It’s hot as all hell and I’m sweating my ass off under the shade of the shadow of the sniffin’ tree as my Great American Pit Bull Fairy pants with her massive dripping tongue and snorts around in the same spot of overgrown weeds for entirely way too long. She pees a tiny trickle for the third time in the same general area of over-cluttered aluminum cans and broken liquor bottles as we try to gain some respite from the stifling heat and humidity under the drooping Spanish moss.
I watch as an older white lady in a supremely expensive looking jogging suit lets her spindly great dane urinate on a black grandma’s carefully curated flower bed. The dog doesn’t relieve itself near the blossoms mind you but sprinkles its relief all over the actual faces of the flowers where I imagine someone is sure to experience a redolent rude awakening when they bend to smell the lovely looking bouquet. This strikes me as one of the most inconsiderate and disrespectful things I’ve seen in a long time and I decide this skinny old white woman in the spotless leisurewear is an invader. She’s an interloper. She doesn’t belong here.
But then I have to ask myself why I think that. And I realize it’s because I view her as an obvious and seemingly inevitable manifestation of the gentrification that’s transforming this mostly affordable and mostly African American working class neighborhood. But who am I to judge her? The white guy with the grubby slip-on sneakers who walks his over-excitable 65 pound pitbull rescue named Booger up and down the block at odd hours and takes long breaks under the shade of the shadow of the sniffin’ tree and rents but doesn’t own. I tell myself that at least I know and respect my neighbors. But am I an interloper? Do I belong here?
I’ve always had trouble figuring out where I belong because what I might have called home didn’t always feel like home. I was born and bred in the dirty south along with a generous serving of early childhood trauma and a steaming side order of non-denominational Charismatic Christianity. I eventually managed to escape what I saw as the insularness and ignorance and hyper-hypocrisy of southern culture on the skids for the prospect of bigger and better and more mind-expanding experiences in places I wasn’t sure I belonged either.
I first escaped to the Pacific Northwest which was the farthest I could physically find from my hometown without leaving the confines of the contiguous United States. I was excited to be somewhere new and different and invigorating and unfamiliar but my surreptitious southerness was never more evident.
“Say that again like you just said it.”
“What?”
“What you just said.”
“What did I just say?”
Rounds of hysterical laughter rebound down the bar.
“What’re you laughing at?”
“Your accent really comes out when you’re drunk.”
“Uh… I didn’t realize I had an accent.”
More laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
“It definitely comes out when you’re drinking.”
“Um… Ok…”
I always prided myself on what I thought was my impeccable non-regional diction but apparently my inebriated inflections more closely resemble a rambling redneck after only a couple of overpriced small-batch hop-heavy craft brew IPAs.
One morning I was riding the bus to work along with a bunch of business-suited businessmen and out amongst the rain-drenched cityscape and over a far hill shrouded in mist I could faintly detect a large herd of boisterous protestors hooting and hollering and honking horns and banging on pots and pans. As the bus approached the pugnacious procession I marveled at the myriad of signs they were holding aloft like singular signifiers in a swirling sea of dissatisfaction.
“My Body! My Right!”
“No to BIG OIL!”
“Equal rights!”
“Legalize!”
“End war!”
“Save Democracy!”
“Practice Peace!”
I was utterly unable to decipher exactly what it was they were protesting. It seemed like everything everywhere all at once and that was when I realized that civil disobedience could also be a form of LARPing. I tried to imagine the discussion at the planning meeting.
“So what’s the theme of today’s march?”
“I think it’s going to be that we wear all black.”
“Make sure to put on your most beat up shoes and unwashed pants so that absolutely no one takes us seriously.”
“Right on brother!”
“Power to the people!”
It was then that I discovered that from the mountains to the prairie there are very many dissimilar and wildly disparate cultures contained within this expansive stolen land we call America and here I was merely a spectator in this one particular moody microcosm. I was an interloper. I didn’t belong.
I subsequently decided to escape to New York City in an attempt to grab a delicious juicy bite out of the sometimes tart and always tangy Big Apple. I had diligently and effectively ditched my southern accent into the Pacific ocean to join the endangered species so when I arrived to the erudite east coast I was a linguistic blank slate on which words like “schmear” and “bodega” could be inscribed.
I was slugging it out as a struggling freelancer when I had to swallow what was left of my scribbler’s pride and take a temp job that quickly revealed to me the revolting rot in the belly of the beast I was wrestling with. My first assignment was at a famous fashion designer’s studio in the heart of the design district. My job was to schlep their office furniture and fixtures from one floor to the next while all the interns and assistants skittered around like scared cats trying to hide from their owner who stalked the halls like a well-dressed wraith. One of the rooms was dark and empty and devoid of decor except for a dedicated projection wall where Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless was playing on an endless loop and waiting for the specter to come suck some inspiration from it at undetermined intervals.
As I was transporting one of the desk lamps in one room to relocate it to another desk in another room a young woman in her late teens or early twenties slumped against the wall and slid to the floor in a paroxysm of plaintive tears with the paralyzing terror that the lamp wouldn’t make it to its intended home. I stood stunned with the lamp in my hand and almost offered to have her walk with me to ensure the completely and thoroughly nondescript lamp would make it to its proper resting place but she became so irrationally inconsolable that I wondered if she didn’t need a good ol’ shaking by the shoulders instead.
When a gaggle of other girls and one gay man gathered in a group to coddle and console her like a cult of codependents I discovered that even in the citadel of the city of such supposed sophistication there could exist such base and boring basicness. Their brains were all broken beyond belief but none of them knew it yet. It would take me many more miserable years to realize my brain was busted too. But I came there that way. No sense in blaming the beautiful big city. I loved it there. But I was an interloper. I didn’t belong.
I knew I needed somewhere safe to escape to tend to my world-weary wounds so I returned downstream to the place that spawned me. But I intentionally overshot the original spot I first poked my head out into the weary world already wounded because I knew that returning to the scene of that violent crime would have been profound emotional malpractice. So I found myself much more meridional in the deepest of the deep and dirty south with my feet gleefully plopped into the muck of the inland tidal rack and surrounded by familiar southerly spirits but not so familiar as to trigger traumatic flashbacks.
The spooky southern city I decided to move back to isn’t my original hometown so the ghosts that haunt this place are someone else’s. That allows a certain distance and also a close proximity to a culture I now realize is embedded in the cracks and crevices of my spiraling DNA like some funkified southern-fried foam insulation. I remember the exact moment I registered I was home when I first ordered chicken and cornbread and sweet tea from a black woman with a greasy apron who called me honey and smiled with eyes like she knew me. I realized I hadn’t had a properly prepared southern meal in over a decade and when I lifted the ice-filled ambrosial chipped plastic cup to my lips I almost wept with tears of joy.
Now whenever I hear that twing-twangy accent that used to make me scramble to run and hide it sounds like a long-lost symphonic melody that makes my chest swell with pride. I feel something close to what might be considered enlightenment-light after now successfully shooing away the webby shadows of my pesky past that shrouded so many memories of my murky former self. I feel something close to peace and perhaps contentment and even more close to genuine comfort in my actual born southern self.
I know that of course the south has its fair share of petulant protests and fever-brained fashion designers and retains a relative grasp on a fair amount of insularness and ignorance but it also has roadside stands with salty boiled peanuts and highway diners with fat-laced collard greens and small towns and communities where black people and white people know how to get along despite what you’ve been told.
I know I’m not an interloper here. I know I belong.
My doggie stares up at me like why the hell are we still out here in this hellish heat and I say ok let’s go and she gets super happy because she’s always super freaking happy. She gives the ground one more grunt and snuffles around under the shade of the shadow of the sniffin’ tree and then we head home under the beating southern sun with big grinning smiles and me with sweet tea on the mind.
