americana: thoughts from a southern woman
Sweet tea. Bacon grease in a jar. Soul food. A small community where everyone knows who your mama is. Sunday school before the main service at church. Grits for breakfast and fried green tomatoes in the afternoon straight from grandma’s garden. Playing in the dirt with neighborhood kids and making it home before the street lights came on. Women who refer to me as ‘honey’ and give hugs that feel like the warmth from the sun after a slight chill in the air. Hot days spent in front of the air conditioner and spitting watermelon seeds off the front porch. Where Nick Saban and James Spann are the A-listers. Where everyone knows the saying “Jesus is the friend that sticks closer than a brother.”
Some people resent where they are from and a lot of them for really good reasons but not me. I love being from a small town in rural Alabama. And a lot of the reason I love it is from what is stated above and what it means to me. Home. Family. Faith. Comfort. Recent discourse has caused me to consider this premise carefully and critically, however, I have come to the conclusion that I love being a southern black woman.
There were a few reasons why this was hard for me to say. One of them is blatantly obvious and that is the South’s history of racism. This fact matters much to me especially since kindergarten I went to predominately white schools. I still remember those uncomfortable moments of being one of five black children in elementary school. Girls teasing me because my hair was different, people telling me to my face that they did not want to be friends with me because I was black, teachers treating me unfairly, learning about the history of slavery and everyone’s head turning towards me in the classroom. I recall leaving my small town for college and through further education realized how much of my own history had been whitewashed, downplayed, or was downright missing from the history textbooks that I had been given.
Another hesitation stems from the same fact: that I grew up and continue to find myself in predominantly white institutions. Sometimes I feel that I don’t have the authority to speak on these matters because to some people’s standards I am not “black enough”. It makes me hesitant to speak on these matters because it can feel like you are making a statement for the entire black community and this is not my intention. I simply would like to articulate my experience whether or not everyone resonates or understands it because I have recently come to realize that my stories are worth being heard.
While it is indisputable that systemic racism has been and is present not only within the South but the United States as a whole, there is also an undeniable rich and beautiful history of black Americans. I think of the first time I visited the Civil Rights museum, of my time at the Legacy museum in Montgomery, Alabama. Reading Martin Luther King’s Letters from the Birmingham Jail or The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. The hymns that I sang in church as a child that were negro spirituals sung by slaves on the underground railroad. It is beautiful. It is painful. So so painful. But also so so beautiful. It is beautiful and worth learning about, listening to, observing, and speaking about it. And it happened in the land that I pass by every day in the car and in the streets that I walk after getting dinner with friends. It is why I educate myself and others to the best of my knowledge, why I exercise my right to vote, why I choose to share my own stories. I am proud to be a black American and those who have come before me have made that so.
There are so many ways that I wish to expand on and discuss these thoughts but I will leave it at this for now.
- from a southern black woman.
