Son Of There

I know what it means to be Southern. This is an entirely different thing than knowing that I am Southern, or identifying as Southern. I am Southern, and I potently, self-consciously know what this means.

It is as much a part of me as my blood type or the patterns of the veins on the backs of my hands. Because I live deliberately in the South, I daily knock up against the distinctions between myself and other men who were born and raised and still live down here.

My distinctions are etched by the experiences of traveling and living abroad when I was a young man. The things I saw, the jarring visual encounters, the social squirmings, the lengthy and sometimes drunken conversations with foreign locals…all of these things cut into me and marked me as I grew past youth into middle age, the way a rope tied around a sapling becomes eventually absorbed by the mature tree.

I look at my fellow Southern men with their tattoos and their sports-worship and their wasting of precious and finite ammunition in beery role-playing afternoons and their fear of being looked down on by the tv people and their passive silence while the statues came down — I look at them and I know that we are children who were adopted by disparate families shortly after birth. How did you turn out that way? And how did I?

Spending time in close company with foreigners and absorbing their questions, their curiosity, their pronouncements, all the while watching them and listening to them among their families, their political opponents, their neighbors, their clerics, their celebrities…these tightly-written episodes knocked the barnacles off of me and helped me, once I returned to her, to sail more smoothly through the warm, black waters of the mythic South, which isn’t a myth at all but which is a complete mystery, and a doomed one.

It seems perhaps quaint and passe‘, this idea of being submerged in the blood culture of which I’ve been a part since birth. It sometimes seems this way even to me. But in back of this feeling is the truth of what I have lived and known, deeper than the earth’s mantle, hotter than its core.

I am, after all, the authentic dark voice of my tortured patch of the earth, the American South, and when I walk beneath my trees sunburnt and freckled and humming to myself, I can never be quaint. I can never be provincial. The trees recognize this, as do the birds. For their senses tell them so.

~ S.K. Orr