Five years ago I moved to the South. And though I’ve lived here for half a decade already, my understanding of the region and its culture haven’t deepened much. So, this summer, I have decided to immerse myself in southern culture–meet the people, eat the food, dance to the music, learn the plant names, partake in the pastimes, read the literature, etc.–as much as I am able. My hope is to compile a list of possible experiences I might have that would give me a comprehensive experience of the South without playing to stereotype or caricature. In my mind, this summer must include a range of experience from the rural life of farmers to the lifestyle of the so-called old money aristocracy. I plan to record my experiences and thoughts, together with photos, and produce a meaningful essay or memoir of some kind.

So, my southern friends, what should make the list?

The puzzled ones, the Americans, go through their lives
Buying what they are told to buy,
Pursuing their love affairs with the automobile,

Baseball and football, romance and beauty,
Enthusiastic as trained seals, going into debt, struggling —
True believers in liberty, and also security,

And of course sex — cheating on each other
For the most part only a little, mostly avoiding violence
Except at a vast blue distance, as between bombsight and earth,

Or on the violent screen, which they adore.
Those who are not Americans think Americans are happy
Because they are so filthy rich, but not so.

They are mostly puzzled and at a loss
As if someone pulled the floor out from under them,
They’d like to believe in God, or something, and they do try.

You can see it in their white faces at the supermarket and the gas station
— Not the immigrant faces, they know what they want,
Not the blacks, whose faces are hurt and proud —

The white faces, lipsticked, shaven, we do try
To keep smiling, for when we’re smiling, the whole world
Smiles with us, but we feel we’ve lost

That loving feeling. Clouds ride by above us,
Rivers flow, toilets work, traffic lights work, barring floods, fires
And earthquakes, houses and streets appear stable

So what is it, this moon-shaped blankness?
What the hell is it? America is perplexed.
We would fix it if we knew what was broken.

-Alicia Suskin Ostriker

(HT: The Writer’s Almanac)

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and then all human hearts… And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil.”

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago