Sweet Home Appalachia

To be, or not to be, a Southerner? That is my question.

Hi everyone!

Between last week and this one, my subscriber list blew up a bit.

So, to my new readers, welcome! So excited to have you here. Check out the archive if it strikes your fancy, but don’t worry — I often refer back to old posts in these current ones.

Today, I’m ruminating on my place of birth and, for most of my life, my home: the (American) South.

Does All Y’all Mean Moi?

I was born in Tampa — at MacDill Air Force Base, to be precise. But I have no memories of that time, because my family moved to Buffalo when I was about three. I didn’t return to Florida until just before first grade, when we relocated to the northeastern coastal city of Jacksonville.

Even as a elementary school kid, I remember some moments of cultural dissonance. Getting used to “y’all” and the pronunciation of ‘aunt’ as ‘Ann-t’ and not ‘Awn-t.’ In second grade, we had Florida-Georgia day at my school to celebrate the annual Florida-Georgia college football game, where we swapped our blue plaid school uniforms with the college gear of our choice. I didn’t grow up with a familial affinity, so I just picked Florida. I mean, I lived there after all.

Believe it or not, I still have the t-shirt my dad bought for me to wear. I wore it like a smock then, but it’s a slim fit now. (The benefits of never really developing any cleavage: I can still wear clothes from elementary school — including a t-shirt from that very school! San Jose Episcopal Day School.)

(Yes, I still wear these. As my snarky adolescent self would say, “Bite me.”)

But on the whole, once I had adopted those linguistic tics and flew my Florida Gator flag, I felt North Floridian enough. The one exception came in eighth grade, when my friend W. called me a Yankee before we sat down to watch Gone With the Wind together. I protested: I was born in Florida! I loved GWTW just as much as she did! But, to be fair, W. is real South: an actual debutant in a line of them who has things like “the family silver.” (My friend Arthur, the biggest gossip in school, got first hand accounts of the giant binder of rules the debs were given. If I recall, they had to wear three-quarter sleeves while hosting tea parties and shit like that. There was, of course, a ball as well. But I just remember the tea sleeves.)

And now that I look back at our high school graduation, it was very Southern garden party. Instead of caps and gowns, the girls wore white dresses and the men pants, blazers, Oxford shirts, and ties. We all carries roses. Frankly, it was gorgeous, and we all looked great. That polyester cap-and-gown shit is such a step down, it might as well be a fall off a cliff.

Life North of the Mason-Dixon

With the exception of the University of Florida, which literally required that I fill out a one-page sheet with my name, I refused to apply to any university south of the Mason-Dixon for undergrad.

When I think about it now, it had more to do with a desire to escape the drabness of Jacksonville: the largest city in the country by landmass, but literally just a network of suburbs where the only thing to do on Friday nights (if you didn’t party, which my friends mostly didn’t) was to hit a chain restaurant and then a chain movie theater.

I wanted culture. I wanted excitement. I wanted city. I also wanted prestige, which is why I applied to, say, Princeton and Yale. But I shirked Dartmouth (too rural and cold) and even Brown (I guess Providence seemed a bit janky to me?). But I mostly hit city schools: Georgetown (D.C. was a neutral space in my eyes), Columbia, Penn, Harvard, and the like. No Duke, no Johns Hopkins, and definitely no UNC-Chapel Hill, which nearly half the people in my graduating class must have applied to.

At Penn, where I finally ended up, my Southernness was a rare thing among my friends, who all hailed from northern climes, but not much to comment on. When I first met my freshman roommates at the tail end of a hot Philadelphia summer, one of them outright asked me why I was wearing hot pants. I couldn’t figure out why she was wearing mom shorts. They also got a kick out of how I say “egg” and “leg” to rhyme with “page” and not “peg.” All in good fun.

But I also got brief glimpses into the less tolerant areas of my Southern school life, especially when it came to LGBTQ+ awareness. One night, I complimented someone on her beautiful necklace: a chain of many-colored hoops.

“Wait, do you know what this means?” she asked.

“Rainbow?!??!” I said, baffled. She burst out laughing and hugged me, explaining the pride flag. That was the month I stopped saying “that’s so gay” as an insult.

I stayed north throughout the years — that is, if I stayed in the country at all. From the age of 18 until 34, I lived in Philly, London, Paris, Edinburgh, and New York City. If I identified with anything, it was my snobbish NYC expectations (What do you mean you’re closed on a holiday?!? How do you not know what a cronut is?!?) and a general sense of myself as a global citizen. Iranian and American in heritage, Europhile in my cultural tastes, a scholar of British literature (not American), trotting out my y’all card whenever someone who had never been to the South tried to act like they knew it.

Though, to be fair: I didn’t really know it, either. I’ve still never been to Mississippi or Alabama, and before my parents moved to western North Carolina, I’d never been here, either. I did know southwest rural Virginia from visiting my grandparents who lived between Roanoke and Lynchburg, but that’s about it.

And yet, there were moments when I realized that you could take the girl out of the South, but….

Most notably, I remember a moment in 2012 or 2013, when a colleague at the K-12 private school I taught at said how shocked she had been to see Confederate flags on clothing when she chaperoned students on a trip to Washington, D.C. She had lived in the North her whole life, so it was a shock for her.

I was equally shocked. Don’t get me wrong: as a private school kid myself with an Iranian mother and a multi-cultural friend group where my Indian-American, Jewish friends and I outnumbered the WASPs, I didn’t see the flag displayed on a daily basis. But I sure as hell had seen it on caps, shirts, those license plate frames, car stickers, and the like. It had never occurred to me that there was an American experience where that symbol wasn’t on display.

I never expected to leave New York. But I did, and I came back to my roots — albeit to North Carolina. Appalachia, specifically.

So, what is the point of all this rambling? Well, I find myself wondering….

Am I a Southerner?

Good Lord Willin’….

Of course, such a question has to start with a definition of “Southerner,” and that in itself is a whole can of confusion. Most people don’t even consider Florida “the South,” and I can see why. Florida, with its black top soil and sharp, tacky crabgrass as opposed to the blood red clay and soft, lush greens of most of the Southern states, was always a bit of an outlier. Most of its plantations were in the panhandle below Alabama and Georgia, with areas like eastern Florida far more influenced by the Spanish colonization that only ended in 1821. Still, when the Civil War began, 44% of the state’s residents were enslaved people.

Plus, as events like the Groveland boys in 1949 and the deaths at the Dozier School for Boys have shown us, Florida did Jim Crow as well as any of the Southern states. And living in northeast Florida was far more like southeast Georgia than Miami for sure.

Because neither my Iranian mother nor Vermont-born father grew up in the South, any exposure I had to Southern heritage in all its forms came from elsewhere. Like W. and her connection to that rarefied aristocratic South. Or my early grade-school obsession with the (American) Civil War, where even as an eight year-old I knew the North had the moral upper hand but thought the Confederate flag (which, FYI, is actually the Confederate battleflag, making it even more menacing than the “stars and bars” political flag) and the grey and butternut uniforms of the South were far prettier than the stars and stripes and union blue.

Then, in the summer before eighth grade, we read Jeff Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 work The Killer Angels for summer reading. I adored it, this story of the battle of Gettysburg as told from the (dramatized) perspectives of some of the men who lived it. In the preface, Shaara explains that he “avoided historical opinions and [have] gone back primarily to the words of the men themselves, their letters and other documents.”

“The interpretation of character is my own,” he adds.¹

Sentimentally, it’s still one of my favorites; I’ve read the yellowing mass market paperback copy so much it finally split down the middle. But it definitely seeks to distance the Confederate characters from slavery. Take this description of Robert E. Lee:

An honest man, a gentleman. He has no “vices.” He does not drink or smoke or gamble or chase women. He does not read novels or plays; he thinks they weaken the mind. He does not own slaves nor believe in slavery, but he does not believe that the Negro, “in the present stage of his development,” can be considered the equal of the white man. He is a man in control. He does not lose his temper nor his faith; he never complains.²

It’s as if all of these things are equal, morally: gambling and racism, shitty reading habits and white supremacy. (Though I will note that reading fiction has been seen to improve empathy, so maybe Lee might have been a little more judicious with his opinions had he picked up a novel every once in a while.)

But in digging out the Lee passage, I also found this moment, between general George Longstreet — a South Carolinian, one of the few non-Virginians in the high ranks of the Army of Northern Virginia — and Lewis Armistead about an Englishman observer:

Armisted said, “We put it to him, how come the limeys didn’t come help us. In their own interest and all. Hell, perfectly obvious they ought to help. You know what he said? He said the problem was slavery. Now what do you think of that?”

Longstreet shook his head. That was another thing he did not think about. Armistead said disgustedly, “They think we’re fighting to keep the slaves. He says that’s what most of Europe thinks the war is all about.Now, what we supposed to do about that?”

Longstreet said nothing. The war was about slavery, all right. That was not why Longstreet fought but that was what the war was about, and there was no point in talking about it, never had been.³

I’m not sure I can come up with a better paragraph than that final one to describe the way in which American culture has mostly sideswiped coming to terms with the ongoing impacts of slavery. Yup, slavery happened. But I don’t believe in slavery, and therefore there’s just no real point in talking about it, is there?

Except that there is, because slavery has shaped American culture more than perhaps any other lived experience in our history.

The South is on my mind right now, because I’m working on The Scoop. (See below for more on The Scoop.)

Sundry Sunday Thoughts

The Scoop requires diving headfirst into a topic and time I know comparatively little about: the literature, politics, and culture of late 19th- and early 20th-century America. More specifically, the intersections between movements like the Social Gospel, Progressivism, the New South, and Jim Crow.

Gosh, it’s icky a lot of the time. The lynching of Sam Hose. The Birth of a Nation. Woodrow Wilson.

But it’s also dizzyingly familiar, because it’s the time when a national white American identity emerged that allowed white Northerners and Southerners to set aside their differences and disagreements after a devastating conflict and work together to support the new American project, with its imperial leanings (see the Spanish-American war) and especially its economic prerogatives.

And I dare say that what ultimately happened is that the rest of America essentially looked the other way at the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1910s and the institution of Jim Crow laws in order for that new American identity to work. To the extent that these structures of thinking continue to inform our institutions, we’re all Southerners.

….And the Creek Don’t Rise

I’m still early in this work, so I don’t yet feel able to articulate it as clearly as I’d like. I mean, I’m learning about melodrama. I didn’t even know that was an actual literary genre: I just thought it was a pejorative, like kitsch.

But in many ways, I see the South as the crucible of America: the source of our best (jazz, blues, Southern Gothic, that red clay and those blue mountains) and our worst (the original American project of extractive, extreme capitalism that legitimized slavery to succeed and any law that seeks to return to that paradigm in the pursuit of wealth).

And that makes me excited to be living in this region, especially the Appalachian South: a desperately misunderstood area that is too often a national scapegoat and punching bag. The community here in western North Carolina, especially in the wake of Hurricane Helene, is the best I’ve ever known, hands-down.

I’m not just a Southerner. But I’ll be the first to tell all y’all that I’m glad it’s a part of my identity. It has so much, I think, to teach me.

Hurricane Helene: Opportunities to Help

Cardinals at the Window Album for WNC Relief. If you like R.E.M, Fleet Foxes, Iron & Wine, Jeff Tweedy, Gillian Welch, The Hold Steady, The War on Drugs, The Mountain Goats, The Decemberists, Phish, and more, then you’ll love this 136-track digital album for $10 and up. All proceeds are split between BeLoved Asheville, Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, and Rural Organizing and Resilience (ROAR). Lots of previously unreleased live tracks (R.E.M.’s is from 1988!), and some songs (covers, I believe) recorded just for this album.

Buy it for the ones you love (including yourself). Pay as much as you can. Spread the word to all of your indie rock friends.

Love Asheville From Afar. This one-stop shop features Asheville businesses that desperately need money to survive the slow winter season. From coffee and food to art of all shapes, to simple donations, you can get a range of thoughtful gifts for just about anyone in your life.

Asheville Goods. Another site where you can buy themed boxes featuring a bunch of local shops — or customize your own!

Help Catye Gowan Feed People with Dietary Needs! This chef has been out there on her own since the storm began cooking food designed for people with severe dietary issues like Celiac and dietary preferences like veganism. She’s a force for good, and every dollar helps!

From the Vault: “On the Origins of Stories (Part One)”

I’ve been thinking a lot about genre lately, and this was part one of a two-parter I did on how I used genre as the central organizing principle when I taught the yearlong history of western literature survey that I taught freshman at Columbia.

On the Origins of Stories (Part One)

This Week’s Dose of K-Pop: IVE (아이브), “Kitsch”

I mean, I mentioned kitsch, so I kind of have to give a nod to this fun little pre-release single from IVE.

The funniest part is that I thought they were saying “nineties’ kitsch” and not “nineteen’s kitsch” when it first came out. Neither makes complete sense, but I couldn’t help feel that they were taking a piss out of my generation. The Nineties were great! Grunge forever.

Also, boy, do I wish I could do those chest rolls in the chorus. But many years of mild-to-moderate scoliosis has made my torso tragically inflexible. K-Pop Dance Sensei, where are you when I need you!?!!! (Maybe I can manifest them.)

Love y’all,

Sara

1. The Killer Angels, xiii.

2. Idem, xvi.

3. Idem, 255.