The American South
The South is a bizarre and barren landscape. One minute you’re in a bustling city with traffic lights, policemen, tall buildings, and sophisticated people and the next you’re in the middle of nowhere with meadows, cows, forests, and little tiny shacks that people supposedly inhabit. The contrast is jarring, and once you’re out of the city the bucolic scenery stirs an ancient anxiety, a deep-rooted fear that traces its roots back to primal days when trespassing on a foreign land was almost certainly met with violent death.
The road stretches ahead for miles on end. New lanes spring forth from the road and are swallowed back into it. There are wide roads with shoulders to pull off onto and small backroads with tractors driving down them. You will drive for miles without seeing a soul outside of a car and then suddenly there’s a half-naked child and a dog running out in the road. Yes, the South is a mysterious place. But perhaps it’s that way all over the country. Perhaps not.
A stray homemade sign stands at the mouth of a driveway leading to nothing: “VOTE FOR SANDERS, USA,” it declares ironically. The speed limits in smaller towns are significantly lower than they are out on the indiscernible highways, and small town cops pray for the chance to catch the unlucky soul who kept cruise control on 60. Fast food franchises and farms are the only semblance of any kind of economy, yet somehow there are still brick churches with big steeples. Southern culture is one rife with oxymorons, so this only seems appropriate.
My grandmother grew up in The Middle of Nowhere, South Georgia. I honestly don’t know the name of the town. She helped support her family by trapping rabbits and selling them for meat by the side of the road before the school bus came in the mornings. Her older brother was abusive, her daddy was a helpless alcoholic, and her house was a shack with floorboards that offered glimpses of the bare earth beneath. Surprisingly, she excelled in school and probably would have gone to college after high school had her daddy not squandered all their money on alcohol.
Sometimes Daddy couldn’t afford alcohol, but he would take whatever he could get. Pure vanilla extract. Mouthwash. Cough syrup. He had to drink something or else he’d get the shakes and be liable to do anything. Perhaps it was best he stayed drunk. Besides, he was so used to being drunk he didn’t know how to function sober. He could even drive a car pretty well after finishing a bottle of whiskey. My grandmother didn’t go to college, but she did marry a man a few years older than her the day after she graduated from high school. They took all they had and moved north to Atlanta to find work. They had been married five or six years before they could afford a car.
It’s remnants of this Old South that I still see on the sides of roads, sad though they be. Old people talk about the good old days, but even they will tell you there was nothing good about them. Not much has changed, out here anyway. Cattle fields with big feed silos give way to fruit tree nurseries with flowering branches. A statue of a bear with paws raised above its head and white teeth glaring sits just by the side of the road to scare off deer (and passing cars). Cell service comes and goes, and I spot what appears to be a white fox in a pen by someone’s house. Old barns from the Civil War still stand, sideways and threatening to collapse at any moment. Nothing has changed here in over one hundred years, and it looks as though nothing will change for another century. The Old South is dead, but its corpse lays exposed to the elements, rotting until it turns to dust or until someone pays for a proper burial.
