What Not to Say to a Southern Girl, by a Southern Girl

Here are some things not to say to a Southern Girl...

1) You're not a Southern Girl.

Ah, thank you. Good to know that my being born in Alabama and growing up until thirteen in Georgia mean nothing when it comes to forming and shaping my experiences that created my personal and cultural identity. Please continue to tell me more things that I am not (feminine, Mormon, creative, dog-and-cat-lover) that I mistakenly presumed I was during those first thirteen years of my life.

2) As soon as you've lived here more years than you have in Georgia, you'll become a Utahn.

I hated Utah when my family moved here in 2001. Even now, after twelve years, I struggle at times to cope with its climate and culture, and look forward with joy to every trip to the South, which always feels like coming home in addition to seeing and feeling the greenery and humidity that I've come to love. Telling me that I will turn into a Utahn on some magical date is like telling a transplanted potato it will turn into a tomato. It doesn't matter where I go or how many years I live in other places - for me my childhood defines how I think of my identity, and I will always think of myself first and foremost as being a Southern Girl, born and raised in the South.

3) You don't know what it means to be Southern.

I am well aware that I am not the average, typical Southerner, but I wish people would not insist that my personal experience counts for nothing in a discussion of what it means to be Southern. There are many aspects of Utah that I can understand and identify with without calling myself a Utahn. Similarly, there are many aspects of the South that I do not identify with, while still calling myself a Southerner. My ties to the South are deep and personal, and while I don't expect other people to share or understand them, I would hope that they could respect and appreciate them as being valid and true. The South is a very diverse, complicated, and controversial place - there are as many different types of Southerners as there are people who live in the South. No one wants to be lumped into a bunch of stereotypical views about a group; I don't appreciate it as an American (Ah, you're greedy and fat and you want to rule the world?), a Mormon (Oh, so you practice polygamy and can't eat meat?), a Caucausian female (Take it away, 30 Rock), a home-schooler (Oh, so you never saw another person of your own age before?), or a BYU student (You're all such self-righteous Bible-thumpers!), and I don't appreciate it as a Southerner.

4) Why on earth would you want your kids to be Southern?

Again, presuming you know me so perfectly and what I mean in identifying myself as "Southern," I expect you already know the answer to this question. But supposing you were asking this question sincerely (take out the judgmental appalled tone and the "on earth"), I would reply that it's because it has been a great blessing in my life to think of myself as a Southern Girl. It's given me an identity and a home, something to love and care about and be curious about and learn about. I want my children to feel a deep connection to the land, the trees, the water, and the animals in the same way that I did playing imaginative games outside in the woods every day in my parents' four-acre property. I want them to have fond memories of working in the garden, taking care of their pets, watching and being fascinated by thunderstorms, lightning storms, and rainstorms, taking long walks in the countryside, and camping out under the stars while they listen to the crickets at night. I can still remember sitting on a swing outdoors all alone as a child and swinging silently in the evening, looking at the stars and hearing the crickets and feeling an overwhelming sense of strength, love, and beauty around me that connected me to a Heavenly Father above who loved me and wanted me to be happy. These are the kind of memories I want my children to have, and if they are happening to children here where I'm living now, I don't see it. I see a lot of kids who stay indoors all day, playing video games, texting, and watching T.V., or going to the mall and wasting time and money on fleeting trends and pastimes. My experience with nature and my childhood are all wrapped up with the Southern climate and atmosphere, and my love for water, trees, and green can ultimately be traced to this too.

5) You don't know the real South.

Condescension and arrogance aside, I'll gladly admit to this, seeing as how my personal experience of the South is so small and particular to me that I am well aware there is far more to the South than I could possibly have experienced and come to terms with in my short lifetime. Frankly, I don't think I'll ever know what "the real South" is. I've taken college classes on the Civil War Era, Slavery in the United States, and the American South. I've read - mostly for fun - William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, Mark Twain, Harper Lee, Tennessee Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Mildred Taylor (possibly my favorite series of books about life in the South so far), Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone with the Wind, and The Help. I'm writing my master's thesis on Cormac McCarthy, a Southern writer transplanted to the west (who, by the way, does an absolutely amazing and brilliant job in writing truthfully and profoundly about both Southern and Western ideology, culture, and history). I have a stack of other writers and books to read when or if I ever get the chance. I absolutely know that I have a lot to learn about the South, but I am doing my best to learn at my own pace, and more importantly, I love those opportunities that I get to learn more about the past experiences that shaped my heritage and land. Studying the South and recognizing the political, cultural, and personal differences between various Southerners and myself does not alter my conception of myself as a Southerner. I've done the same with American and Mormon history, to an extent, with the same conclusions. I am not the same kind of Mormon as Eliza R. Snow and Brigham Young; this is obvious. I am not the same kind of Southerner as Scarlett O'Hara and Robert E. Lee; how could I be? Ultimately I would counter to #5 by saying "You don't know the real me," a statement which I can say for sure is true of everybody except for Heavenly Father (and to a certain extent, my beloved husband, to whom I've shown more of myself than I would ever dare to anyone else in the world).

Thinking about these questions has given me an additional insight about #4, which is that you cannot ultimately choose where your children decide to be "from." I may do my best to raise my children as completely devoted Southerners and they may turn out to be bleeding-heart New York liberals (I'll still love you guys, though). It is a unique and personal choice to determine the meaning of your cultural and personal identity and to deny a child that freedom would be to deny them of their free agency. I do not think my parents intended to raise me or any of their children as Southerners (in fact, as of late I'm rather strongly convinced of the opposite), but at one point or another, it wasn't their decision any more. In fact, I'm pretty sure I came to identify more strongly with the South (and, fittingly, the sense of "loss" and an nonexistent or overly romanticized idyllic past) after I moved from Georgia. However it happened, my childhood experiences in the South continue to be a defining and crucial part of my identity today, and I am very grateful and proud today to call myself a Southern Girl, born and raised.