Let me tell you about South Carolina.
It’s a beautiful place and I lived there, once.
South Carolina is a wild thunderstorm with lightning that makes me want to pray.
It’s a place where people ask about family origins without referring to Diaspora. Where just last night a taxi driver waited for me to walk inside; I felt uncomfortable because it is different.
South Carolina is home to purple crepe myrtles and late night rides on waterways through marshes with your best friend howling “Debaser”. It’s lectures from James Dickey, Pat Conroy, and my first sociolinguistics class. Reading Pynchon while Jane’s Addiction waxes poetic on media and madness, sitting on the porch among friends with gin. South Carolina is Nirvana and Pink Floyd Happy Hours; straddling the back of more than one motorcycle, too. It’s invigorating to smell rain, dancing barefoot in low country mud.
South Carolina is where I fell in love more deeply than I ever will again and took marital vows, where most of my pets were born. Friends of mine are buried in South Carolina’s soil. I miss them.
South Carolina is where I met you. We didn’t know each other very well but I heard you. Hometown pageant queen, you yelled the N word at a driver when you couldn’t get a parking space by the student union building. You were not a beauty queen to me, anymore. I’d never seen or heard anyone use that word, that way. Not until I met you.
I saw you, too. Giant confederate flag behind your couch, “Heritage Not Hate” decal on your window, confederate themed fraternity t-shirts. Did I Jew you down? I’d never heard that before, either, and had to ask someone what it meant. You said it a lot, with definitive justification: “I’m not talking about you, you’re cool — it’s the other ones.”
I’m so cool I never forgave myself for nodding in agreement. I’m so cool I had to run away. I’m so cool I didn’t say anything, didn’t stand up for my ancestors, in the face of your heritage-not-hate. I’m so cool I had to wait 20 years before expressing my truth, because I heard hatred in your voice.
I knew what you meant.
You did, too.
You terrified me, but I cannot forgive you until I forgive myself.
I see you both, now. There you are on social media, where only algorithms can think to cross our paths again.
Didn’t know it but it seems you have not changed. Didn’t know it but your blind hate and my fear left an open wound. Didn’t know it but you’re the reason I never went back to a place I love.
Didn’t know it until I finally went back for a visit today, but generations are changing and you’re dwindling into oblivion, an embarrassment to yourself, avoiding responsibility for the things you said and did when it was acceptable, then, in the 1990s.
I heard you, then.
I see you, now.
Still standing behind the word ‘heritage’ when you know better. You know why people are hurt. You know what you said and did. I see you, now, still clinging to heritage for the wrong reasons. Pretending as if you never said or did the things I heard and saw.
I saw you then, and now your flag is gone.
“Niggers are different here” you said more than once, then, in the 1990s. “We say nigger because they’re different down here,” is what you said, then, in the 1990s.
“It’s different down here” was your best excuse, then.
Today you say “It’s the same as everywhere else.”
Now, you respond to pain with “Racism is everywhere.”
This is the flag you wave, now.
Are you proud? I’m ashamed.
I don’t know how to forgive you, and I don’t know how to forgive myself for waiting this long to talk to you about what I saw you do, the evil I heard you spew.
Deep love for the South comes easy. There is no shame in honoring ancestors who died during the Civil War. Let me tell you about pride in Southern traditions, they are wonderful. Hot boiled peanuts on the beach, an overnight drive to read poetry in Asheville. Let me explain that there are many who celebrate the South while eschewing the hate, blind racism and subtle undertones of discrimination.
I see you, now. Dishonoring heritage through semantic diversion, clinging to old ideas. I knew you, then. I saw what you did, and I heard what you said. You’re outnumbered by a more liberated South now, but your smoke and mirror diversions have not changed.
I know how to forgive you.
I don’t know how to forgive myself.
Now that you have a new flag, I know how to find you.
Let me tell you about quiet racism. It is dangerous. Let me tell you about the South, because it is beautiful. Hear me when I tell you, the South, with a louder history of racism, is different. Louder is not the same as everywhere else.
It’s Not Your Daddy’s South — Recommended reading:
Two Miracles In Charleston, by Peggy Noonan
Confederates In The Attic, by William McGurn
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