First, Tell Me What Kind of Reader You Are
This is an excerpt from an essay first published in the Oxford American.
It appears in its entirety in Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South.
When people of the Northeast ask what I do, I long for one of those professions that would certify me to respond as follows:
“Before I answer that question, I am ethically obliged to inform you that as soon as I do answer, our conversation will be billable at $200 per hour or portion thereof—and the answering of the question itself shall constitute such a portion, as will what I am telling you now, retroactively.”
That would dispense with a lot of idle conversation in which I find myself bogged down in the Northeast.
“What do you do?” people ask.
I say, “I’m a writer.”
And people of the Northeast don’t respond in the way you’d think people would. They don’t say, “I knew a writer once. He could never sit still in a boat,” or “Yeah, that’s about all you look like being, too. What do you do, make it all up, or do the media tell you what to say?” or “Uh-huh, well, I breed ostriches.” I could roll with any one of those responses. One reason there are so many Southern writers is that people of the South either tell a writer things he can use, or they disapprove of him enough to keep his loins girded, or they just nod and shake their heads and leave him to it. But people of the Northeast act like being a writer is normal.
“Oh,” they say with a certain gracious almost-twinkle in their eye, “what kind?”
What am I supposed to say to that? “Living”? “Recovering”? They’ll just respond, “Oh, should I have heard of some of your books?” I don’t know how to answer that question. And I’m damned if I’m going to stand there and start naming off the titles. That’s personal! Can you imagine Flannery O’Connor standing there munching brie on a Ry-Krisp and saying, “Well, there’s The Violent Bear It Away. . . .”
People of the Northeast don’t seem to think it is all that personal. They seem to think that you can find out about books by having a schmooze with the writer, in the same way they might think you can find out about whiskey by chatting up someone in personnel down at the distillery.
What I want to do, when somebody asks me what kind of writer I am, is sull up for several long seconds until I am blue in the face and then, from somewhere way farther back and deeper down than the bottom of my throat, I want to vouchsafe this person an utterance such that the closest thing you could compare it to would be the screech of a freshly damned soul shot through with cricket song and intermittently all but drowned out by the crashing of surf. But I was brought up to be polite.
I was also brought up Methodist and went to graduate school, so I can’t honestly say what I want to say: “Self-taught annunciatory. I received a vision out of this corner, of this eye, at about 7:45 p.m. on January 11, 1949, and since that moment in earthly time I have been an inspired revelational writer from the crown of my hat to the soles of my shoes. And do you want to know the nature of that vision?
“The nature of that vision was a footprint in the side of an edifice, and the heel of it was cloven and the toes of it was twelve. And how could a footprint be in the side of an edifice, you wonder? Especially since I stood alone at the time, stark naked and daubed with orange clay, in a stand of tulip poplar trees some eleven miles outside of Half Dog, Alabama, way off a great ways from the closest man-made structure in any literal subannunciatory sense. That footprint could be in the side of an edifice for one reason and one reason only: because—”
But then they’d just say, “Oh, a Southern writer. What are grits?”
I don’t live in the South anymore. I maintain you can’t live in the South and be a deep-dyed Southern writer. If you live in the South you are just writing about folks, so far as you can tell, and it comes out Southern. For all we know, if you moved West you’d be a Western writer. Whereas, if you live outside the South, you are being a Southern writer either (a) on purpose or (b) because you can’t help it. Which comes to the same thing in the end: you are deep dyed.
Whether or not anybody in the South thinks you are a Southern writer is not a problem. Englishmen thought of Alistair Cooke as an American. Americans thought of him as English. So he was in good shape, as I see it: nobody kept track of whether he went to church. . . .
The language needs a second-person plural, and y’all is manifestly more precise, more mannerly and friendlier than y’uns or you people. When Northerners tell me they have heard Southerners use y’all in the singular, I tell them they lack structural linguistic understanding. And when they ask me to explain grits, I look at them them like an Irishman who’s been asked to explain potatoes.
All too often in the Northeast, writers themselves seem to regard being a writer as normal. When people ask a Northeastern writer what kind he or she is, instead of expostulating, “What do you mean what kind? Getting by the best I can kind! Trying to make some kind of semi-intelligible sense out of the goddamn cosmos kind! If you’re interested, see if you can’t find a way to read something I wrote! If I knew it by heart I would recite the scene in Marry and Burn where the fire ants drive the one-legged boy insane (which I’ll admit I think almost comes up to what it might have been, but it’s not simple enough, there are too many of’s in it; I couldn’t get enough of’s out of it to save my life!); but I don’t carry it around in my head—I was trying to get it out of my head; and even if I did, reciting it wouldn’t do it justice! You have to read it”—a Northeastern writer will natter away about being poststructuralist or something. And everybody’s happy. Writers fitting into the social scheme of things—it don’t seem right to me.
Grits is normal.
This is wonderful.
“oh…a Southern writer! What are grits?”
Fantastic!!
I’m one of those Southerners who think that it belongs to ME. By “it”, I mean the memories, the culture, the sweat dripping down your back til it reaches the waist of your shorts, and then continuing on down to the crack of your butt, just as if it had a right to. I get very possessive of that heritage, and guard it jealously against carpetbaggers and scallywags.
I am fully aware that there is NO way in hell to convey the Southern Experience to anyone that didn’t get it by osmosis. I get very irritated when Yankees (Yes, I still use that term, because I can’t find another that conveys all the nuances as perfectly as does that one, which always has and always will.) proceed to tell me that they now consider themselves “Southern” because they have lived longer on my side of the Mason-Dixon than they did on their side. Along about then is when I wheel around to face them, look dead in their eyes, and proceed to interrogate. “That don’t make a damn. Where were your folks born? Uh, huh…but your mama was born up north? How about your granny? Oh, immigrant that settled north. Well, honey, I am sorry to disappoint you, but you are not qualified to claim the “Southerner” title. That is a hard one to earn, and a lot of these 40 and under generation members that were born down here to parents who qualify as “Southerners” themselves, don’t get to claim that designation. You must be born in the South, surrounded by extended family on both sides of the aisle, and have spent your childhood knowing your cousins well enough to get into a fight with ’em when you are spending time at your Grandma’s during summer vacation. You have to know your Grandparents well enough to tell stories about their lives, and also about your life around them as a child. (Like how your grandmother got up early and went to the kitchen and made biscuits, with strik-o-lean and gravy, ON A WOOD STOVE!! And how you were too ‘fraid to go to the outhouse after dark, so you were allowed to use the slopjar by the bed. etcetera….)I got so many stories that I’ve forgot more than most people have ever known, and you pull them out like your favorite pretty rocks, and savor the way you feel when you are tellin’ ’em. And, if you’re telling stories to non-Southerners, you always get to do more embellishing than when you are swapping yarns with a native. Another Southerner knows when you are milking it a little too much….generally known as “layin’ it on a bit thick”. However, you can make it thick as molasses for somebody that doesn’t know any better, while you are softening those vowel sounds a little bit more to make the accent a bit sweeter, and making sure to sprinkle the vernacular throughout, like you were seasoning greens, and throwin’ in some slaughtered grammar for good measure.
So, I cannot imagine having to explain myself as a “Southern writer” at a cocktail party with non-Southerners who generally look at us in one of two ways. We are either treated as an endangered species with just the cutest oddities in our mannerisms, dress, and conversation. Or, we are immediately dismissed as lacking intelligence, class, savoir faire, sophistication, and that is just the beginning of the list.
I went to New York City in the summer before my senior year in high school, which was 1964, and the World Fair was there. I traveled, along with about 100 other South Georgia Methodist Young People who were their MYF group’s Best of the Best, on the Nancy Hanks, a train that ran from Savannah to New York (non-stop, I think). We were so excited. We were going to see the sights, visit the United Nations, the Empire State Bldg, and the World Fair. We would get to see plays, and stay in a big Hotel (which was the Taft Hotel–we were, after all, on a tight budget). So, you can imagine our anticipation.
One of the strongest memories I have is of how rude everyone was. If you waited your turn to place your order, you never got it placed, and it sometimes made you cry in frustration and embarrassment. And people were always making fun of the way we talked, and even would ask us to say more, and then laugh in amazement at us. My 16-year-old’s impression of the world I saw on my first trip out of the Deep South was definitely not a positive one, to say the least. Seeing Music Man and South Pacific was great fun, but couldn’t balance the scales against the negative experiences.
Well, let me reel in my Attention Deficit Ramblings. Just remember whatever that Latin phrase is that translates, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down”, and keep it with you in a virtual pocket like one of those pretty rocks you found and couldn’t bear to toss away.
Gerry