Sometimes my husband and I drive our young kids out of town for a weekend hike, leaving behind our city’s cold-brew coffee shops, dosa restaurants, and taco trucks that make it possible to forget for long stretches that we live in the South.
Ten minutes outside Greensboro’s city lines, we chug along county roads with church marquees that read Today’s forecast: God reigns, the Son shines. The roadside clogs with vines that curl around their own green throats: wisteria, honeysuckle, kudzu. Sometimes a white wood-plank house with a sagging screen porch reminds me of the farmhouse where my great-aunts lived. Or a fallow field surges up, familiar in its emptiness. We never stop along the way. We don’t know anyone here.
Twenty minutes outside town, the Dollar General stores no longer appear in strip malls, but alone, in vinyl-sided buildings. Like shabby lighthouses, they rise on knolls. After forty minutes, we pass rusted-out feed stores, a tobacco-and-candle outlet, a taxidermy shop, and a plywood sign with wobbly spray-painted letters advertising Deer Corn. As the towns get tinier, the businesses migrate into houses with painted signs hanging from carved wooden posts in the yards: Heavenly Reflections Beauty Parlor, Jan’s Tax Service. Inevitably we see a Confederate flag. I count them as tally marks against where we live.
It’s fall 2020, pre-election, and we’re driving to Hanging Rock State Park when a guy in a truck stamped with a Confederate flag decal passes me on the two-lane road.
“He gave me the finger!” I say indignantly. Then: “Maybe he didn’t like my bumper stickers.”
“Or maybe he thought you were driving too slow,” says my husband, who also sometimes thinks I drive too slow.
Once we get on the hiking trails, phrases in Hindi, Spanish, Mandarin, and Thai jangle with “y’all” and “get your butt away from that ledge.” Like the flags, I count how many languages we hear. They remind me of my public-school classroom back in the city, and my students whose families are as likely to be from Pakistan or Hong Kong or Ghana as from the rural community down the road.
Still, every caricature of the South is sometimes true. In the visitor-center bathroom before our hike, a woman ahead of me wears a T-shirt that reads Start your day with a cup of Jesus! I hope my eight-year-old daughter won’t ask what that means. The shirt on the woman behind us reads Gun control means using both hands. Out here, it’s easy to feel like a tourist in my own state, a visitor from a land of blue cities, grad schools, and subway-tiled kitchens, amid a panoply of guns and Jesus. Out here, it’s easy to say out here.
I have lived in North Carolina all but six of my forty-three years. Sometimes this causes me a prick of alarming remorse, like I forgot to leave. I like it when people express surprise that I was born here; though, I don’t always know where that surprise comes from. Is it because I don’t have an accent, or I’ve lived on several continents, or I’m an introvert? If people assume I grew up here, it’s embarrassing how quickly I work into the conversation some clue that I’ve left and come back: When I was teaching in California or the year my husband and I backpacked through South America. I never say I’m Southern. Neither do my kids. But here I am, five minutes from where I grew up, raising my children, who I guess are going to be Southern too, not that I can tell you what that means or why I’d once felt so certain it wouldn’t come to pass.
Though I don’t identify as Southern, I understand something about being Southern, such as knowing that a particular breed of woman, upon hearing “Happy Easter,” will reply, “He is risen.” Such as the term “my church home.” Such as the subtle distinction between a snarky and a genuine “Bless her heart.” Such as the obligation to offer anyone who enters your home a beverage and politely press them until they take it, worn down by the intensity of your need to have them sip something. Such as cheese straws. Shrimp boils. The variety of ways that one might pronounce on or crayon. Silences. The scruffy beauty of kudzu that grows along rural roads and threatens to consume the landscape here.
I think of kudzu as quintessentially Southern, though it comes from Japan. This shaggy vine, an outsider that writes the story of its own belonging, knits together the blank, wide margins along the roadside between warehouses and rusted bridges. Kudzu masks the foliage underneath, making everything bulky and indistinct in the way a good snowfall turns discrete bushes into an undulating hedge. I know it doesn’t belong here. It chokes out what it covers or, in the language of botany, outcompetes other species for light. Still, when I drive down state highways draped with its decorative green, I feel a peculiar pang for old quilts, salted cantaloupe, the stiff, white curtains in my grandmother’s dining room, coconut cake at Christmas, and the farm where I never go.
I hear people say the New South is in cities and the Old South is in rural areas, as if the New South is progressive and the Old South regressive, the New South blue and diverse, with Peruvian and Hmong communities, and the Old South red, with Confederate flags and deer corn. Those lines exist. The community where I live, though, is full of contradictions—old-time Southerners who are open-minded, transplants who are close-minded, people from the West Coast, like my Seattleite husband, who are pleasantly surprised to find they like living here. (We too have Trader Joe’s and coffee shops and co-ops bursting with organic produce! Plus, as he routinely points out, you can drive downtown in five minutes and park for free.) Even inside city limits, all these things coexist: the pickup truck with the Confederate flag decal whizzing by the Chinese-owned grocery. A dilapidated house plastered with Trump flags—Don’t tread on me! Trump 2020. No bullshit—sits directly across the road from Ve Nguon Café.
Driving home from our hike, in the tiny town of Danbury, I saw one lone protestor—white—standing outside the Baptist church holding a sign that read I can’t breathe. At first, I was surprised to see her, given how far away we were from any city. Then I wasn’t. The South is good at complicating my idea of it.
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Living in the South requires inuring yourself to certain paradoxes: the landscape revised by an Asian vine; the American flag printed on made-in-China beach towels; and the near-ubiquitous T-shirts branded with the label Simply Southern—though, most of us would concede that almost nothing about the South is simple.
The place I know best, my hometown of Greensboro where I currently live, prides itself on its progressivism despite our persistent de facto segregation in neighborhoods or the death in 2018 of a Black man who was restrained by police in a maneuver known as hogtying. I send my kids off to play in houses where parents voted for Bernie and Biden and Trump. On the next street over, a Black Lives Matter sign sits next door to a Trump sign. At a light near the elementary school, I idle behind a truck with a sticker that says Make America Great Again. Or no: looking closer, I realize it says Make America Green Again. This place is not neatly blue and red.
“Come see this,” my husband called one night. A mathematician who studies voting theory and gerrymandering, he’d found a map of the 2016 election results online that, with each click, revealed ever-smaller districts and precinct-by-precinct delineations of how constituents had voted. Like most everyone who isn’t living under a rock, we knew about the blue islands in the sea of red that characterize the current American political landscape, whether here in North Carolina, in his native Washington State, or in the country as a whole. Yet the closer we zoomed in, the more the tidy myth of blue cities and red counties devolved into a murkier mix.
Within our blue city, a few wealthier precincts turned red—the neighborhoods around the country club that house those who voted for Trump. We clicked on the precincts that surround the high school where I taught for years, a white-flight school on the edge of city limits, built ten years ago to accommodate the astonishing development on the northern and northwestern sides of our county. From behind a steering wheel, you see a mixed-up land: McMansions, yes, but also trailer parks and big, lonely churches built with the ugly brown brick of the 1970s. As the houses get bigger, the precincts on the map get redder: blush, then coral, then crimson in the precincts where seventy-eight percent and higher voted for Trump. Yet a few shallow, blue pools emerge north of town. Unlike my current school, there I had no students from Hong Kong or Ghana or Pakistan. We had fewer than five Latinx students in a school of fifteen hundred. When a statistician from the district came to analyze our testing data, his mouth curled wryly, and he said, “It’s really hard to find comps for your school, because it’s hard to find a public school in the state with such a low percentage of students on free-and-reduced lunch.”
At that suburban school built atop farmland, my affluent students weren’t the stereotypical farm kids of the rural South. Many of them—a startling number—had moved to North Carolina from Ohio or Pennsylvania for their parents’ jobs. In those mostly white neighborhoods, men in suits left three-story houses with carpeted rec rooms to drive pickup trucks to their offices. They and especially their children, whom I taught, co-opted the cultural cues of the South: shiny trucks, cowboy boots, too much eyeliner. Their Southern pride felt rooted in their whiteness, a white-nationalism lite that came equipped with lake houses and jet skis and giant Trump flags affixed to the back of trucks. Which is to say that sometimes the people who most embrace Southern culture aren’t even native Southerners.
The twenty-minute drive from my house to that school felt like a trip to another country. So many of these farms-turned-neighborhoods blur distinctions. They occupy the suburban no-man’s-land that tends to boast the affluence of the urban but the cultural values of the rural. During class once a student begged me to allow him to answer a call from his insurance adjuster: “Please? I hit a deer and wrecked my Benz.” Even the thematically-linked street names of these intersecting cul-de-sacs suggest a scrubbed, romanticized rurality—Fox Run, Den Trail, Skeet Club Road. The history of the land becomes a story we paint on street sign after street sign, another kind of cover-up, another invader boasting of its own belonging.
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Each day I drove into those neighborhoods so different from my own, I remembered riding around the suburbs of Charlotte on sun-pulsed afternoons in the 1980s with my grandmother, who would say, “This used to be your granddaddy’s farm.” I’d grow sleepy in the backseat, sucking on the vanilla Tic Tacs she doled out of her purse. We’d gaze out the car windows at the housing development his farm had become (another farm, his father’s, had been flooded when Duke Power dammed the Catawba River to create Lake Norman; that furrowed land now lies submerged one hundred feet below the motorboats that shred the lake’s surface). On the way home from these drives, we’d stop by KFC to get an eight-piece chicken dinner for what my dad and his mom always called “supper”—“dinner” being the word reserved for lunch.
Unlike my students who were so eager to claim the term “Southerner,” I am an insider. My dad’s family, Scotch-Irish immigrants, arrived in what is now western North Carolina in the early 1700s. Some of them became slave owners. David McCorkle, my great-great-grandfather, was not a slave owner but a Confederate soldier. Enlisted in July 1861, by January he was dead of typhoid. In a letter home, he asked his wife about the price of sweet potatoes that fall in Lincoln County. The framed letter hangs in the living room of the McCorkle farmhouse where my grandmother grew up. My dad wishes he had the letter to give to a historical society, but none of my blood relatives own the farmhouse now. I haven’t been inside since I was a child.
Before a branch of adopted cousins, the Johnsons, inherited the farmhouse, a bevy of my spinster great-aunts lived there, entombed in the smell of Vaseline and, out on the porch, Aunt Het’s cigarettes, which two of her sisters, both nurses, had forced her to smoke outside since the 1950s. On visits that my grandmother called “going up home,” my brother and I found the place compellingly exotic: scuffed linoleum floors, box fans, the aluminum hospital toilet crouched menacingly atop the real toilet. We kissed our great-aunts’ cross-hatched, tissue-paper cheeks, avoided their whiskery chins, and ate pineapple cake slumped on paper plates. As a little boy, my dad learned to collect stamps and love history from these women. He says, “I always reckoned they were just too smart for any of the men in Lincoln County.”
Twenty miles away in Charlotte was my grandmother’s house and the SouthPark mall, where I wanted very much to buy slouch socks in paint-bright colors or to finger the sleeves of Esprit and Benetton shirts my mother would never buy. Instead, we were at the farmhouse, where adults told stories and laughed. My brother and I wandered around the musty rooms, touching the antiques until someone took us outside to climb the magnolia tree and chase cats. Through the fence, we threaded hay to the leftover donkey. Even as an eight-year-old, I sensed I didn’t belong there—and that I did. The farmhouse, and my longing to escape its rundown shadows, distills my idea of the South in ways I can’t entirely explain. I wanted to get to the center of things. That I now feel a romantic wistfulness for a place I only ever wanted to leave is an irony not lost on me.
My great-grandfather may have sensed the land slipping away as his children moved away. In the 1950s he allegedly prophesied, “One day the Johnsons will own all of this.” And now they do, except for thirty acres with a narrow corridor of road access that my grandmother left to my dad and that he would sell if he could find a buyer. It’s too far from Charlotte to become a housing development yet, but maybe in a few decades it won’t be. No one minds that the Johnsons got the land. It’s a joke told on ourselves. Instead of acreage, we have mortgages inside city lines, diplomas printed on thick paper. We bequeathed what we no longer thought we needed, what had become cumbersome to hang onto. Perhaps people like me stopped looking for ourselves in the story of the rural South because we didn’t like what we saw.
My dad, who feels a much stronger connection to the farm than I do, suggests it wasn’t the land but his father’s willingness to leave the farm that created the modest wealth to send my dad and my aunts to college, then my dad to law school. In the 1920s, my grandfather set off for Charlotte to sell dairy products for Sealtest. Leaving the land was a step toward generational wealth. He missed it, though, and bought a farm in the 1950s with his brother. He spent his Wednesday afternoons off and Saturdays pitching hay into the bed of the truck my teenaged dad drove. He loved horses. He loved dogs.
To my own children, any family farm might as well be the moon. My children like to dig for worms and hunt roly-polies as much as any kid, but they, like me, have a tenuous connection to soil. They work the land in miniature: a fairy potion mulled in a ten-gallon orange bucket, mud pies oozing out of shape on the slate patio. They do plenty of casual violence to the yard, twisting off a fern’s fiddlehead just for the hell of it. My kids have never even been inside someone’s house that might qualify as in the country. They call lunch “lunch.”
It’s hard not to feel this reduction in experience as loss. My kids don’t have my wistfulness for the farm of my family’s past—the pine trees and arrowheads; the foal with a star on its forehead that my father was going to get when he was twelve, until it died from its mother’s kick; all those men sitting around, laughing, with their shirtsleeves rolled up; the quilts and the cantaloupe and the cake. They also don’t have my ambivalence about being Southern, about the violence people have done to each other on this soil and the ways in which we all still benefit or suffer. Maybe the children understand more than I think, though. Maybe they understand the silences in our stories. When I began reading Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You to my fifth grader, he stopped me, disturbed, and asked, “Why don’t we learn any of this in school?”
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On the radio, a scholar discussing the history of Black quilters in North Carolina explains that, when women got together to quilt, they used the old quilts as batting for the new. When the new quilts wore out, the old quilts began to show through in calico and muslin apparitions of the past. I like hearing that no matter what we cover up or change, what came before exists, matters, and eventually reveals itself.
The street of my high school alma mater was renamed two years ago. Originally it was named for Charles Aycock, the white supremacist who was our state’s fiftieth governor from 1901–1905. In his address accepting the Democratic nomination for governor in 1900, he declared, “We must disfranchise the negro.” Now it is named Josephine Boyd Street after the first Black woman who, in 1957, integrated that high school. Not that I learned her name when I attended the school twenty-five years ago—my mom reminds me that we both learned of her in a 2004 LA Times article. In that interview, Josephine Boyd recounts the torments she faced: eggs flung at her, tacks on her chair, taunts and jeers, and a death threat warning her not to show up to her graduation ceremony. She attended anyway.
Boyd died in 2015, but her name is newly planted on street signs, which suggests that sometimes painting over the old can be less cover-up than revelation. Street signs can lie, but they can also correct a lie. This rechristening follows similar moves to rename a middle school, an auditorium, and a neighborhood in our city, all formerly known as Aycock.
My insistence for so long on dissociating from my Southern identity—my claim that I’m not that kind of Southerner—now strikes me another kind of cover-up. To deny my Southern heritage, a phrase so closely aligned with the Confederate flag that I’m loath to use it even here, is to suggest I can’t abide the contradictions of where I come from. I live here. To portray this place as a cartoon depiction of the South, a land of conservative, backwards white people, excludes so many people who call this region home, including people of color whose families have been here as long as mine or longer. To claim the term “Southerner” is to complicate it. Sometimes I think the most Southern thing about me is my conviction that the South isn’t really mine—not the farmhouse, not the politics, not the history. But it is.
Until recently, the last time I had gone up home was for my grandmother’s funeral in 2005. It was a cold and sunny March day. Stalwart daffodils bobbed in the wind. In the tiny church graveyard down the road from the farm where she’d been born, where escaped goats used to eat the plastic daisies, my grandmother’s casket stood on display at a graveside service. Many of the tombstones bore her maiden name, McCorkle. My cousin’s young kids jumped on the mound of clay, pushing aside the rug of faded, artificial grass to play King of the Mountain beside the casket during the service.
Afterward, I walked around the graveyard crying. I was twenty-six and my grandmother had been ninety-nine, and there wasn’t much objective reason to grieve. Just before she died, she declared, “I’ve had the perfect life.” Still, I felt like something was over, like I knew I’d never come back, even though by then I was living in California and had no plans to move home. My dad stood beside me and said, “She loved you, and you loved her, and that’s all that matters.” As we drove away, my brother and I sat in the backseat, returned, long-legged, to childhood. I kept thinking I’d visit the farm again, but for fifteen years I never did. On that road, the daffodils come back year after year to crane their necks. No complicity in their yellow silence.
One winter day, my husband and I finally drove to the McCorkle farm where my grandmother grew up. It’s not yet a housing development, but there are plenty nearby. No hunting and No trespassing signs stamped the woods on either side of the two-lane road. We passed billboards (Hey, I still love you. I do. – Jesus), a rundown paintball course, and a sign commemorating the nearby plantation home where Stonewall Jackson was married. A few minutes off the highway we saw the first Confederate flag.
A mile later, the farmhouse came into view, looking better than I’d remembered—new gray siding, a wreath on the red door—even though the magnolia tree I’d once climbed lay on its side, waiting to be chopped up and hauled away. The shack beside the house, which used to be my great-grandfather’s store, was surrounded by Busch cans in the mud, stacks of old tires, upside-down planters heaped with garbage, and an industrial fan.
I pointed out a few things to my kids, but they were eager to get to their cousins’ house in Charlotte and didn’t see much to look at. They stayed in the car while my husband and I zipped up our jackets to wander the small graveyard where my grandparents are buried, half a mile down the road from the farmhouse. Amid the fake, glittery poinsettias and the tiny American flags were thirteen more faded Confederate flags stuck in the frozen ground. I’d wanted to come back for years. After a few minutes, I was ready to go. It was simpler to feel like I didn’t belong than to feel like I did.
Leaving the farm was easy. After one turn, we followed the same road to my brother’s house through various name changes and lane iterations, past the glass knives of downtown. Along some rural sections of the road, the kudzu hopscotched from tree to tree. Long stretches, though, had no kudzu. I looked more closely to see what was there: redbud, holly, hickory, sweetgum, and plenty of green I couldn’t name. In the dark heart of the forest too, I’ve read, kudzu disappears because it’s unable to survive in shade. It turns out its takeover is not as dramatic as the doomsayers proclaim. This familiar landscape I love is another thing I’ve seen only partially, at a distance. Missing the farm; being or not being Southern—these storylines are slick with the varnish of myth. Up close is a patchwork truth: ragged sprouts that don’t seem to belong together growing side by side.