It was a really, really different time. For one thing, it was the last time I spent Thanksgiving and Christmas down South – and both apart from my new girlfriend, who has already demonstrated whatever is the female equivalent of “balls the size of church bells” by moving to the Washington DC area a month after September 11, when anthrax was still a going concern and guys with M4 rifles still patrolled the airports. I clearly remember walking around the Riverchase Galleria with all its security measures and wondering if Al-Qaeda really had designs on trying to donk off a bunch of hicks grasping for bargains. The fact that I would even consider a possibility of foreign terrorist attack on Ala-freakin’-Bama should tell you what a different era it was.
(more after the jump)
The Pretenders “2000 Miles” had an especial resonance at the time, because she was about that far away as the crow flies. I remember worrying about the Muslim school that now resided in my former high school and how well they were bearing up in the middle of the Heart of Dixie at that moment in history. I tooled around in the new Mercedes my mother had bought, questioning its fuel economy in wartime as well as the merits of owning a Mercedes built somewhere between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa. I spent way too long in the company of my immediate family, too long wandering around in a house that was still full of pretty raw memories, trying to figure out just what was wrong with me and why I hated coming down but kept doing it anyway.
Well, seven years on, I think I sorted it. The problem is, as soon as people find out you’re from Alabama, you’ve got a lot to overcome – everything from dogs and firehoses to a mayor praying in sackcloth and ashes six months before being frog-marched to jail in a bond scandal, and never mind the college football fans. And that’s bad enough without factoring in the fact that I never felt like I belonged. It’s like I always say about my accent: people out here think I sound like a plate of grits drenched in Jack Daniels and people back South think I sound like a Yankee newsreader. I think subconsciously, that was the first time I really started to feel the tension that resulted from having to answer for a state that utterly rejected me.
Ultimately, I dealt with it by throwing Alabama under the train. Yes, Dreamland and Bear Bryant and Hank Williams Sr. and Charles Barkley and half a dozen Olympians and Dr. James Andrews and Milo’s fries and tea and the number one public high school in America – but is it enough to overcome Bull Connor and Richard Scrushy and Larry Langford and a lynching as late as 1981 and college kids torching churches and people who think anyone in a turban is an AY-rab and Confederate flags on a pole outside my mother’s beau’s house (who as it turns out is a blood relative of mine)?
Not for me, it wasn’t. In the grand scheme of things, it boils down to George Wallace versus Atticus Finch, and Atticus Finch is a fictional character.
So in many ways – and in so many ways – the holidays are a time for feeling guilty about how much of my past and my heritage I have to kick down the well just for the sake of preserving my own sanity. In the end, I’m not sorry about it, either, because for serious scholars of the Southern condition, suicide is the same sort of occupational hazard that black lung is for coal miners or carpal tunnel is for office typists. If you don’t believe me, ask Cash and Cason and Fletcher. Oh, you can’t, they’re DEAD. So pick up The Mind of the South or 90 Degrees in the Shade or read bits of I’ll Take My Stand if you can stomach it, or just take my word for it.
It may suck sometimes, but I did what I had to do and I regret nothing.
Gosh, that’s cheery, isn’t it? Next one will be more amusing, honest.
FWIW, there’s a lot about your experiences of the South and Alabama that resonate with me in terms of my upbringing in Peoria. I think maybe not quite so negatively, but the same statement rings true: it’s not where I belong.
(Also? You definitely have a drawl, to my ears, but I wouldn’t describe it as grits drenched in J.D. You can get that same accent in southern Illinois. 🙂
Here’s the thing, and the thing is this: If you were what you see when you look at your home state, you would still be there. You would have let inertia take hold and cruise along. You’d have let challenges pass you by, stayed put, and kept your head down. On the other hand, where you came from made you what you are, somehow or the other, even if it was to incite in you a rebellion against what you saw was wrong. I know, because that’s a life I’ve led as well.
I think that there is stuff wrong with virtually every subculture on the planet. I am not even sure if the Buddhists can claim the moral high ground at this point… We’re all of us all too human, and expecting too much of people will just lead to the kind of heartbreaking disappointment that makes you numb. I can be cheery too, can’t I? I know people from my hometown, who upon first meeting seem like the nicest folks you’d ever want to meet, who turn out to think that “race” equates to “species”. As in, people of different races shouldn’t mix because they are of different species. When I heard this, I knew that one person was wrong. Seeing a bunch of other people nodding in silent agreement let me in on the secret that more was wrong.
It was good that I could find people like you, who grew up among the same kind of wrong-headed thinking, but came out the other side prejudiced only against the stupid. It made me feel like I wasn’t as alone as I had felt growing up.