The south is my home—I grew up in it, I have traveled throughout its states and breathed its humid air. Yet so many aspects of the stereotype of “southern” are both familiar and foreign to me. My mind knows them, sees them occur and accepts them as true. But I did not grow up encountering them on a daily basis. I lived in that New South where blacks and whites eat in the same restaurants and leave in different cars, where concrete strip malls have grown up faster than kudzu, where we think the past is left behind and yet we keep repeating it. Empty gas stations. Broken-down buildings. Shotgun mill houses. Dinner on the front porch and broken appliances in the yard. Strange, yet comforting. Still here, and yet gone. Difficult and nostalgic. The unmistakable presence of those who built their life on a certain plot of ground. And over it all, the shifting colors and tones the sun makes as it plays with our attempts at civilization, by turns shadowing and illuminating them day after day, year after year. Maybe I’m searching for something I never had. Maybe I am recording how things are so the future will not forget where it came from. Maybe I’m just looking, like we all do, for a place to call home.
