Given my linguistic quirks, obsessions, and general demeanor, I wouldn’t blame you for not considering me a Southerner. Particularly when the vision most of the not-southern United States has of the average Southerner is either bigoted and religious or bigoted, religious, and uneducated.
This is a typical complaint you’ll hear from any Southerner who travels outside of their cities — An act we’ve grown increasingly less fond of as the tinge of an accent or wisp of cultural difference is enough to send the supposedly enlightened down a path of prying, ignorant questions. They’re always the same questions, and even in the age of the Internet, the Well Red Comedy Tour, and countless influential and beloved historical figures, there’s little hope inquiries into our competence and custom will ever change.
A dear friend of mine confirmed this sentiment recently. She’s teaching while pursuing a doctorate out of state and still has any discussion of her origins met with shock that she’s literate. LITERATE. No, Southerners excel in academia purely through charm and grits. I feel even the most dedicated liberals need to remember that Hillary Clinton attended the University of Arkansas, a fact that should, even in the slightest, imply whole worlds of literacy in and around this most maligned of regions.
Yet it never does. I also attended the University of Arkansas, as did my friend, but both of us were well read long before haunting the basement of Kimpel Hall as bleary-eyed journalism undergrads. Neither of us “sound” Southern (at least to one another) but there is something unmistakably not Midwestern in our intonation.
But while traveling outside of the South is a loathsome prospect for us, economically it’s becoming a necessity. Arkansas is a difficult state to have honest conversations about. Any outsider knows us for Walmart and racism a la Little Rock’s segregated schools. Somehow, despite explicitly stating Walmart is a factor in Arkansas’ reputation, the company’s financial ramifications are downplayed. Other titanic corporations that call Northwest Arkansas their home: J.B. Hunt and Tyson Foods. There are still others, and growing every year, but the big three are implicated in a lot of the grievances the locals have regarding affordability, culture, and housing.
Arkansas has a stark line of demarcation, or at least it thinks it does, between the steamy river valley and boggy rice-producing south and the mountainous, industrialist north. All of America’s petty and unending squabbles are clearly on display in the socioeconomic plight of the average Arkansan’s life but the outside world doesn’t bother to look. Arkansas is dismissed as a “Red State” and its people maligned because they’ve allowed themselves to be ruled thusly. The truth is complex, but to ignore corporate involvement in the ongoing fight against (and for) gentrification and acculturation, is to utterly misunderstand what the modern American South is and the broader war of the soul.
I intend to show you the South through a queer, socialist, and satanic-minded lens. You might find me more trustworthy than an outside opinion, but you’d be foolish to assume I’m not steeped in an undeniable infatuation with muggy, dead breezes and thinly veiled hostility behind every stranger’s smile. I love the South, I hate the South, but more importantly I will defend it as much as I long to see it destroyed. This position is at the heart of a true Southerner. Perhaps not as well defined as it is in me, but the concept swarms all of us like so many gnats.
Southern Gothic is not simply a literary style, but the very real conflict of belonging but simultaneously suffering intense alienation and isolation. It persists in the crushed dreams, economic ruination, and desperation to escape that has prematurely aged entire generations. It’s not reserved solely for bayous and plantations, but I know those romantic depictions interest outsiders more than the reality of superstores and and rent-to-own shops.
To be truly, agonizingly, fatalistically Southern flows through generations that think they’re removed from and above history’s tensions. It is reenacted in every micro-aggression and transgression, and festers the more we try to deny how much this region possesses us.
And that’s the South I want to show you through my time spent in Arkansas and forays into the world outside it. I want to provide context, perhaps even enjoyable insights into why this region and culture so perplexes the world, and how it can constantly poison itself but continue to exist.
I’m not sure where this idea will go, but in speaking with my aforementioned friend I realized how few honest Southern voices are willing to tackle both the good and the bad. They’re clearly available if you look for them, but we don’t have a populist voice that’s willing to engage with the Gothic sentimentality I readily embody. It’s because most people who talk about this region are doing so with humorous intent or are deeply uncomfortable with reading into why we belabor various forms of etiquette and social stratification.
I don’t know how well I will convey these concepts, but I know I will attempt to leave you with a better understanding of the South as I see and experience it, and what I’ve determined is wrong. I’m not ambitious enough to claim I know how to fix this mess or will accurately convey every conflict, but I do know that I’m utterly ensorcelled by my own romantic, decaying fantasia.
Of course, I do know what started it: I was incensed by the price of gentrified fried bologna sandwiches sold just over a mile from my home. And in the traditions I’ve intimated above, I’ve attached to this outrage generations of woe that now manifest as bizarre pride in the honesty of fried, processed meat. I don’t even like bologna yet I’m prepared to defend its honor like the sister I don’t have.