Sweet Home....Mississippi

I've always had a love-hate relationship with the south. I blame the south for most of my shortcomings...but I also have her to thank for most of my sucesses. In the ignorance of youth I swore that I would abandon the south as soon as I turned 18 and never return. But after three years overseas, I realized that this is where my roots are. Despite everything, I'm a southern girl, through and through. So I picked up my life and moved to Mississippi to change the world :)

Everyone who knows me gives me a hard time for moving to Mississippi. On every national test where Mississippi is 49th, Alabama is 48th...Out of all the 50 states I chose one even more "backwards" than Alabama. But it does feel like home. No matter how much I tried to erase my southern upbringing, I still feel my heart racing at the mention of SEC football. I crave chicken and dumplin's and fried okra. I pull out my country CDs when I'm in the car alone. And more or less, I get the people.

Southern women have a culture completely unto themselves. A southern woman will never leave the house without lipstick, knows how to make sweet tea from scratch, and will NEVER confront you directly. Someone mentioned to me yesterday how passive agressive that seems, and it is, but it's more than that. Southern women are raised not to cause problems, to be the ultimate hostess/mother, to never make anyone uncomfortable...it leads to a lot of smiling in front of you and stabbing you in the back when you leave. But I don't think it's intentional...we don't know how to confront someone (it took me 21 years and 4 years of therapy to "deprogram" the fear of making someone else uncomfortable)...so emotions come out in funny ways. But in the end, southern women are just mothers/wives/hostesses who are trying to live up to unreasonable expectations and doing the best they can.

My mother was raised to be the ultimate southern lady. Her father was in the military and when they moved back to his family's farm in 6th grade, school integration had just started. Much like Mississippi, in South Carolina, the whites fled to private schools. By the time my mother reached high school, she was the only white student in the entire school. She was miserable, she was bullied, and she was predjudiced for years because of that experience. Her father insisted that he was not going to pay for private school when there was a perfectly good public school for free. I've always wondered if he did it to make a stand against segregation, or if he was just stubborn. I could see him doing it for both reasons. The farm they lived on had been in his family for generations and seems to be a lot like the Delta. They grew cotton, peaches, and pecans, although by the time I was in middle school, they were living on retirement and didn't really depend on it to make a living. They had a housekeeper Vera, who lived just on the other side of the farm. Her family had worked for them for generations, originally as slaves, and eventually for some paltry sum of money that my grandmother handed out each week after she cleaned up whatever messes we had made. I guess I'm making it sound worse than it is...my grandmother didn't pay her less because she was black, she paid her less because that's what she had paid for years. And I guess Vera didn't come clean the house because she was black, she came because that's what her mother had done before her, and her mother's mother before that.

I do remember around 1995 though when Vera finally got indoor plumbing. They invited us over to see the toilet. It was the first time that I'd ever been to her house and there were kids everywhere. Two of her kids and their kids lived with her. They had a small kitchen and a bedroom that also served as a living room and just off to the side, the bathroom. I think some church group had built it for them and we stood there and ooohed and aaahhhed as they flushed the toilet. I think that may have been my first realization that even though they lived just down the street, their life was so completely different from mine, it could have been another country.

And that's what I worry about here...I know white southern culture....unfortunately, I'm not as familiar with black culture. I went to a suburban public school where we bussed in "the blacks" so we'd have enough to recieve federal funding. Luckily, my elementary school years weren't as isolated, but 7 years in that kind of environment really changed my perspective. I had grown up to believe that everyone was equal and had had a lot of great close friends of all different ethnic groups when I was in elementary school, but I guess it's easier to be ignorant of racial issues when your young. I will never forget visiting a friend at Tufts University in Boston during my freshman year of college and being absolutely shocked that they had black people in their fraternity(Auburn, and I think most southern schools, have seperate black and white fraternities). Later that night I was so ashamed of myself for thinking that and began to hate some of the things the south had done to my mind.

So I guess I'm coming at this from a mixed position. I know I understand the south, but my south may be completely different from what my students know. Also, I tend to be appalled by these things, whereas most southerners, black and white, think that's the way it's always been, it's the way it should be, and think I'm crazy for wanting to change it. All I can hope is that I'll do the best I know how and hopefully grow personally as I try to figure out my place here.