LEAVING THE SOUTH
By Adam Lovingood
Copyright 2000

I'm leaving the South. That I'm not the first to have done so has little palliative effect on my thoughts or feelings. Thirty-one of my thirty-four years I've spent as a resident Southerner.

The difficult part about leaving the South is that living here doesn't prepare you for living anywhere else because there is no place else like it. That isn't just Southern bravado or chauvinism speaking; quite the contrary, it is bald truth with warts and blemishes. The South is like the quirky relative that you love but wish wasn't part of your family.

A few weeks ago, my partner accepted a job in San Francisco. Since then, I have exercised my Southern prerogative and pretended that the move isn't taking place.

Southerners have a formidable penchant for denial and fantasy. Our white, antebellum ancestors thought they had created a utopian society for themselves. Yet, it was a society resting squarely upon the backs of the oppressed and, morally, could not continue. Perhaps fantasy and denial was the only way they could deal with the evil institution they were propagating. As that society foundered, Southern whites chose to ignore that their world was necessarily changing.

Despite institutionalized denial, like Jim Crow laws and the creation of the Southern Baptist church, Southern society crept slowly into the modern world. And the South still deals with social change by denying that it is happening. Whether the civil rights movement, or women's rights, or gay rights, most Southerners pretend that by refusing to acknowledge progress they can conserve the here-and-now. People who assert rights considered inconvenient are seen as violating some sort of "gentlemen's agreement" to which they were never asked to be a party. The insane relatives are to stay in the attic and won't be discussed. Boo Radley is not a polite topic of conversation.

Gentility has become a cultural barrier to honest communication. In the best tradition of our British forebears, we strive to say not what we mean in a selfless sacrifice of earnestness for the sake of civility. Certainly, people in other regions of the country edit their conversation to maintain civil society. But only in the south does enforced politeness become a cultural necessity.

John Berendt discussed how insular Savannah's denizens are in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil as if they are unique. But they aren't. Even Southerners who live and travel outside the South never lose the sense that they are merely visiting their destination despite how long they may stay there.

Blanche Dubois, the perfect embodiment of the South, was the consummate hothouse flower creating her own world of illusion and was a character that only the South could create. Innocence comes from not knowing. Not knowing can come from refusing to know.

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Looking out our bedroom window into the back yard, I see them. Each flash takes me back a few more years. I'm eight years old, scurrying about ecstatically on a summer's night. Clutched tightly in my trembling hands is my jar of clear glass, the label scraped away with holes punched in the metal lid. Grandma always reminded me about the holes. "You don't want 'em to suffocate," she would say soothingly, "Then they won't flash anymore." That would be the worst thing that could happen; the flash was everything. To my child's mind, it seemed summer came on the wings of the fireflies.

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My Mother is a good Southern woman. She never says exactly what she means. She fears large cities, especially New York which she has never visited. She was born in Virginia and has lived her entire sixty-nine years in the South. When I talk with her about the places I've visited I see in her eyes the lack of recognition, a gaze of incomprehension. Everything beyond Southern borders is foreign whether Istanbul or Albuquerque.

My Mother attended my law school graduation in Berkeley, California, three years ago. My partner and I took her and the rest of my family sightseeing in San Francisco. I wanted her to see the beauty and majesty in the Bay Area that I saw. But she didn't. I knew she was there just for me.

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From the perspective of my five-year-old self, my sixteen-year-old sister could do no wrong. Walking through the woods near our aunt's home in rural Virginia, I wanted to be scared. It was October. Tell me a scary story. Please. She told me of hideous creatures skulking about the trees. Can you hear them? I can hear them. What was that? I think they're behind us. Run.

Running at top five-year-old speed, I saw my aunt's house ahead just beyond the tree line. I tried to stop but the gravel driveway gave no traction; I fell and skidded across several inches of rock and asphalt ghosts. I looked behind me to see if the creatures had overtaken us only to see nothing except my sister. She was there to pick me up and carry me in the house for bandaging. Aunt Beulah gave me apple cider and rock candy.

I still have the scars.

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The woman's silence always intrigued me. Tall and large and dark and silent. Praying with a fear-trembling mumble. Mom said the woman was sick but then she wasn't anymore. Mom said the woman claimed to have seen the Beast from the Book of Revelation on a country road when she was a young girl. The Beast told her to preach, or she would go to hell with him. So she preached anywhere they'd let her, including our living room.

Now the woman had needles in the morning. She prayed for the needles to stop. I was only four when Dad's mother died. I didn't see Dad cry. I think Dad's feelings for my grandmother consisted of that disproportionate mixture of love and fear that only a preacher's kid can understand.

I wasn't allowed to go to the funeral. All I remember is waking up one day and seeing all the adults dressed as if going to church or a gala and being told that Grandma Burse had "gone to heaven." I never understood why she didn't say goodbye.

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My great grandmother Lily, my Mom's grandmother, was an inscrutable woman of rose-print aprons and thick, rubber-soled shoes who smelled of gardenia dusting powder and orange snuff. Our paths crossed at a time in both our lives when neither of us could walk without assistance. She was eighty something, and I don't remember ever hearing her speak. Occasionally, she would smile wanly when someone would meet her gaze or bring her cookies. She loved to watch Gunsmoke.

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My friend, Arthur, moved to Seattle last year. Like me, he is a native Southerner. His move elicited a mixture of excitement and fear from himself and tears from his mother and me. He seems happier although there is a sadness in all of us associated with the realization that you can't live where you're from because of a difference not chosen.

Arthur and I met almost ten years ago. During our first summer together we decided to take a tour of the South. For several weeks, we introduced each other to parts previously unknown, enjoyed new experiences and reacquainted ourselves with places from the past. It was on that trip that my persistent shame of the South melted away as if by the hot summer sun making way for a nascent pride. Southern culture possesses some inexorable element that is good and lovely and irreplaceable.

I'm now living in the Bay Area, San Francisco. My denial has abdicated to reality. Now I fill my role as Southern emissary to help eradicate the misconceptions that abound about one of the most culturally rich regions in the world. Misconceptions that I once held before that summer years ago.

I'm now a transplanted Southerner; always Southern. Because the South is in a blues song or a pot of jambalaya or a Flannery O'Connor short story or a Tennessee Williams' play, it's in me, always with me. I have my memories.