Southern Mitosis (and Other Complicated Love Notes to Atlanta)

Where to begin.

I come from a lackadaisical town down under the Mason-Dixon, a lazy metropolis that clucks alongside the muddy Chattahoochee with everything to do but not a reason to its name. Enter Atlanta, Georgia, USA: my people, my place. In pre-modernity, one’s own identity was known primarily through connection to others. You couldn’t define the part without the parcel, and although we wouldn’t admit to it, I don’t suppose much is different in the 21st century. Identity is a social process — there is very little purpose in sketching outlines of yourself without a context to place them in and an audience to appreciate them. Whether you are an island or not, your geography is a function of your vicinity. Your shores have brethren across oceans. Atlanta is my coastline, littered with tidepools and outcroppings that have pressed me into shape without my even knowing it.

I’m not convinced that anyone of us is truly content with nailing ourselves to the wall with a handful of adjectives, half of which cannot even puncture our skin. There may be some truth to my profile: white, female, straight, upper-middle class, liberal, able-bodied, and unapologetically Southern, yet I’d like to think my truth extends past this. We have names for a reason; they give brevity to what is otherwise an endless stream-of-consciousness. Are we really prepared to give up this splendid cacophony of neurons, poems, memory, blood for a suite of indicators that fit neatly onto black-and-white twelve-point bureaucratic forms? My name may be short, but I’ll be damned if it fits onto these forms. It holds fantasies and phantoms I am still unaware of, all of which originate from the fantasies and phantoms of another name entirely, the name of the place I am not just from, but of.

And this begs the question, what’s in a name? The naming of Atlanta was not a one-off process, cycling through four to five titles before settling, depending on whose history you read. The etymology of this final resting place is sheathed in a mythology suitable to the idiosyncrasy of the polity it was meant to encapsulate. Atlanta has largely defined itself as a symbol of resilience, of re-birth and transformation, and this has been true for better and for worse, its narrative no one-noted climax of the protagonist. The city has been razed, burned, covered in the yearning blood of both Yankees and Confederates alike; has corrupted itself with the venom of hatred, lynching black bodies and imprisoning black minds; has venom still coursing in its veins, unbeknownst to and in spite of the city too busy to hate…The city has also risen; has taken flight; has given meaning to the words dream, grow, alight. And so it has and so it is, sin and salvation in one sprawling streetscape.

Dubbed Terminus in 1837 by its white settlers, Atlanta was never supposed to be anywhere at all but a train terminus, form and function in one four-way stop. As it grew, however, it took on the name of the Big Man du jour; it put in a brief stint as Thrashersville — after the most successful merchant in town — before shifting to Marthasville in 1842 — after the then-governor’s daughter. The burgeoning town did not mean to be owned by anyone though. It had dreams beyond the follies of men in top-hats. Come 1847 Atlanta took on its final name, shaking off the small-town, Old Southern dust of its infancy and foreshadowing future hairpin turns that would leave its founders turning over in their graves. This new town’s motto? It would soon become Resurgens, Latin for “rising again.”

“What’s in a name?” is not always a comfortable question. As a center of commerce and trade, antebellum Atlanta wasn’t the agrarian portrait of the Old South that lives on in the nation’s psyche, but it was a Southern city — slavery was sewn into its bones. Between 1850 and 1870, the town’s population sky-rocketed from a modest 2,569 residents to approximately 21,700, while the black population tracked this boom, growing from 19% of the total to 46%[1]. In 1864 when General Sherman brought the Union to bear on Atlanta, taking siege of it and burning it to the ground, the town housed only 10,000 residents, again, around 20% of which were slaves[2]. These are telling numbers. A mere six years after being flattened by the Union in a battle to retain the right to enchain, we see Atlanta’s population double and its free black population climb to nearly half of this. Why?

Setting aside more skeptical and often valid accounts of the impoverished inertia of freed slaves with little opportunity and nowhere to go, I’d like to consider that Atlanta’s growth was the desired result of a calculated change of mind. On September 2nd, 1864, Mayor James Calhoun rode to the Union forces with the white flag of surrender and a hastily scrawled note to be delivered to the closest officer of authority. It read:

“Brigadier-General Ward,

Comd. Third Division, Twentieth Corps:

Sir: The fortune of war has placed Atlanta in your hands. As mayor of the city I ask protection to non-combatants and private property.

James M. Calhoun,

Mayor of Atlanta[3]”

Here was the willing surrender not just to the Union but to a new way of life, accepted in exchange for peace. Here was Atlanta, bowing itself to the inevitable motion of the world and saying, “all right.”

Obviously, things were not so solemn for all of Atlanta’s residents. We can expect that the few Union-sympathizers and the plentiful now-former slaves were all more-than relieved by the surrender, although the Northern catharsis was not done. Holding to Calhoun’s request, Sherman and his troops evacuated civilians from the city and then gave it hell, not leaving for good until mid-November to make certain the destruction of any potential military asset the waning Confederacy could swoop in and latch onto[4]. When the damage had been done, Atlanta trickled back to itself, first with caution and then with vigor, ready to begin again the frenetic process of becoming.

Georgia Historian Wendy Venet notes that post-war Atlanta held true to Calhoun’s surrender mentality. Upon being assigned a federal Reconstruction leader, Gen. John Pope, Atlanta threw a banquet for him and toasted his name — acts of celebration the rest of the former Confederacy surely gawked at in horror[5]. But Atlanta knew what it wanted, knew what it was to become. Its destiny lay beyond stubborn wounds and stubborn, useless utterances of “the South will rise again!” Atlanta would rise on its own, starting with toasts to those in positions to help it lift off the ground. Opportunism is just another word for adaptation. “There was a South of slavery and secession — that South is dead,” the longtime editor of The Atlanta Constitution, Henry Grady would write in 1886. “There is a South of union and freedom — that South, thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour[6].”

So what’s in a name, after all? Vetted accounts of the rationale behind the city’s name do not exist, but two of the most popular theories are intriguing for how they speak to what Atlanta would become. The first and most frequently recounted theory is that “Atlanta” was a feminized version of “Atlantic,” meant to conjure the Ocean’s mighty power and possibility. If this theory is true, the naming of Atlanta was clairvoyant. If it isn’t, the naming was still a lucky shot in the dark. Sit in Ebenezer Baptist Church, watch the Peachtree Road Race at first gun, touch-down at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, go 30-over down the connector at 1 AM through the visceral heat of June’s dark, tell me there isn’t a force like millions of gallons of gallant waves ready to crash up, over, and down every inch of this place.

The second most popular and perhaps more poetic theory is that “Atlanta” was a nod to Atalanta, the virgin huntress of Greek mythology. Having been abandoned by her father the King of Arcadia in the wilderness, Atalanta is said to have been raised by a she-bear, who taught her to hunt and survive as an animal. The huntress took pride in her unrefined wiliness and resisted the expectations of a princess put on her when she was reunited with her father. In one story, Atalanta attempts to circumvent her father’s command that she marry by staging a footrace against her suitors, knowing full-well she would be faster. In another, she hops aboard the Argo to become the only female crew-member of Jason and the Argonauts, despite protests from more than one domineering man. She was a woman too busy for many things, perhaps most of all, to be hated.

In many ways, Atalanta is the embodiment of Atlanta. There is the flippancy of her birth and the hard-won success of her survival. There is the deserved pride in having emerged from certain doom to become something grander. And there is the consequent rebellion to fall quiet and in line behind expectation and custom. She was a wild woman, she was, and she intends to keep is so…

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This is the place I have come to know myself in and through, red clay cast like mortar in between my toes — it knew me before I knew it. I am still learning. About both. The me and the it.

One-hundred-and-thirty years lay between Atlanta’s first breaths back following its burning and my own humble first breaths. I stand on the shoulders of giants. Flash-back to 1996, a girl with corn-silk hair wears a diaper and a coat of mud. She is one-and-a-quarter, splashing in puddles at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, unaware, unconcerned with how deep those puddles go. She is I, and I am countless fleeting seconds in this city across time, put on flesh, and I am just now peering down into those puddles. They reflect the present in perpetuity. They also tell me where I come from, where I am going, what it means to be made up of the seconds of a city across time.

It is no longer the viscous Georgia June of 1996 though. Time and geography alike have separated me from this space, and in many ways, it is this distance from Atlanta that has begun making things clear to me, or in the least, has begun making a space for a future clarity. I cannot tell whether this clarity will be about myself as I stand here now or about the place where I come from. Perhaps this present tense signifies a continuous action; perhaps myself and my place are irrevocable, and I always come from and stand from my place, no matter where I am.

This certainly felt like the case when I arrived in Vermont in February of 2015. I remember writing a poem sometime during those first few months, attempting to articulate the deep absence I felt that complimented so well the immense cold of the Northern air. The first stanza read:

In 49 degrees, my body breaks;

It is the red Georgia clay in my bones whose contractions give me the chills and the shakes.

New England is a cold king —

Handsome, but has snow in his mouth.

No, there ain’t a goddamn man in the world that heats me up like the South.

Homesick, I was. Desperately. Almost untouchably. I waltzed around my new, glacial campus with my head in Atlanta, and when my birthday came and went in mid-March, I failed to notice because there were no daffodils peeking their faces out of warming ground. It wasn’t just the climate I missed nor my family nor even the familiarity. It was something more intangible than temperature that made my whole self ache with separation. Come Summer when I was finally granted reunion, my first acts of celebration were to strip the shoes from my feet, let the scalding asphalt of my driveway burn its memory back into me, and lay my body against the magnolia tree in the backyard. My father, a Southerner who never needed to prove a petty thing to himself by leaving, watched from the stoop with a look of both marginal concern and bone-deep understanding. I like to think he was imagining what it might be like to return home.

There has been gain, of course, and privilege in casting myself far from the South. It has laid bare dysfunctions in both city and self that required my distance to appreciate. Through a college education devoid of proximity to and passion for Atlanta, I have been forced, rightfully, to confront realities about my origins that I may have always acknowledged with a perfunctory nod but never admitted to head on. One of these realities is another distance, this one from the Atlanta that many in the city live, grayer and harder than my own. For all its progress, Atlanta is still riddled with the legacy of Jim Crow. Like a broken bone left to heal by itself, the body of the city hardened into its infelicity long ago and has been allowed to go on with it. This is seen readily by taking the rapid-transit line from the North of the city to the South; below I-20, the only white people on the train are going to the airport, and most of them are clutching their suitcases white-knuckled and trying to look straight ahead. I am complicit in this. Whether or not I clutch my suitcase white-knuckled, I am guilty of moving throughout Atlanta and eating in Atlanta and driving in Atlanta and living in Atlanta without fully understanding what Atlanta means. There are no one-word answers to that question, but away from Atlanta, I find myself now keenly aware of the moral imperative I have to keep seeking this understanding, even when it upsets my rose-tinted vision.

There are also my personal dysfunctions, spread neatly on the operating table of New England like naked nerve endings. It is every bit the sharpened, reticent world up here that Southern literature promises, and I have sometimes felt as unequipped to live in it as William Faulkner’s tortured Quentin, who drowns himself in the Charles River to truncate this epiphany. Somewhere in a cavity of our minds, a cloying effigy of the South has spun lazy, intoxicating, and ultimately distorted reveries of what we’re missing. I know as Quentin did that this South does not exist anymore, if it ever did — the honey-colored utopia of buttermilk biscuits and painlessness is a hollow vision dreamt in collective, anguished hindsight post-Civil War, post-World Wars, post, post, post. I also fear, as Quentin did, that I am somehow beholden, betrothed to this false figurine, unable to move on from it and forward into a world that, by contrast, feels brittle. But I am not Quentin. I believe in a South that is, a South which is honest and undoubtedly crooked and utterly magnificent. I had to come to New England to learn of the South’s and Atlanta’s humanity: ruthlessness twined intimately with beauty.

I have handfuls of both in my pockets. I chew on these instances in idle moments, when my mind walks the convoluted path back home like a hitchhiker, wary but keen. The beauty of Atlanta is always more restless in my hands when I pull it out. It tumbles over my fingers in a frenzied attempt to manifest behind my eyes, and I let it with glee because I have more favorite moments in my city than I know what to do with. There is a particular building in midtown — the Bank of America building, for anyone familiar with the city — that acts as Atlanta’s totem for me. It’s visible from almost anywhere you find yourself, and it has a habit of sneaking around unexpected corners to knock you dead when you turn them. Its top glows orange at night, sloping itself upwards into the finest of points to pierce the sky, prodding God or anybody else to look. And I look. Always. Because whenever I see it, I see my 8th grade history class, loading our plates at the infamous Mary Mac’s Tea Room, whose owner instructed her staff in the early 1960s to serve African Americans because “their money is the same color.” Not exactly exalted progress, but worthy enough to celebrate to a group of hungry, pimpled 14-year-olds whose primary concern was eating fried chicken and hoppin’ john and making the time spent in midtown and away from school flow as slowly as sorghum. I see my mother walking me towards the fabulous Fox Theater to see my first show there, Cats the Musical, and how the ceiling was lit like a night sky. I see my father’s pole beans mingling with his summer squash along the fence to his garden. I hated that squash; there was always too much of it and too many, a bright yellow alien species colonizing the yard overnight. We would bring plastic bags of them to the neighbors and leave them hanging on their doorknobs. I also see my family gathered on the front porch in different configurations and in different shades of daylight. For some reason, the uniquely Southern tradition of passing time on the front porch and doing nothing at all hasn’t found its way North or even that far West. It’s a shame — front porches are a grand stage for the dullest of moments and the in-between times when you finally look around and let the air surrounding you catch up to your inner-monologue. I see the slowness every time I see the building.

I am less thrilled to remember the times it has stood witness to the ruthlessness too, its presence sober in the background of these memories. Such memories are less distinct for me, jumbled together in the way that all hatred tends toward. Love and beauty have so many different flavored notes to consider, but ruthlessness, hatred always fall hard and flat on the tongue, like iron. How much iron there is in my city and heart that it has stiffened my eyes when I’ve run past the Peachtree-Pine homeless shelter — less than .1 miles from my totem — during the celebratory Thanksgiving Day Half-Marathon, lest the sight of want make me consider whose privilege giving thanks is. How the iron has solidified inside me at every mention of “the badlands,” where we don’t go if we can avoid it. And how the iron has pretended to melt but has really just spread when school service projects and volunteer days have forced me to stare at all that is wrong with lovely, enchanting Atlanta. In these times, the building is a knife in my side, calling for my blood as penance for my willful ignorance.

Here I teeter, swallowing the dichotomy. I am toeing the final edge of my formal education away, which has endowed me only with confoundment and has ripped all convictions from my ribcage save that of uncertainty. It is not such a bad thing. For the first time, I feel that by peering back at Atlanta, I am looking forward at it. The Southern psychosis is a fixation on Return. We carry an ache that whispers of the space where things were luminous and whole; we are always looking for the way back in. But this space does not exist. I know because I’ve sent a shot through its heart, and it exploded into dust — no space at all, just fragments of truth here and there that were patched up into a veneer of reality. For long enough, I mourned the lie, begging for it to be true, but now I think it is my duty to forget Return, collect the fragments of truth still scattered in a mess across my mind, and use them to build Recovery.

Recovery has its eyes open in the way that Return never does. It is a humble acquiescence to how things are with enough quiet hope for how things could be to save it from complacency. It is what Mayor Calhoun bowed his head to when he surrendered Atlanta to the Union, it is what the city embraced when it toasted General John Pope’s Reconstruction leadership, it is what Margaret Lupo directed the staff of her Tea Room to carry out during the Civil Rights Movement, it is what every bit of progress in Atlanta, Georgia, USA has rested upon from its beginnings. It is the goodness in us, our ability to hold dearly what is beautiful and true and move forward with it to dispel what is ruthless and false. It is how we can hold both in our pockets or city limits or selves to study closely. It is how things get better, but it requires our honesty, our wide open eyes.

Most importantly, Recovery admits that there is no place to get to. It is an intransitive phenomenon, focused on process rather than ultimate position. As such, there cannot be a perfect South, but there is a “living, breathing” South, as Grady reminds us. Inherent in living and breathing is movement and change — we meet conclusion only at our ends, when Death makes us final. There is no fault in flaw, then, but only an opportunity for the friction of Life to yield transformation. What a grand idea, and don’t we have our work cut out for us? And what better people for the task than those whose very existence is predicated on the place in question. A place on the map, a place in our own flighty souls, we all come from a place, and I come from a place, down under the Mason-Dixon…

[1] “African American Experience,” Atlanta, The National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Travel Itinerary. Web. https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/atlanta/africanamerican.htm

[2] Davis, Stephen. “Civil War: Atlanta Home Front,” History and Archaeology, Civil War and Reconstruction 1861–1877, The New Georgia Encylopedia: 10 March 2003. Web. http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/civil-war-atlanta-home-front

[3] Garrets, Franklin. Atlanta and Environs Vol. 1. “The Surrender of Atlanta,” Marietta Street Artery Association. Web. http://www.artery.org/08_history/UpperArtery/CivilWar/FMGarrettsSurrender.html

[4] Leigh, Phil. “Who Burned Atlanta?” Opinionater, The New York Times, 13 November 2014. Web. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/who-burned-atlanta/

[5] Pendered, David. “After Civil War, Atlanta’s Leaders Were Ready to Return to Business, Says Upcoming Speaker at History Center,” SaportaReport, 21 May 2014. Web. https://saportareport.com/after-civil-war-atlantas-leaders-were-ready-to-get-back-to-business-author-says/

[6] Grady, Henry. “The Old South and the New,” The World’s Famous Orations, America: III (1861–1905) on Bartleby. Web. http://www.bartleby.com/268/10/17.html