Kleenex has launched a new website entitled “Get Mommed,” where you can choose a mom to give you “extra care” this cold and flu season. You have your choices of race, ethnicities, socio-economic statuses . . . Are you gagging yet? ‘Cause I am.
I’m sorry, Kleenex, but I already have a mom, and I don’t see her featured there. Maybe that’s because my mom uses Puffs because, until recently, Kleenex deforested virgin rain forests in British Columbia to make their product. So, I’m sorry, hippie Amber. My mom’s more socially aware about products than you, and I’m sorry, Asian Sue, but my mom is as much of a hard-nosed bitch as you (I can say that, you can’t), but she hates Asians ever since she got tired of eating at Chinese restaurants with Dad and I. And, most of all, I’m sorry, Southern Magnolia, but, while I’m sure my mom would find you as adorable as Minnie Pearl, my mom thinks any sort of dancing “conjures up the devil,” and she would find the idea of being a debutante uppity (thank god). But, if you had a tv show like Paula Deene, she would not only watch you, but dvr you and refuse to ever delete you even when the thing was full of you, Paula Deene, John Wayne, Johnny Cash, and Dad’s “This Old House.”
Where is the stereotype of my mom, Kleenex? Where is the country-Southern accented, green-eyed, gray-haired, crooked-toothed (because braces were too expensive) arthritic woman that, in my childhood, sometimes weeped uncontrollably in quiet moments over her dead son, who has a terrible Celtic temper and the best fried squash or broccoli and cheese casserole ever made; who loved her children so much that she prematurely ended her career as a teacher and a librarian to stay home with us and turn our childhoods into education-boot-camp because she wanted us to be able to have the most possibilities in life, but who was too prideful to send us to things like therapy even when she recognized how abusive her eldest son was or her after her youngest’s suicide attempts?
I’ll tell you where she is. She’s at home, in Arkansas–and you can’t have her, ’cause she’s mine.
Last night in class, a classmate said, in comparing our modern lives to the Victorians, that religion doesn’t mean anything to us. Uh, say what?
Religion doesn’t mean anything to our society today? Are you kidding me? How is it humanly possible to not realize that religion is a major factor in US politics and life?
When I marched in DC for marriage equality, the counter-protest signs said god hates fags. They didn’t say “I have a personal problem when two men smash each other’s colons excitedly,” no matter if that’s the true sentiment and god is just the label placed upon their hate.
At the county fair back home, a c of c woman set up an extremely disturbing (traumatizing) booth about abortion because the baby Jesus told her to repopulate the earth.
Growing up, my parents and Sunday school justified war by saying that there’s war in the Bible and there will continue to be war until the end of times, until the final battle between good and evil.
My classmate may think religion has nothing to do with her life, but religion affects it nevertheless. If she were pregnant and wanted an abortion, whether or not she could get one would be dictated mostly by the local religious toleration of it because the general populace controls the laws. If she were gay, it’s religious groups leading both the pro- and anti-gay marriage/gay adoption debates. (Of course, she’d probably be like her best friend, whom is bi and told me last spring that California didn’t matter because she could marry in Connecticut and that it didn’t affect her. This level of selfishness caused me to just stare speechlessly.)
Everything. Everything is or once was dictated by religion. If she’d ever hung around any type of fundamentalists, she’d understand the exact level of control religion can–and does–have. In Arkansas, everything is controlled by religion, no matter how informal this control is. Morals control whether or not counties sell alcohol. It was only last year that a state lottery to benefit scholarships was voted in, after decades of attempts and religious fights against it. In Arkansas, Family Council, a conversative Christian lobbying group, has the power to pull out thousands with emails, phone calls, and letters telling people how to vote and what to be against for Jesus. Every election, they analyze every single politician up for election in the state and ask them questions like their stances on abortion, gay rights, and other hot-topic issues, along with listing their religion and how many children they have, just so voters can see that they’re good, Christian, family people. Had I been selected for the Equality Ride, I would’ve been traveling all over the country to private universities with anti-GLBT stances to talk with students and community members about how the baby Jesus loves everyone. Why? Because the Equality Ride understands that change begins with religious groups, and it’s religious groups both leading the gay pride parades and holding up the pitchforks against them.
In order to be an educated person, we should be able to see how our society functions. Religion is important. Even if you never set foot inside a church or read any sort of holy text, religion still has an influence on your life, whether you like it or not. Overlooking this portion of human life is to overlook a huge chunk of history and the human existence.
This weekend, I attended the National Equality March in Washington, DC. On the way there, we drove through New York City’s Bronx. On the George Washington Bridge, I looked out and saw the Manhattan skyline in the distance and recognized immediately the Empire State Building. Growing up in Arkansas, New York City is so far away, it might as well be another planet. I’ve seen photos of New York City my entire life, but here I was, looking at the Empire State Building with my own eyes. And I stared. Meanwhile, Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” came on the radio, and it seemed like the most perfect moment ever. I actually started dancing in the backseat to Miley Cyrus.
Just the night before, I had been discussing regional differences with Sister Susan after watching a movie called The End of the Line, which was supposed to take place in Arkansas, but I felt reflected nothing about the Arkansas I knew. As it would turn out, a lot of what I experienced the weekend would be a lesson in regional differences.
As I told Sister Susan, that movie’s Arkansas is not my Arkansas. Their Arkansas has no morals: they curse, drink, and generally Act Trashy. There was no reference to the baby Jesus or church or anything. Not even the old people act the way I was taught to act, the way any Dignified person acted in Arkansas.
I often find myself pondering regional differences since coming to CT. See, there’s this girl I know from Ohio. I’m not going to lie–she aggravates me to no end. Why does she aggravate me? Because she likes to say she’s from the South (SHE IS NOT SHE IS NOT SHE IS NOT *throws things*), but then she doesn’t act like anyone from the South (she grew up in a family of atheists! GASP. She didn’t even know who Abraham was in our religion class last fall! Can I just say I rest my case that HELL NO is she from the South? I rest my case). She grew up on a farm, so I feel like we should have a lot in common (I was in 4-H my entire childhood), but I was taught that people that act like her are pieces of trash. She thinks you can’t have a good time without drinking. She talks about all these beer games I’d never heard of before meeting her. When she was telling me how she was going back for Thanksgiving and Christmas last year, she said her family would be drunk the whole time anyway, so it was all good. My family? My family has lead the anti-alcohol campaign in my home county twice now, winning both times. You have to drive 34 miles on mountain roads to get alcohol because my county is dry, as are all the counties around it.
But it’s not just alcohol that made me feel like this movie isn’t like my Arkansas, or why I have a problem judging my classmate as a drunkard piece of trash. It’s the way the women are dressed. I remember mom once throwing something at CMT when I was about nine and some woman came on the screen. She threw something at the screen and yelled that she was a slut–but she didn’t say slut, because slut is a Bad Word in mom’s vocabulary. Skank? I don’t really remember. I think it started with an s, though, and I was told when I quickly repeated my new word to my friends at school that it wasn’t a curse word. At any rate, this lady had interrupted mom’s Grand Old Opry or gospel singing or whatnot with her commercial, and I still have no idea who that woman was, but mom wasn’t happy with that blonde woman dressed in the teal business suit laying in a suggestive come-hither pose on our screen.
Because, you see, it’s about morals. My mom always talked about how there’s different kinds of poor. My mom and the cousins that lived next door to her growing up (etc) were poor, but they weren’t trashy. Both families were very religious (Baptist). My granddaddy lead singing in church a lot. Once, mom told me when she was a toddler, she threw the Bible on the floor in church in a tantrum, and granddaddy took her outside and spanked her and told her not to ever throw a Bible on the floor again, and she didn’t. (In fact, ever since hearing this story, I feel oddly guilty if I drop a Bible, as if I were the one spanked for it.) Both families had a high emphasis on education. When my granny was in school, she went all twelve grades, which was unusual for a girl at the time. Not only that, she graduated top of her class with only one B her entire life. Unfortunately, this was during the Depression, so she couldn’t afford college, even though she desperately wanted to be a nurse. My mom fulfilled my granny’s dreams for her, though, by graduating college and becoming a teacher and a librarian. One of my cousins also became a teacher–one of the best in the district, everyone said, until the day she died within a month of being diagnosed with brain cancer two years ago. It was her death that really inspired me to reevaluate my life and apply to grad schools.
This is the world I know, of Jesus and overachieving, and it not mattering that you have any money because the library’s free and pinto beans are cheap and every summer, we only eat what we grow and what we find at the farmer’s market anyway. I know a world of being taught to be morally pure for Jesus, and overachieving and not desecrating one’s body because your mind and your soul are all you have for sure in this life. I was told over and over by my granny that “they” can take away everything you own, but they can’t take your mind or your soul, so you need to learn all you can and make the best life for yourself that you can through the powers of education–education achieved by not destroying your body or your mind through sins like drugs and alcohol.
This is the world I know, and I was taught that poor people who acted the way my classmate does (though, she is obviously rich)–drinking, partying, being lazy, etc–are trash that I should not associate with.
So, I’m from the whole entire world that my classmate doesn’t even know exists, and she wants to say she’s from the South? No. Just no. Likewise, another guy in a class this year told me he’s from the Midwest (dunno where) and said it’s pretty much the same thing as the South. No. It’s not.
This trip to DC taught me that no matter where I go, I will always be a Southerner, for better or worse. As a Southerner, I was taught to be polite and care about the welfare of total strangers and to give in to a certain extent to keep the peace. At the same time, I also bear witness to generations of hate and disparity, and I say no more. I was raised by Celtic tempers in a historically militaristic society. I grew up in a society that wants to oppress others just because they can, and I grew up putting up with it because that’s the way life was, while watching the adults in my family not tolerate oppression directed towards themselves. (This is a fancy way of saying my mother is a bulldog and can be slightly terrifying and regularly humiliated me throughout childhood by being quite willing to verbally maul anyone that pissed her off in the least. On an upscale, when my seventh grade advanced English teacher wanted me to write my SS# on my spelling test and I, instead, wrote that it was “none of her bees wax,” and when I was, consequently, called to her desk and asked if my mother would approve of my talking to her that way, I quite confidently said “yes,” and took my seat.)
I write all this having had quite a tiff with some of the campus GLBT group that were my travel companions. It’s a long, dramatic, stupid story that ends with me telling the president to go fuck herself over the phone and hanging up on her, then ditching the entire group and taking off on the DC metro by myself. At one point, no one would answer their phones, so I took the metro to the airport and was standing in the Delta line waiting to buy a ticket to Hartford when I got a voicemail from one of them. By the time I had reconnected that night with the group, those riding in the same car as me had apparently forgiven the others for what they did, but I was still ready to throw the Quaker peace testimony out the window and punch someone in the face, I was so mad. I remembered then, of course, that when people in New England get mad, they don’t really mean it, or it doesn’t mean they hate you and want you to die. I, as a Southerner, am quite capable of remaining mad as hell for 150 years, thank you very much. I’ve been taught to be polite and keep the peace–up to a point. After that point, I become like a cat and never, ever forget what you did to piss me off so much, and may or may not regularly seek vengeance upon you. I’ve learned that I can tell I am nearing this point when I start speaking with more and more of a Southern accent. When I reach this point, I try to reevaluate the situation and calm down. This time, however, I passed the point of reevaluation and went into full-out rage and listened as my accent became thicker and thicker. Now, it seems all other parties involved are completely blind to the entire thing, while I continue with the memory of how angry they made me and my own disinterest in taking their shit, because, as a Southerner, I’ve already taken so much shit. As I walked around DC, I recognized the ordinary oppression I’m so used to in Arkansas, that I hardly ever experience in New England. None of my travel mates mentioned any of this, and looked at me strangely when I griped about a jerk of a Capitol policeman who ordered me around just because he could. As I was crossing the street at the mall going towards the WWII Memorial, a crazy guy in an ice cream truck playing creepy ice cream slasher tunes yelled at me that equal rights was horseshit and something about “Communist.”
The idea with all of it is to cause fear, to cause me to yield and be afraid of them and respect them through my fear, to obey. What they don’t understand, though, is that my brother is a Klannist, so anything they do seems like child’s play to me. I will not yield or be made to be afraid, and anyone that thinks otherwise is greatly mistaken. As a Southerner, I have a history different from anyone from any other region of the country, a history of being known for slavery, civil rights, hatred, and hospitality. No matter what other regions might have in common, like agriculture and a love of country music, it is not the same and it will never be, and I will not be made to be afraid because I have seen true hatred in my own home that they cannot even imagine.
A couple years ago, Alan Jackson released a song called “Small Town Southern Man.” I’ve had a love-hate relationship with it ever since.
It’s a sweet song, really. There are many people who are just like the people in this song and, having grown up in a small town in the South, I can tell you that it’s the ideal for many people to live like this. They live and die and are generally good people and never really do much with their lives besides have kids, who want to do nothing with their lives except have kids.
The problem I have with this song, and the problem I’ve had ever since it was released, is that there’s so much it doesn’t talk about: most notably, the exclusion of everyone that doesn’t fit into this narrow ideal. Watch the video. Where are the people of color? Where is the GLBT community? For that matter, where are the handicapped people? Where is anyone that doesn’t fit into this narrow view? Were they not invited to the dance? The video shows the progression of a community through generations, but it doesn’t allow anyone new into the video frames.
This is the story of a community, but it’s not my community. In my hometown, people of all colors live side-by-side. Immigrants from Russia and South Africa and Bangladesh teach at the local colleges. Mexicans work in restaurants and in the poultry factory, doing the dirty jobs that others don’t want and feeling rich with their meager wages. Children of all colors and backgrounds go to the local public school and have the same teachers and classmates. A college professor of mine once called my hometown one of the most integrated in Arkansas. I guess no one told him about the race riots at the high school in 1971-1972. To be honest, I was surprised myself when I found out as an adult. It didn’t seem like something that could happen in my hometown–but it did. In fact, one particular protest by white students happened on the parking lot of the church my family went to, where my parents were married only two years before. What was the high school then is now a primary school, and what was the black high school during segregation became an elementary school that I attended in the mid-’90s. It was no secret to us that this building was a product of segregation, or that the storage building on the playground was a Rosenwald school.
The story of the South is the story of persecution, and there are stories from the South that will rip your soul apart–especially if you do research and realize these people that owned other human beings or did horrible things to other humans are not only the ancestors of your neighbors and family friends–but they’re your ancestors as well. Recently, I purused a US Census from before the Civil War and learned that a well-known family name in my hometown owned many, many slaves. Not only this, but at least two or three were mulatto. How did that happen, exactly? Did Grandpa slavemaster rape his slaves? Last fall, a class of mine explored how to use digital archives to do research. In my curiosity, I typed my hometown into the search engine and found the Blood Red Record. I’d never heard of such a thing before. What disturbed me most of all about this record was that not only had a lynching recorded on there happened in my hometown, but that it was the lynching of an “unknown Negro.” I wondered then, and now, was there even a reason for his death? Did he look at someone funny and a mob decided to string him from a tree?
No, no. I didn’t want to think that the ancestors of my home city could be filled with such hatred. I didn’t want to think that this could happen where I had lived my entire life up until a few months before, where many of my family lines had lived since the 1840s and ’50s. This happened in other, more backwards towns in the boondocks. This happened in . . . my town. It happened in my town. Like it or not, there it was on the screen, like blood splattered from the ancestors of the black children I played with so many times at recess, who weren’t Black Children to me, but Kimberly, Emanuel, Alan, Katrina, Christina . . .
In the community that I call home, our ancestors made Alan Jackson’s barn dance flow with blood, and their children said “Hell, yeah!” and their children covered it up with bleach until pissed off enough that the blood flowed again, then again quickly brought out the bleach and made the ancient floors so white that an outsider might not know of the blood once spilled here, but the dancers know.
Grandpappy told my pappy back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he’d done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street
For all the people to see
The announcement of this on facebook created a stir on the National Equality March’s page, with people around the country calling everyone in Tennessee and the South bigots and rednecks, with additional comments dissing the overwhelming Christianity of the region. As someone who grew up in the South and someone, especially, who lives in New England now, it angers me when people make generalizations about everyone in the South. This happens twice a week in one of my classes this semester in a class that’s not even about the South, slavery, Civil War, civil rights (etc, etc). It’s a class about using legal documents in historical research. Period.
I’m gay, and I’m a Southerner. I’m a gay Southerner, and my mother still loves me. I’m a gay Southerner, and I’m still a Christian. I’m a Christian, and I don’t use god to hate people. I’m a Southerner, and I’m probably more liberal than you. I’m a Southerner, and my ancestors owned slaves, and at least one was a gen-u-ine plantation owner, but that’s not my fault. I’m a Southerner, and my ancestors were influential in their towns before the Civil War, but doesn’t make my family anything more than poor today and it doesn’t make those who would be so bigoted today see me as anything more than a dyke.
I’m a Southerner, and I’m also a historian, and the knowledge of my regional history and the history of my family, as well as things in my own lifetime, motivate me to love instead of hate. The inequities I’ve experienced, seen, and learned about motivate me to not be afraid when I try to enact change around me. How much more can anyone possibly do that hasn’t already been done?
Southerners posted that billboard, and it will be Southerners who regroup from this act of vandalism. Until you have lived in the South and lived with the inequality around you every day, you will not understand the dynamics of the South. Until you learn to see that not everyone who lives in one region of the country is stupid, ignorant, hateful, Republican, Christian (or even religious), straight, or white/black, you will forever be some idiotic outsider pointing your finger and calling people you don’t even know names.
You think you know the South because your ancestors were brought there. You think you can throw out the slavery of your ancestors like hand grenades and watch as their destruction in the distance baffles the populace into false respect for horrors that you, yourself never saw. You think of the South as one great mass of faraway like-minded hateful, racist people and, since they are so far away, you think you can freely criticize them for their pasts that you perceive as the present and there will be no argument from people who, like you, are strangers to the South.
I’ve been in class with you two weeks now, twice a week, and every single class so far, you’ve found reason–sometimes multiple reasons–to criticize or mock the South as you see it. You attempt a horribly nasal Southern accent (the worst attempt I’ve heard since moving to New England, thanks for that) and recount an event you saw as racist on a trip to South Carolina without understanding the culture surrounding what happened. You call Southerners imbreds, and assert that your husband (he, not you) lived there long ago as if nonverbally saying that you know what you are talking about and no one should ever challenge you. When I finally did speak up–nobody calls or even remotely implies that I am an imbred, I’m sorry–and called you out on it, you fumed in your anger and said no more the rest of the class and, instead, looked at me now as what you envision as a Typical White Southerner, even though in the short time I’ve known you, you’ve made it evident that you have no clue whatsoever what a typical anything or anyone in the South is. If you did, you would know that the Typical Southerner is going to defend his/her home from outsiders (see: Civil War). Even though the majority of people might not like what the outsider is criticizing themselves, they see it as their own place to criticize, not someone else’s who does not understand the complexities of life in the South. When this does happen, and when something is generalized to the entire South, not just one locality or even one person or group of people where criticism belongs, the Typical Southerner is taught to feel it his/her duty to set you straight, thank you very much.
Since you know nothing about the South, you see no difference in its residents now than a hundred years ago. You see no difference in the opinions of young adults and the elderly. You see everyone in the South as being exactly like my brother: religious right-wing racist, homophobic hate mongerers that, most likely, enjoy parading about the countryside in their bedsheets. I’m not going to lie–people like him exist. Obviously, they exist. Hate exists everywhere, even inside of you when you label the entire South as being only one way or another. The thing is, the antithesis of him exists as well (hi, nice to meet you). For every person that chooses to hate, there is another who chooses to love–but, being polite, those who love are often muted by the shouts of their hateful neighbors because they either don’t want to get involved and start something or don’t want to offend their neighbors. Remember, the South is full of small towns. Everyone knows everyone else’s entire extended family, and often people are friends with someone in their family line. In choosing to not lose a friend or, possibly more importantly, a customer over criticizing a family member, those who hate assume silence to be consent when silence is often fear. After all, why shouldn’t they fear? Look at the history of the South. Those who are the most hateful can be incredibly dangerous, especially in mob situations. Do you really want such a group, however small, against you or your business?
Opinions in the South are often governed by self-defeating fears: fears of education or “getting above your raising,” fears of being different, fears of being the topic of town gossip. These fears all culimate into the fear of questioning the status quo. To allow yourself to question is to allow yourself to change, and if you change, what will you lose? Your religion? Your friends? Your status in the community? In the South, you are expected to think about tough issues in school, but continue to act like just another good ol’ boy in public. You might have different opinions, but unless you are in a liberal hub/metro area/college town, you will usually be afraid to express them unless you already know how the other person feels, so not to offend him/her. You learn to live with your annoyances because you don’t really realize how wonderful your life could be if you spoke up and realized there are more people who agree with you than you thought because the dominating voices are hateful.
Everyone speaks to total strangers on the street. Everyone carries on conversations with people they know in the grocery store when they see each other just like best friends, no matter how much they can’t stand each other. Behind closed doors, the truth comes out among family. Yet, if someone died or another tragedy happened, the community would still be there to help each other out because it was the right thing to do.
So, when you detonate those stereotype grenades and lug them at the public, what you don’t realize is that there is an entire society and culture and history beyond your stereotype that you don’t understand and that you will never understand because you are already so convinced in your own rightness. No matter how much truth there might even be in one of your stereotypes, you will still never be able to see the true differences and diversity among the people that you mock because that is not self-serving for you. It’s easier for you to make baseless claims about strangers in another region of the country and laugh than to really get to know them and why they are the way they are.
You think you know the South, but I am here as a Southerner to say that I can guarantee I’ve protested more places and people than you in the name of peace and equality, and I will continue protesting until I’m too sick or too dead to do it. I am here as a Southerner to say I don’t care what color you are (though, this seems to be a major issue to you?) and I have no control over what my ancestors did or didn’t do. What I can control is my own impact on the world around me. I recommend that you begin considering this as well. Also, next time you look at me with hateful eyes, please know that not only were most of my friends in public school black, but black families in my community joined my 4-H club growing up because the other clubs in our county would not accept them and we would. This toleration was not new to my generation, either, considering that both my granny and her brother’s best friends just so happened to be black. All sides of my family have lived in the South since before the American Revolution. Several ancestors fought for the Confederacy, and some even died for it. The family cemetery in the homestead where my granny and her brother grew up bears some of their graves. Yet, at some point, my family chose to transcend hatred and intolerance and to teach their children to do the same.
Why is that, you ask? President Carter recently decided to leave the Southern Baptist Convention–after sixty years–as a result of their teachings on gender.
At their most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.
Tonight, I found myself exploring country songs again on youtube while creating art. I came upon Alabama’s “Song of the South,” which I’ve always loved. Growing up, I always cranked up the radio when this song came on. I can remember being little and my mother singing “and I shut my mouth” in one of the silly voices she used when reading to me to make me giggle. When I was little, of course, I didn’t really understand what the song was about. Growing up, I understood more and more, until finally writing a paper my Junior year of college about my county in the Great Depression, which I named “Somebody Told Us Wall Street Fell,” because it was so true for the people I interviewed and the newspapers from the time that I read. While industrialized cities in the North suffered terribly from the Depression, the rural South was already poor. My own home county was more affected by the droughts of the mid-’20s (my family lived just east enough to not be considered part of the Dust Bowl) and the Flood of 1927, which my granny and my great-uncle spent their entire lives retelling. This song, unlike so many gag-me-with-a-spoon country songs, is just so true for so many people at the time. As a historian, I find that highly attractive. As a Southerner, I find it still more attractive. Yes, please do tell me more about my own history, darling.
So that’s why I feel so compelled to reply here in regards to many of the comments left on this video. Let’s just sum it up with this . . . lovely . . . comment, which begs me to recollect what my mother always told me about how when you point your finger, there are four more pointing back at you: did you white-trash christian scumbags decide to take a break from killing niggers, queers, and jews, to put your retarded videos on you tube?
First and foremost, I must say the following: Oh no you didn’t say that about my momma. Now then, I would like to discuss Southern stereotypes.
This is my granny. She died when I was 17, only a few months before I graduated high school. And I want to be exactly like her. When I was a Junior in college, I took a class–US 1900-1945–taught by a professor originally from Michigan. Even though he’d lived in Arkansas long enough that all of his children (one of which was in my grade in school) knew no other home. Despite this, the professor never did understand Southerners and would frequently piss off every single one of us in class because the things he said were just wrong. According to him, all Southerners of this time hated black people and all Southerners basically took part in lynch mobs or something.
One day, I finally raised my hand and informed him that my granny had black friends, thank you very much, and so did my uncle, her brother. In fact, her very best friend when she was alive was a black woman. I stopped short of actually saying “so shut the fuck up, please,” but I did give him an actual example from the Flood of ’27, when my uncle and other neighbors helped bury a black woman who’d died. Since there was no other dry land except the Indian mound on my family’s property, she was buried there. Does that sound like the actions of a people blinded by their hatred to you?
True, there are people fitting his description. I don’t contest this. I do, however, take exception that someone–a historian, no less–would resign that all of any people were one way or another. This is why I went that entire semester ready to throw things.
I think if I learned anything from my granny, it’s to accept other people for who they are, and to keep on keeping on. At her funeral, my brother delivered a eulogy in leiu of a sermon, even though my granny was a deeply religious woman. She used to tell us that no one could ever steal our education or our souls, and told us to learn all we could so we could have a good life. My granny had a fire in her. While it’s cliche to say she could light up a room, she did. While I have many memories of her being angry and a few of her being sad, always, always, I think of her happiness first–her happiness in spite of having had such a terribly hard life. That, and her willingness for adventure.
At her funeral, my brother told of the time she played in the rain with me on the Fourth of July. She was probably about 76 at the time, and while my mother worried she’d fall and break a hip or something, my granny just laughed at her. So we stood there in the rain, bouncing a plastic ball back and forth to each other, Granny giggling even more than me. About this same time, she wanted to go work at the peach orchard climbing the trees to pick peaches to make some extra money in addition to her Social Security check. My mother’s reaction was to laugh and tell her they wouldn’t hire her, which made my granny yell “Don’t put us down!” as she would do each time she felt my mother was being ageist. (The thing is, I have no doubts about her ability to climb trees, and know very well she’d do it just to show you she could.)
My mom told me once that when I was about three, I said “I like going to Granny’s, but I hate going to Grandma’s [my fraternal grandmother, my granny's polar opposite in personality].” It was after this that Granny would babysit me (well, that, and Grandma left three-year-old me unattended in her carport mere feet away from the street). She had a fake Barbie doll that she insisted we play with every time I came over. She’d make clothes for it and get all excited because now she had an excuse to play with her pseudo-Barbie doll again. I never really liked that stupid doll much, but after my granny died, I took the doll back home with me. Me, I always wanted to play with her building bricks, but she wouldn’t let me because my brother had built her a little house with them and used up all the bricks. At the time, I failed to see the sentimental value she had with the house that, throughout my entire memory, took up a place of honor on the left side of her piano, right next to all our family portraits, and my “baby doll,” as she called the pseudo-Barbie.
I remember playing checkers with milk caps with her. When I was little, I relished in what a good player I was because I beat her every time. One day when I was older, I had the sudden realization that Granny had gotten really good overnight as I watched more of my milk caps disappearing from the board.
The photo above was taken on Grandparents Day 1993 at my school. My granny came to eat lunch with me, then grandparents and grandchildren were directed to the courtyard for photos. My granny never missed a school event. She walked with me all the way to the newspaper office and back each year in primary school for the Just Say No to Drugs walk, came to my plays and musicals. When I was about eight, she had to go to Wal-Mart when she was babysitting me. I think she told every single person in the store that I was her “grandbaby,” the name I cherished because it set me apart from my siblings. I was the one and only youngest grandchild.
So, when you make generalizations that all of a people are one way or another, you’re talking about someone’s dear granny. You’re talking about someone that somebody else loves. You’re blaming people who spent their lives teaching their children and their grandchildren to love and accept other people, no matter their differences, for the harm that others inflicted. Not only are stereotypes wrong, they hurt.
Kleenex has launched a new website entitled “Get Mommed,” where you can choose a mom to give you “extra care” this cold and flu season. You have your choices of race, ethnicities, socio-economic statuses . . . Are you gagging yet? ‘Cause I am.
Last night in class, a classmate said, in comparing our modern lives to the Victorians, that religion doesn’t mean anything to us. Uh, say what? 
You think you know the South because your ancestors were brought there. You think you can throw out the slavery of your ancestors like hand grenades and watch as their destruction in the distance baffles the populace into false respect for horrors that you, yourself never saw. You think of the South as one great mass of faraway like-minded hateful, racist people and, since they are so far away, you think you can freely criticize them for their pasts that you perceive as the present and there will be no argument from people who, like you, are strangers to the South.
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