The South

I still wonder how I got here sometimes. I mean, I'm an urban girl, born and raised in San Francisco. I am used to a significantly higher proportion of museums, reliable public transportation, walkability, multiculturalism, great restaurants, and varied architecture than I have here in Austin, Texas. Don't get me wrong, Austin is an extremely cool place to live, and it has been nice watching it grow up and offer incrementally more of what I miss. Still, I don't identify with the South, even though I have lived here for almost as long as I lived in SF.

Rednecks and racism, right? The failure of Reconstruction and the Stand in the Schoolhouse Door. Bible Belt, NASCAR, and conservatism. Medgar Evers and Emmett Till. Paula Deen. Thankfully, my informal curiosity and formal education (thank you Karl Hagstrom Miller, Jacqueline Jones, and Coleman Hutchison) have loosened, widened, and complicated my understanding of a loose, wide, and complicated place to the point of awakening a new curiosity.

When I drove through the South in 1998, I was nonplussed. I thought kudzu was cool, and it was fun to trace the different BBQ traditions, but I didn't really connect. I remember the guy in an Alabama KOA trying to make conversation by doing his best Jeff Foxworthy-esque comedy, but he was making jokes about his decorating his grandmother's pig nut hickory tree for Christmas by hanging blacks. Strange fruit indeed.

But, I moved to a former Confederate state of my own volition in 1999, and have put down some roots. I'm thinking its time to find myself in this place - this South.


So, I am going to be presenting a paper at the University of Mississippi next week, and I'm driving out there - by myself. I'm going go through Ferriday, Louisiana, up the Delta, to Oxford, MS - then through Memphis, TN, and Little Rock, AR, and back through Shreveport, LA. I'm going to visit museums, markers, monuments, grave sites and battlefields, to sate the history geek in me. I'm going to research an essay on race memory in music heritage museums, and spend time in the Blues Archive at Ole Miss, to sate the scholar in me. I'm going to follow the Tamale Trail to sate the food fiend in me.


And I'm going to try and blog it daily. We shall see.....