Why I Stay in the South

I am a child of the Southland. I love it here, and I grew up here, in a childhood filled with honeysuckle, sweet tea, fishing, lightning bugs and church potlucks.

The earliest memories I have involve table fellowship with other folks, of lessons drummed into my head about hospitality and being told to “remember who I was”. I have vivid memories of elderly, blue haired ladies telling me they knew my grandma (who died when I was very young) and my daddy and that they knew I had been “raised right”.

In the South I grew up in, I was taught we had to take care of each other, because none of us had much. So my Daddy would miss supper sometimes, because after working more than 10 hours that day crawling under houses in a shirt with his name on it for barely over minimum wage, he would go straight to the volunteer fire department to get trained on some new piece of firefighting equipment. Because of this, I learned that love – for a place or a person – can’t be divorced from responsibility.

I learned that the things that make for a good life involve other people – the people who bring you a casserole when you are sick, the rounds you make at Christmas, as you take tins of fudge to old ladies who would wipe the snuff off their mouth and say with amazement, “I’ll swan…” as they bit into that creamy goodness. The neighbor who knows your daddy is sick, and comes down and cuts the grass and stacks the firewood for your family.

My grandmother’s sister Louise – my great-aunt — was a fierce lady. Born in 1907, she had been divorced in the 1930’s, when that was rare. She told me her first husband was a drunk, and “damned if I was gonna do all the work and watch him drink”. She told me that she might go to hell for it, but she had been in hell for the years she had been married to him, so she knew how to live there. She refused to take the Lord’s Supper at church, because “I am lots of things, Hugh, but none of those things is a hypocrite.”

In a small brick church that had my granddaddy’s name on the cornerstone, I learned about Jesus, who told us to love each other, and who had long hair, but that was OK, because he was God and, most important, he didn’t live in my daddy’s house. God was the Father, and demanded obedience – which made sense to me, as my own father demanded obedience. I figured Jesus had been told, ‘Because I said so!” any number of times as a kid.

But more than theology, in that small church I learned about community, about being a part of some people who would cut the articles about you out of the local paper when you won the spelling bee and put them on their refrigerator and pray for you every night. About casseroles when you’re sick, about not noticing Mr. Hayes sang off-key, about celebrating small victories and going to every funeral.

I learned other things too. I learned that we were poor, but proud, and that we were expected to work hard, but that didn’t mean we had to like it. But I also learned that some people would look at your Black friend’s hard work and tell you he was “a credit to his race”. And that would confuse you, but not as much as trying to understand why he wasn’t allowed to spend the night at your house.

As I grew older, I learned that complicated lesson that the very people who taught me to love can be, themselves, unloving to others. That the people who taught me to be hospitable can themselves be inhospitable. It means coming to terms with the knowledge that the people who loved me into being are flawed, and fall short often of the ideals they gave me.

Being a child of the Southland means feeling things fiercely, and so I learned that you stand up for people who can’t stand up for themselves, and I learned that I had responsibilities to my community. That I learned to draw the circle of community larger than my people did is not my fault but theirs, and was somewhat inevitable: After all, they are the ones who taught me that “red and yellow, black and white – they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

They taught me that, and I believed them.

Being in and of the South while being a progressive white straight male means your liberal educated friends from North of here will watch how your state votes and will call your friends and family things like “inbred” and ‘hillbillies” and “white trash” and ask you how you stay there.

And sometimes, when you have the energy and the notion, you tell them those people are some of the kindest, best people you know, but folks in power have made them afraid in order to maintain power. That your people have been played and told that their diminishing paychecks and their insecurity and their inability to keep the land their granddaddy farmed and got 49 harvests from – that all of that is the fault not of the people who are in power, but of people who have black and brown skin and less power than even they do. And your people believe it, because scared people will believe anything that will make them less scared.

And sometimes, when you have the energy and the notion, you tell your friends from elsewhere that you stay because you love it here, and that you are not just from here but of here, and your roots run deep here, and one day you will be buried here amongst your ancestors. And that for them to ask why you don’t leave means that you are supposed to believe that there is a separation between the values you learned as a child and the values you have now, when the reality is, the person you are now is just the person you were taught to be then, only writ larger.

And for them to suggest you leave is to suggest that you cannot be the person who longs for table fellowship and church meetings and the smell of cape jasmine and the delight of sweet tea and cornbread and also be the person who fights for justice for your community and who yearns for the day we can all sit at the same table and eat cornbread and sweet tea together.

And that is not true.

Because the truth isn’t that I can be all of who I am and also be Southern – it’s that I am all of who I am because I am Southern. And to suggest I move and give up on this place and these people is to suggest I deny all of that, and that I deny them. And that I cannot do. I will not do.

Because I am lots of things – but none of those things is a hypocrite.

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