18. Where am I From Again?

Where am I from?  Growing up, that question always confounded me.  I remember once being sent away for a week to a summer camp where I knew no one.  My parents were busy relocating from one Army post to another, and thought it would be better for all if I was out of the way during the move.  At the get-acquainted assembly the first night of camp, the counselor asked how many of us campers were Yankees.  I didn’t exactly know what a Yankee was but the girl next to me raised her hand so I did too.  It turned out there were only four of us; the camp was somewhere in the deep South.  After all the other campers belted out Dixie, we four Yankees were made to get up on stage and sing “Yankee Doodle.”    

Mortifying as this was,  my mistake in labeling myself  was telling.  True, I had only ever lived in the South.  But cocooned on Army posts, I did not consider myself a Southerner.  When I was a teenager, my father was transferred to Germany, where I attended Frankfurt American High School with other military kids.  Life outside of the sentry gates  -- civilian life -- remained pretty much a mystery until I went off to college.

As an Army brat, I was an experienced shape-shifter, adept at being dropped into a new setting and quickly figuring out how to fit in.  But the University of Florida in Gainesville was a challenge on a different scale.  I ended up there thanks to in-state tuition, Florida being my parents’ official residence.  But I might as well have been set down on Mars. Some of the people I now found myself in school with had known each other since kindergarten.  

Before long, I had shape-shifted into a sorority girl of sorts.  I remember demonstrating good citizenship by gathering Spanish moss from the trees outside to be boxed up and shipped to Tri-Delt chapters up North for use as décor in plantation-themed parties.  Sorority life never felt like a good fit, but for a while I went along.   Gradually, though, I felt more and more estranged from my made-up persona.

Instead of openly declaring my independence, I simply began leading a double life.   For public consumption, I dated conventional, Corvette-driving fraternity boys.  But on the side I had a motorcycle-riding, acid-dropping boyfriend.  I’m sorry to say that disaffection with life as a Southern coed did not translate into political activism.  I’d spotted picketers around town so I knew there was a civil rights movement in Gainesville.  I was curious but kept my distance. Music happened first. 

My motorcycle boyfriend took me to a dive he frequented called Sarah’s Place --  a wood frame building behind a diner in Gainesville’s Black neighborhood.  There on weekends a woman named Sarah McKnight presented R&B, blues and jazz.  Jim Crow had ended, but the integrated musical line-ups at the club were still uncommon in the South.  I looked up Sarah’s recently, and discovered that the place is famous: Cab Calloway, B.B. King and James Brown all played there, as did white musicians who learned from them.  A documentary is in the works; there is already a poster designed by famous poster artist David Lance Goines. 

Evenings at Sarah’s Place were a big improvement over drunken bashes at the Sigma Nu House.  I was an outsider at Sarah’s too of course, and at first I was uncertain of my welcome.  But the crowd was happy and friendly and in that hot smoky room the music bound us together and fastened us deeply into the present moment.  There was no better place to be.  

Gradually extricating myself from sorority life, I discovered that Gainesville had more to offer than I’d assumed. Even so, I wanted out of the South.  So urgently that I didn’t even stick around for graduation.  On the last day of class of my college career I flew away, back to Europe where I felt more at home.

After a few detours, I ended up making my life in the North -- Providence and Cambridge and New York.  I was neither born nor bred a Yankee, yet I have shape-shifted so completely into this identity that friends I have known for years are shocked when they learn my true origins.  For years I never admitted to being from the South.  I felt I had turned the page on all that.  

Southern expat Willie Morris wrote in his classic memoir North Toward Home that for a time he was so ashamed at being from Mississippi that when introduced he’d claim he was from North Carolina instead.   Not different enough, I thought.  Why not Connecticut?  Or Vermont?    Willie’s Southern accent wouldn’t have let him get away with that, of course.  

As for me, I don’t have a Southern accent.  My present “coming out” as a Southerner is entirely voluntary -- though not entirely comfortable.  Yet since I have turned to them, the stories in The Pile cannot be denied.  As I pull on those threads, they pull on me, insistently, disturbingly.  Reminding me just why I kept them shut away in in my closet for so long.