herpetology in Michigan, where I was born Yankee.

   My childhood was spent in segregated Fayetteville, Arkansas, in the 1950s. There were no black faces in my schools—it wasn’t until 1957 that the 101^st Airborne Division escorted the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American students, to Central High. But my white parents and their academic friends were fiercely anti-segregation. They were NAACP members and Quakers and they soon moved to the suburbs of New York City, where kids made fun of my accent. At least once a year, I visited my grandmother in Alabama. The only black faces I knew there were Beulah, Grandmother’s cook, Hattie, the ironing lady, and Richard, the yard man. But that was more than I ever saw in Westchester County.

    Southerners call me a Yankee. I may be an irredeemable atheist who married a Jew and left him for a woman, but I am forgiven because I am Blood. Family, church and football are the foundations of my relations.

   You are allowed to make fun of family. When I’m staying out in the Talladega forest with my father’s widow these days, my cousin says, “If you start to hear the opening bars of Dueling Banjos wafting up from the valley, give us a call, and we’ll drive you to the airport.”

   You’re allowed to make fun of church, too, like the story told of the preacher’s wife who called the police because her husband was late getting home. The cops found him banging the organist on a table in the parish hall.  Then there’s the one about the grande dame who, after Christmas Eve service, got into the back seat of her car and started yelling that someone had stolen her steering wheel. Bless her heart. (This is how, in the South, you say someone is a nutcase.)

    But for heaven’s sake don’t make fun of football. Football is serious. The fanaticism for college ball doesn’t exist in the North. Nor does anybody care who you’re related to or what church you go to. And my Yankee friends are just as terrified of the South as my southern ones are of the North. (With the possible exception of my northern black friends, many of whom also have family there. “Your people probably owned my people,” said one, pointing out my privilege, and guilt, on discovering that I had Alabama ties.) Racism and the South are entwined in the northern mind, despite the fact that lately we have been assaulted with the fact that racism is everywhere in this country—and all over the world. Fear of the “other” goes deep in humans.

    I get defensive when people dismiss the South as the land of rednecks. It is so much more varied and complicated. It is also the landscape of my childhood, and, with all its issues, it feels somehow right to me. I spend the summer within spitting distance of the Arkansas I grew up in. And when I see the red dirt and cotton fields of Alabama, Lynard Skynard plays in my head, and I think, Oh, Sweet Home.

My Yankee stepmother's house overlooks this field. You can go both ways.

Headed up the hill. Nowheresville, Alabama.