On Being Raised Right in the Deep South

Adults in my family taught me that children are to know their place and that adults in general and parents and teachers in particular are morally required to teach children their place by precept and example. The Deep South is still a post-figurative feudal society based on a network of privileges and obligations that are seen as static and unchanging.  One’s placement in this network in relation to the person being interacted with determines the appropriate response from both sides of the interaction. Not obeying these very tight interaction norms constitutes not knowing one’s place. One is obliged, in interaction with others, to insist that the other know his or her place. Failure to put the other firmly back in his or her place in the event of a lapse is considered a painful humiliation that reveals a shameful personal inadequacy; allowing or suffering such lapses reveals a failure of enculturation so severe as to constitute a lack of personal honor. I was a nigger-lover growing up. This meant that I did not insist that black people interacting with me know their place.

In the Deep South, the possibility of legitimate social progress is not recognized, and attempts at reform are seen as disruptive of a social order that crystalized into an ideal form at a point in the distant past. The dynamic energy that in a more open society would express as social action in favor of reform expresses in the Deep South and must express in any such closed post-figurative society (e.g., Iran or Saudi Arabia) as resistance and reaction to modernity. The influence of parenting, education, religion, and all other agencies of socialization dovetail in the Deep South, which results in channeling the idealism of the young into blind allegiance to a past that is not based in factual history but rather is mythology. This mythology of a past golden age that one is honor-bound to remember and respect by living out the values upon which this lost splendor was supposedly based is used to justify hostility to modernity, democracy, tolerance, and respect for diversity as a good per se characteristic of the open society. This mythology makes it possible to justify a culture of denial based purely on reaction and resistance by appeal to values that do not describe how any society ever functioned or how the society of the Deep South actually functions today. Southerners, my people, are so much the people of the lie that a willful, well-fortified ignorance fiercely defended is the routine result of normal enculturation.

I was brought up to understand that my culture valued mutual affirmation of assigned status roles above all else in social interactions of all kinds. I learned this by being noticeably shocked when the wife of Rev. Mark Edens, Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Ashford, Alabama, casually mentioned, when substituting in a public school classroom, that all Catholics were going to go to hell. I was stunned and replied quietly that I just did not believe that. I was sent to the office to be chastised by W. H. Brown, principal of Ashford High School and Deacon of the First Baptist Church. That night, my mother informed me that I was an uppity little shit and that she was afraid she might die of embarrassment over spawning such a fool. I was taught that questioning the authority of a clergyman or a cop or a teacher never constituted appropriate behavior. This instruction was at least prudent in a place where the county sheriff, the chief of police, and the mayor were all Baptist Deacons and known members of the Ku Klux Klan.

I never had children because I could never quite convince myself that my offspring would not regress to the mean of my gene pool and turn out voting Republican and worshiping as part of a Southern Baptist Congregation. I could no more love or respect children who reminded me of what I came from than the people I came from could love or respect the person I was determined to become in spite of them. This is intolerance but I feel no shame for being intolerant; some ways of life are just so awful that they should not be tolerated. The people who have the best right to say so are those who, having grown up in a certain way of life and understanding that way of life from the inside, feel irresistibly pulled by simple human decency to take themselves elsewhere. Many such persons feel the need to explain, to as many people as possible, that anyone still looking out from the inside and feeling at peace and at home there, has become, to use just one example, a Good German at the expense of becoming a really awful human being. Substitute Good Ole Boy for Good German and you have my story.

I am teaching my students, I hope, that teachers do not tell you all the right answers or teach you how to live, because no one knows all the right answers or how anyone else should live. I try to encourage my students to listen and learn to see the world from as many different points of view as possible and to live from whatever intersection of these many points of view makes it possible to live out as much truth as one is able, knowing that this is neither the whole truth nor nothing but the truth. As Rilke wrote “At the crossroads in our heart stands no temple for Apollo” (Rilke, 1922).

I hope I am teaching my students to value openness and curiosity in their interactions with others by the example of how I listen to them and then speak in response, only to listen more, and responding always with the goal of getting each to say more and go further in the uttering/outering/othering of themselves. The kind of truth sought in literature and qualitative research, the two disciplines I practice most passionately and teach most often, is subjectivity. I would most like to teach my students that appropriate behavior in a writer or researcher is all about being totally open and endlessly curious about what the other person is saying, so totally open and so endlessly curious that being right about what you think the student is saying is more important than deciding if the student is right from some perspective other than the student’s own.  

   

Reference

            A year with Rilke. “Not by grasping” [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://yearwithrilke.blogspot.com/2011/01/not-by-grasping.html