The Carpet Bagger's Journal — moving from NYC to Mississippi

February 12, 2012

On Missing the Dixie National Rodeo

Filed under: Southern blog posts,Uncategorized — annebabson @ 3:04 pm
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Even if we had gotten tickets to the Dixie National Rodeo, we would have missed the real rural Western experience.

Last night, my husband Chuck and I found parking behind some horse trailers in an alley a walk away from the Jackson State Fairgrounds.  We walked between stands selling cowhides and saddles and stands selling lariats and posters of country music legends to the north entrance of the coliseum.   I was wearing brown boots, blue jeans, a red gingham blouse with a kerchief, a  denim jacket under a sheepskin coat.   We met two other couples there, both living in Vicksburg like we are, and we were planning on buying cheap seats up in the rafters so that we could watch the bull riding, the barrel racing, and who knows what-all.

However, when we  got to the box  office, we realized that they had sold all the tickets already.  We were not going to the rodeo, after all.  Instead, as a sextet, we went to a Japanese restaurant down the street and had a lovely evening, anyway.

So what’s wrong with this picture?  Nothing, but the experience the rodeo promises to people like us, people with graduate degrees and uncalloused hands, would be unattainable even if we had seats so close we could feel the breath of bulls on the back of our necks.

The image may be western, but the viewers are removed from the realities of settling the West

Almost the second the West was won, America developed a sentimentality about cowboys.  Buffalo Bill ‘s Wild West Show was just a show, not wild at all, for people who would never be cowpokes, unless poking a cow can be extended so far as slicing into a New York strip steak.

The people who back their trailers up to the Coliseum in Jackson, Mississippi may indeed have learned to straddle the agrarian image of America that Thomas Jefferson gave us and the contemporary realities of cell phones and Facebook status updates just like they wrap their thighs around the back of an angry bull, but the rest of us, the ones buying, or trying to buy the tickets, we have no such capacity.  We are products of a society that dishes us up true grit on a salad bar where we can pick and choose between morsels of culture.  All six of us, the ones who went out to dinner instead of the rodeo, we are all white folks, so we are no more Japanese than we are cowboy.  So to what do we really and truly belong?

One of the women who ate teriyaki with me last night told me she was from a small town called Hot Coffee, Mississippi, and I am sure that she comes from more rural digs than I do in Brooklyn, but she and the other woman lamented the disappearance of a sign welcoming outsiders to Hot Coffee that looked like someone was pouring coffee off a sign post.  The other woman remembered that her father used to woo women by walking around where he came from with a pet goat, and somehow, in the vocabulary of this particular rural region, that was like having a nice ride in Hollywood.

But we, the educated people — lawyers, professors, computer scientists, chemists — we don’t have goats.  We may come from Hot Coffee, but we are not stuck there by land battles or other forms of economic necessity.  If we use a lasso, it’s not for livelihood — it’s a rope trick, nothing more.  So who are we?

This boy from New York City was adventurous but ultimately more Republican than Bull Moose

People often say of those who move away and move back that they can never really and truly go home again.  I furthermore say that any of us who refine our minds can never truly be present for The Dixie National Rodeo.  We are too aware of other things, and our options are too many.  People who get up to milk the cows at 4 am usually do so out of necessity, not out  of romantic transcendental ideologies.  As for Dixie, that country no longer exists; indeed Dixie, as opposed to the real Confederate States in secession, was as mythological as Atlantis, for no one who has picked cotton for no money sings happily about how they wish they were back in the land of cotton where old times are not forgotten — look away.  So moving South — which I undoubtedly did — it has not made me any more a Southern Belle than Teddy Roosevelt made himself a cowboy when he bought guns in Manhattan at Tiffany & Company (Yes, that Tiffany’s used to sell guns, silver plated, apparently, along with the rest of their jewelry) and moved to the Dakotas.  Teddy Roosevelt mastered the skills of a cowbpoke out on the range very impressively, but he always could count on other forms of income.  He managed to inhabit the rough neck culture, but he himself remained a city slicker inside.  He could hunt in the land of grizzlies, form the rough rider brigade in the bar of the luxurious Hotel Menger, but this was a bit like Marie Antoinette building herself a Hameau to play at being a peasant girl.

I will never be a cowgirl.  I might learn to shoot a gun, Tiffany silver-plated or otherwise.  I might learn all the manners of  a Kappa Kappa Gamma.  I might learn to inhabit this culture with thorough fluency, but somehow, I’ll end up eating foreign cuisine, reading a marvelous book, investigating arch Machiavellian realities or corn pone frontier humor from a consumerist, internationalist, twenty-first-century intellectual distance.

It’s a shame we missed the rodeo.  I think we would have had a terrific time.   The truth, though, is we missed the rodeo over a century and several libraries ago.

December 13, 2011

Measuring change one school hallway at a time

Filed under: Southern blog posts,Uncategorized — annebabson @ 1:47 pm
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The founders of my step-daughters non-racist school were Klan in all but name and sheet

My stepdaughter’s school is a quiet Christian private school with good teachers and affirmative values of the kind that most any member of the political Left today could embrace, but its founders intended it to be a white supremacist enclave.  My husband and I sent her there because she is bright, and the local public school is run like a prison,  not a place to imagine a future.  The place where we have sent her is simple, with a building whose roof often leaks, no  state-of-the-art technology, but with instruction that emphasizes critical thinking, core academics — the very thing that makes some people going to school in dirt-floor school houses in the third world better prepared for American universities than our own students in schools with smart boards and WiFi.  It is now integrated, at least as much as most private schools in the country are integrated.  This means that there are a few African-American students on campus.  The school does nothing whatsoever explicitly to foster a spirit of racism in the community today.

However, the school used to be called a Council School, one of the schools founded immediately after Brown v. Board of Education was decided, by the White Citizens’ Council of Mississippi — you know, by those people who thought that something horrible would happen to white girls if they learned multiplication tables sitting at desks near black boys.  The White Citizens’ Council was secretly funded by a scary J. Edgar Hoover-ish organization that used to spy on pro-integration citizens in Mississippi — the Sovereignty Commission.  It was a horrible chapter of this state’s history, one that should cause any thinking person to shudder.  The school used to send out racist propaganda to school parents out of the PTA.  The current principal there tells me that the school at that time was Klan in all but the white sheets.

Today, however, the school is run by Christians who formally reject notions of racism as an anathema to their system of belief, whatever pockets of cultural bias they may still individually foster.  I could wish for more African-American history in the US History class, but that would also be true if we sent my stepdaughter to a Catholic school in Yonkers, New York.  I could wish for more titles by African-American authors in her English class, but the English teacher is fantastic, and she is focusing on good literary American classics, so I can provide perhaps a greater rainbow in the curriculum.  There are surely racists who attend the school, racist parents who send their children there because there are more black students at the public school.  However, the school’s mission teaches a spirit of service to the community, the imperative of putting character before career, principle before profit.

I consider this an air sample to test to show the progress that Mississippi has made over the past decades in terms of racism.  The Sovereignty Commission was de-funded in 1977 by the governor.  The Council School was disbanded and integrated the same year, reconstituted under a Christian board that changed the school’s mission statement and its actual mission.  Most of the people who felt the way the founders of the school felt are dead.  Their children may not have many, or any, African-American friends, but they have few enemies and draw no color lines in public life at least.

At school, my stepdaughter has both white and black friends.  She socializes with both.  She has learned from me and from her father that racism is akin to Satanism in our system of belief.  The pictures still hang on the hallway walls of the old classes of Council School graduating classes.  Like all such photos, they appear dated.  It is good that the kids who walk the hall neither find that history buried, nor do they find it celebrated.  It is a truth, a sad truth, much like the truth of ruins left from the time of Sherman’s march.  Things were one way.  They are that way no more.

Mississippi is changing.  It does not change quickly.  Nothing happens here quickly.  As Dr. King said in his letter from Birmingham Jail, the time is always right to do what is right, and no one should be held back by others’ reluctance to be fair.  However, racism is something that does not only hurt the group that is oppressed directly by it; it hurts the character and the spiritual health of the perpetrators as well.  The only ones who are owed redemption are the oppressed, but the paradoxical truth is that in relenting from racism, a potential opens up for the oppressor to become whole again as well.  Like green shoots from a ruined antebellum mansion, I see this former council school, now a Christian academy, as a reason for Mississippi to hope for better things to come.

October 13, 2010

The Land of Cotton — and other mythical landscapes

Filed under: Southern blog posts,Uncategorized — annebabson @ 3:38 am
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Old times here, apparently, are not forgotten

 

When European writers imagined the Orient — a distant place, vaguely understood, rarely visited — they invented a landscape in their minds, invented customs and people unlike the  real residents of the lands to the  East of Europe, and what they invented said a lot more about their own feelings than the reality of the lands to the East of them.

I am reading a great deal about problems of orientalism in literature, am writing about imaginary versions of Japan concocted by Anglo writers.

As I drove this Monday through landscapes of rolled haystacks bound with wire and cotton — fields and fields of it, stretching with loden green and tufts of white everywhere — I wondered if there might not be a similar mystical landscape version of the South popularized in the North.

And so there is:  Dixie.

Dixie the song was written by a Yankee from Ohio — Daniel Decatur Emmett in 1859.

The song was first publicly sung in a minstrel show in  New York City that year.  White men from the North pretending to be black men from the South sang these words:

Oh I wish I was in the land of cotton!

Old times there are not forgotten!

Look away, Look away, Look away Dixie Land.

I have not written it in the offensive imitation of ebonics that was the original language of the minstrel show because it makes me unhappy to do so.

Within a few years, this song about happy ex-slaves nostalgic for a life of slavery in the South became part of the mythology, fully adopted, mind you, by rebel troops as their fight song in the Civil War.

There was an imagined South — one where slaves happily sang as they picked cotton.  There were happy women in hoop skirts.  There were white men with suits and string bow ties and goatees.  There were, in this imaginary South, no real poor white people suffering as the  real poor white people did as subsistence farmers.  The imaginary South was a fun Broadway show South.

Here I stand in the real South, overlooking real and quite lovely cotton fields with a greyish tinge and gritty dirt clods.   I am glad I have no picking to do  of these tufts.  I much prefer this South, the one with the real people who are not always happy but are usually smiling anyway.

In Orientalist fantasies, there are often despots.  Despotism, according to a scholar named Grosrichard, is an important part of the fantasy.  In the fantasy of the South, there are despots, too.  The reality of a history of despotism cannot be ignored.  The South did hold slaves longer than the Northern states, and there have  been many incidents of violence against people of color.  However, in the North, the image that the Klan is pandemic in the Bible Belt — that is a fantasy that absolves the North to some degree of its present hate crimes.  Earlier this month, a horrible hate crime was committed in the Bronx against a man who was assumed by his  attackers to be homosexual.  New Yorkers understand this horrible crime within the context of a much larger community where not everyone is filled with hate, not by a longshot.  However, the idea persists in New York City that hatred is more universal here in Mississippi.

Standing here near a cotton field — admittedly being white, being blonde with blue eyes, hence not as easily a target of such forms of hatred as if I were an African-American woman — I’m not sure that this is so.  I tend to think that while there are still some people who are hateful, the vast majority of people behave more like their neighbor’s keeper in a way that New Yorkers do not, can not, given the vast number of neighbors New Yorkers have.  People say hello to strangers all the time.  Churches feed people and visit the sick (something they also do in New York, when they know who is sick in the community).   There are haters here, to be sure, but in New York, I think some of that is just more suppressed, not extinguished.  Look at the awful things the Republican candidate for governor of New York said this week.   New York is not hate-free.  Neither is the South.  However, the despotism is muzzled at least down here to some degree in the real contemporary South, at least compared to the imagined South of the song Dixie.

In his book Orientalism Edward Said talks about Gustave Flaubert‘s  interaction with a courtesan in Egypt — Flaubert had a few imaginary ideas about the way women were different in Egypt than in France.  To be fair to Flaubert, in strictly external and superficial ways, the women did look different and sound different.  That said, his ideas about Egyptian women were crude and reductive.

The ideas that Northerners have about women of the South are a bit silly.  They imagine Scarlett O’Hara saying, “Why fiddle dee dee!”  They certainly imagine every Miss America contestant from below the  Mason Dixon line.  There are women who cultivate the pageant and the belle images, to be sure, but it would be crude and reductive to imagine there are no feminists down here, no thinkers among women, no hilarious, goofy interesting and individualistic women.  I do think it is harder to be that way down here than up North, as I see a greater pressure to conform to the artificial standards of the cult of Southern womanhood.

So as I look at the field in the land of cotton — are old times forgotten here?  Look away – no, but perhaps they will be overcome yet.  Look away – no, but the South is reinventing itself.  Look away — but why would you look away?  These fields are beautiful, aren’t they? – Dixie Land.

February 1, 2010

Sexy Tractors

Filed under: Uncategorized — annebabson @ 1:56 am
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Richard Harris of NPR News shared the following with listeners:

January 25, 2010

Can a man’s technology make him more attractive to women? A new study says it can. But before you run out and upgrade your smart phone, take note.

The technology in this story includes stone axes and other basic tools of agriculture. And the smitten women are the hunter-gatherers of prehistoric Europe. Those technologies were not simply cutting edge about 10,000 years ago; they were revolutionary.

“You can regard it as the most important cultural change in the history of modern humans,” says Prof. Mark Jobling at the University of Leicester in England. “It allowed people to generate their own food, and populations to grow and society to become specialized.”

…He says, is that “as the populations expanded from the Near East they contained men and women. But then the indigenous people, the hunter-gatherers who were already in Europe, the women were incorporated into these societies and had offspring…the result is the genetic pattern we see in many Europeans today: male genes from farmers who hailed from the Near East, and female genes mostly from women who had been hunter-gatherers in Europe after the last Ice Age.

So, to the punch line: Does technology make men more sexy?

“That would be one way to interpret it,” says Peter Underhill at Stanford University. But it’s not necessarily just sex appeal at work; it “might be in terms of not just physical appearance but also in terms of ability to provide for offspring.” — from NPR News.com

That’s all very cerebral and fine.  However, for me, Kenny Chesney has more pertinent things to say on the topic:

Yes I said yes I will yes

“She thinks my tractor’s sexy
It really turns her on
She’s always starin’ at me
While I’m chuggin’ along
She likes the way it’s pullin’ while we’re tillin’ up the land
She’s even kind of crazy ’bout my farmer’s tan
She’s the only one who really understands what gets me
She thinks my tractor’s sexy”

Ladies and gentlemen, long oppressed by urban sensibilities, I am coming out of the closet — I am an agrosexual.  I dig guys with farmer’s tans, tool-wielding hands, a certain boot-wearing gait, a laconic way of stretching out the word “ma’am” into four or five syllables.  I dig the Earth, the Earth they plow, the practicality of what they do, the profound necessity — no one has ever told me in a manner that I can honestly believe that poetry was truly a matter of life and death, and yet it is what I do best, but agriculture is.

I’ll be honest.  In ancient Europe, if I had seen those stone-axe-wielding studs headed toward my cave, I would have given it up faster than you could say “paleolithic archeology.”  My genes scream now for some jeans, faded and American blue, not torn at the boutique but out on the back forty.

It feels good to tell you all this.  On my way back and forth to the University of Southern Mississippi, I cruise by fields and see the occasional tractor.  Finally, National Public Radio has given voice to my Stonewall, or my stone implement, anyway.

At the University of Southern Mississippi, I am taking a class in queer and gender theory in literature.  Reading texts that go into the minutia of the habits of men in the Greco-Roman world and their anthropological implications, I cry out for a text that at last expresses my sexual preference — I am talking about a clearer definition of my “straight.”  The closest I have ever found before this was written by a very naughty Southern woman named Rosemary Daniell.  It’s called Sleeping With Soldiers, and while I don’t intend to be anything other than absolutely monogamous with my sexy implement-wielding husband (okay, he’s not a farmer; he’s a chemist, and the implements are generally metal, not stone, but, hey!), she describes the things that get me hot under the church lady collar.  She talks about her promiscuity of a certain era of her life with verve and a guilty pleasure of muscles, guys who get their hands dirty at work, soldiers of  fortune, oil rig grease monkeys in bed. To all this, I say yes, I say yes I said yes.

I’ll be honest.  New York, for all its kinky, twisted sexual energy never quite scratched my itch with all the men who got manicures on Wall Street, the tortured artists, the metrosexuality.  It’s not quite the same as Marlboro Man manliness, is it?  I’m not in favor of cancer cowboys — don’t get me wrong, but there is something about a guy who gets up before dawn because the cows need milking which is just, well, sexy.  There’s nothing abstract about it.  He’s solid.  He’s real.  He’s capable.  There’s milk in the bucket.  There’s food on the table.  I think his tractor’s sexy, and now I know that my ancestresses agreed with me.

January 24, 2010

America’s hidden autobahn

Filed under: Uncategorized — annebabson @ 6:52 pm
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Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road. — Walt Whitman, from “Song of the Open Road”

America has a secret, all you New York commuters, carefully finding a place in stop and go traffic.  That secret is the joy of a two-lane highway with nothing behind and nothing in front.

I discovered Whitman’s open road in Alabama on my way to Vicksburg — one lane going my way, no smoky to my bandit, and I drove for hours at 85 MPH on an absolutely empty straight shot toward my destination.  I might have hit a possum in my haste, had I hit anything, but in fact I hit nothing.  Not even a leaf was taken  out of its path in the wind by my one-lane drag race with myself.

New Yorkers don’t really believe this American possibility — good, empty road with nothing in our way, not even in rush hour, but I promise you in the deep South, tax dollars have built solid highways where there are no blizzards and no mass commutes.

They are a joy — roads with speed minimums.

However, I discovered a darker aspect of the lovely isolation of these paths last Wednesday night.

I was on my way home — three hours from one place to another, with nothing in between — and it was dark, a dark New Yorkers have never experienced on the road.  The emergency broadcast system interrupted my Mississippi Public Radio “All things Considered” listening.

This was not a test.

I was in an area where I was in danger of golf-ball sized hail hitting and shattering my windshield, tornadoes — As a New Yorker, I have every strategem under my belt about avoiding potential muggers, but tornadoes?  What does a gal in designer shoes do with that kind of danger? — and a definite promise of a severe lighting storm destined to fell trees and wreak havoc, let loose the dogs of war.

If I had been hit by a tree or some golf-ball ice, nothing would have heard me scream before I  died.

Undestand that on this stretch of road, the only settlement of humanity I saw was a bunch of RVs amid the pines hung all of them with the Confederate Flag — yes, I thought it was a KKK compound (Kompound?), too.  Honestly, if they were parked in this mess, they were in more trouble than I was on my way home, now slowed to 50 MPH, despite all emptiness, because I couldn’t see in front of me or behind me except when the sky lit up with dracula-movie lightnihg, only there was no Transylvanian castle in which to spend the night.

I prayed loudly to myself as I drove for the next hour and a half home.  The emergency broadcast system interrupted me several more times to let me know the many ways I might just die right now or in a few minutes,  but I pushed forward, really having no better alternative than to outrun the storm such as I could.

On a clear day, Whitman’s open road is the American dream. There is nothing in one’s way.   As he says, I myself am good fortune on these roads.  However, after some warning signals and dire computerized-voice cautionings, I am my own malediction on this road in stormy weather.

The German’s autobahn links large populations together, and they collectively speed between them.

Our highways with no hindrances are between little places, clusters of humanity nestled together between places, were you to fly over them at night, enveloped in unrelenting shadow.

America is its roadways. The dream is a clear shot wherever we’re headed, but forget about rescue in a time of extraordinary adversity.  Rescue will come too late to save us, unless it descends from God.

I thank God for my safe return home, where my new husband poured me a  glass of Jack and covered me with a blanket.  I was weeping.

I’m looking forward, however, to my next foray on that highway.  The weather report predicts promising clarity.

I am an American, after all.

January 17, 2010

Time Traveler

Filed under: Southern blog posts — annebabson @ 2:05 pm
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Was this photo taken generations ago or only a few days ago?

I got married a week ago yesterday at The Cedar Grove Mansion Inn in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Here is some text I found online with the help of my brother about paranormal activity at Cedar Grove Mansion:

“MANIFESTATIONS:

The entity of John Klein still is master of his home, perhaps not quite trusting the living’s judgment, and keeps a fatherly eye on the staff, owners and guests.

When someone enters or goes near his gentleman’s parlor and he doesn’t like them for some reason, the smell of a pipe can suddenly be noticed.

The sounds of children playing and the sounds of a baby crying have been heard.

The entity of Elizabeth Klein has been seen walking down the front stairs of the home she loved so much, just happily going about her business.

One of the graves moved in 1919 was of a little girl, perhaps the daughter who died in the 2nd floor bedroom.

The entity of this little girl has been seen by staff and guests and often heard going up and down the steps leading to the 2nd floor. She looks lost, sad and puzzled.

Foot steps have been heard going up the outside stairway, which are perhaps made by the teenage son still trying to come home.

Other people have claimed to see some entities of Civil War era soldiers wandering around the mansion and sometimes going up the stairs.

It is thought by some that the female entity of the suicide death is perhaps also floating around the mansion, ballroom, and using the steps as well.” — from http://www.hauntedhouses.com

I have a theory about the most elegant Cedar Grove Mansion Inn — a relais chateau in the midst of an otherwise American landscape.  It is a portal into a time warp.  Like Brigadoon, perhaps it only appears at intervals.  In any event, my wedding there was a trip back in time.

The night before, I slept in General Grant’s Bed — rather, I didn’t sleep, as I was too happy and excited to do so.  General Grant may have managed to sleep in that bed during the siege of Vicksburg, as it was the seat of his command, but then, he wasn’t getting married, now was he?

The next day, my beloved step-daughters-to-be and my Jackie-O-as-teenage-Egyptian-girl Maid of Honor Lylah made our own bouquets out of dark red roses and wrapped them in old-fashioned toile.  We got our hair curled — me in a style quite in keeping with antebellum sensibilities, and then Lylah helped me into a giant ivory dress.  As violin music wafted toward us, my brother — in a tux for the first time — walked me down the aisle toward Chuck, nervous and bright-eyed, handsome and sharp-dressed.  The rest of the evening was spent in a candlelit glow.

It was as if we had been transported, or at least half-shifted the way apparitions of the dead appear to be, into another era.  Our wedding party was interracial, hence Lincoln had already freed the slaves.  The music was from contemporary times, but the sound system kept going out, as if it had static from a probe sent into orbit with messages to extraterrestrial beings.  It was too dark in the ballroom to see.  We felt as if we were not where we usually were.

Eventually, Chuck and I went home.  This morning, before writing this blog, I had to clean up messes left by our dog.  Life has returned to the prosaic, as it too often does.  However, we are back from an odd place, a hiccup in the music of the spheres.  Time travel, all my science fiction seems to suggest, is generally exhausting, and I am, one week later, inordinately exhausted.

Nonetheless, something happened.  Is midlife marriage paranormal in all cases?  I cannot say.  All I know is that I seem to have been a tourist in the ether, and now I am going to make my new husband some breakfast.

December 20, 2009

Crossing the line

Filed under: Southern blog posts — annebabson @ 2:47 am
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The Mason-Dixon Line is the line, historically, between two ways of American life, between personhood and non-personhood.  For slaves, to cross this line from South to North was the difference between becoming a man or a fraction of one.  How then is it that I in crossing in the other direction find myself more complete?

The place of my transgression

I crossed the line just a little bit South of Gettysburg this week, while listening to the song, “Where I Come From” by Alan Jackson on my radio:

“…Where I come from,

it’s corn bread and chicken.

Where I come from,

a lot of front porch sittin’…”

Oddly enough, this Brooklyn girl is now from the land of corn bread and chicken — not vodka martinis and tapas.

I’m at home, a property owner for the first time in my life, and I am turning a house in a small town, as best I can, into a Monticello-like island of Jeffersonian culture, but more about that later.

Crossing the line between personhood and non-personhood in the reverse direction was astonishingly liberating.  I thought of Caesar and his Rubicon and Washington and his Potomac.  The line, it seems, is the unpatrolled border between two nations, one where I am an infiltrator of another way of life, here to do battle for truth as I understand it but also to accept a hometown welcome, too.

I’m coming home to where my hostess skills and my prayer life are a sort of gold standard.  Eccentricity combined with a certain kind of sociability in the South is no sin.  I am hopeful I will adapt, too, not just cause an adaptation.

The hills turned greener as I entered the land beneath the line, and in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, it seemed that Fall had barely taken hold, but the ruggedness of the terrain was due to a permanent state of non-ambitious relaxation, the opposite of skyscrapers preening their necks.

An old farmhouse in the Smoky Mountains

I have crossed into a new way of living, to be sure.  The time zone is different.  The seasons are different.  People want to set a spell, share a word with me, and I am going to discover.

I am marrying into a new culture, even as I marry into my own.  You see, I have lived my adult life almost entirely on an island off the coast of my own country, and this, well, at one time, this was not my own country — it had left my country behind and only returned after being utterly brought to its weatherbeaten timbers and its empty stretches of uncultivated wilderness.

For years, I have claimed to write about the American experience, and so I have, fictionally.  I see it is time for some creative non-fiction in a prosaic land where, crossing a line into a sort of no-return denim-friendliness, I have been set free into a kind of a personhood devoid of the pretensions of my previous home.

Where I come from, Alan Jackson tells me at the crossroads where the blues player met the devil, where Oedipus met his father, where slave met free, where I am now, this is not a land like any other I have known before.

May God have mercy on me as I step into the unknown and yet uncannily familiar mud of my new back yard.

November 20, 2009

My second act

Filed under: Southern blog posts,Uncategorized — annebabson @ 1:30 am
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“There are no second acts in American Lives.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Every Jane Austen novel ends at the marriage altar.  Dissatisfied wives in literature end up dead — like Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary.  Satisfied wives end up obscured in fiction, without their own narrative, accessories to the real plot.  Unmarried women barely exist at all.  When things go wrong in literary plots, women end up strangling themselves with their own bridal veils, like Antigone, or they end up obliterated some other way.

A couple of years ago, when my life fell apart, I wondered which dramatic death I was destined for.  I did not want to die, understand, but where did I have an example of a woman who picks herself up, dusts herself off in her forties, and starts all over again?  I had a couple of television-world examples, less than half an inch thick.  I had CJ Craig from The West Wing

Aaron Sorkin imagines a second act for one woman

, who becomes the White House Press Secretary after a failed Hollywood career in PR.  I had Samantha Jones from Sex and the City, who at a perpetual 39 seems to have no regrets.

Sex And The City imagines a second act that ressembles act one precisely, only with the possibiliy of Botox.

In fiction — well, I had Scarlett O’Hara, shaking her fist at heaven, swearing that as God as her witness, she would never go hungry again.

After marriage #2, Margaret Mitchell imagines a still-feisty Scarlett getting engulfed by Rhett Butler's embrace.

I did a great deal of soul-searching, of Internet searching, of job searching, of PhD searching, but I dare say I have drummed up a second act in this American life, no matter what Fitzgerald thought:

  • I’m getting remarried
  • I’m becoming a not-so-wicked stepmother
  • I’m getting my PhD
  • I’m working part-time while I do so and my future husband pays the bills.

The one thing, though.  Perhaps Fitzgerald could have said, “In New York lives, there are no second acts.”  However, in other places, I find that I can have one.  Scarlett gets hers in Georgia.  Mine, it turns out, is in Mississippi.

Yes, I’m moving from Brooklyn to Mississippi.

Horrified?  So are my New York friends.  They imagine Klansmen.  They imagine a total lack of Sushi — which, I admit is a legitimate consideration.  They know that Mississippi is the number one  state for teen pregnancy, illiteracy and  obesity.

Don’t they get it?  Down there, I’m skinny.  What dieter wouldn’t want to go?

Seriously, here is a photo of my second act:

That smiling woman is me. That cute man is my fiance.

I corresponded with my old writing teacher from my Freshman year in college — Allan Gurganus, author of The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All — a Southern writer if there ever were one.  He told me that he thought my adjustment from New York to life on the Mississippi would be more dramatic than my adjustment were I to move to the Belgian Congo.

He may have a point.

This blog, which will document my adjustment weekly, will examine just that.  Those of you  who like Jeff Foxworthy jokes, or  remember fondly The Beverly Hillbillies, feel free to watch in  morbid fascination as I document all that I find to love about the South, all that I find cumbersome or odd.

Intermission is over.  The house lights dim. Enter our heroine, stage left.  We see a ranch-style house in Vicksburg, Mississippi.  There is a small dog yapping.  There is a man seated outside, sipping a can of beer, smiling.  The woman is carrying an armful of books,  and she is  dressed in black.

The second act, written by my hand and the improbable divine hand, begins.

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