I feel like I should have prefaced the previous entry with some explanation. For those of you who don't know, I'm a southerner by birth, and I spent the first 28 years of my life in various parts of the South (Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana). My family, with the exception of my brother, still calls it home. When I first moved to California, I almost felt like I needed to hide this fact. There was a sense that if I revealed my roots, I wouldn't be taken as seriously as someone from, say, Cleveland. It was as if Alabama carried a stigma that would land me only vast amounts of mockery and countless dead-end jobs.
I could keep the information from people...until I spoke to them. No, I don't have a thick accent (rarely use y'all, fixin', or ain't) and many people don't hear it all. But it's there and when you haven't heard the drawl other than on TV I suppose it's really not that difficult to pick up. After a while, I decided that it wasn't worth the effort. In fact, as time went by, I became less self-conscious of the fact that I am a Southerner.
I've been thinking a lot about my Southern heritage lately. Sure, there is plenty that I'm not proud of, plenty that needs to be damned, plenty to even be ashamed of. But there is that rich culture that seems to be disappearing faster than it can be recorded. Every time a computer is plugged in or a satellite dish is put up in the rural regions of the South, a little more of the autonomy of the region vanishes. Of course, there is good to be gained from this, but with the good comes the decay of traditions. How long before the mountain music becomes only an artifact on a web page? How long will it be before the oral tradition, the art of storytelling so rich in the South, is replaced by html-encoded e-mails? And I could go on.
I guess some of this reflection comes from seeing the movie Big Fish over the weekend. In the movie, set mostly in Alabama, a son patches together a biography of his dying father. Much of what the son knows comes from "tall-tales" told by the father, tales that the son gives absolutely no credibility to, and in fact is so turned off by the stories that he has stopped speaking with his father. The father does spin some very fantastic yarns and when taken only on their surface could be interpreted as nothing but fantastic ramblings of a certifiable bullshitter. The son, on the other hand, represents that new wave of Southern children: skeptical, jaded, modern. He, too, is a storyteller, but instead of following in the oral tradition of the father, he's a reporter for the UPI bureau in Paris (France, not Texas). He is a man determined to get the facts and deliver them in black and white with ink, not with the colorful words and imagination of his father.
Sadly enough, I've seen some of this first hand. My great-grandparents lived long enough for me to remember hearing their stories, often told while sitting on the front porch. Even my grandparents relayed a certain part of their history through tales. I can recall days spent listening to my grandfather discuss his childhood through elaborate stories about baseball games, either witnessed or played. I see less of that in my parents. They are much more concrete, their narratives tend to lean toward the factual side. My father is a storyteller, but I don't think he has a fantastic bone in his body. Mom simply relates what she knows and only if she thinks it worth both her effort to tell it and our effort to listen to it.
That leaves me..."the writer". My personality doesn't really allow for me to be the vocal teller of tales. I pretty much live on the page. But I'll never forget the afternoons spent on my great-grandmother's knee as she entertained me with some of the grandest stories, stories I don't really recall other than bits and pieces (one about some kids getting lost in a basement, for example). And who knows what I'll pass down to my children. Will the written word be enough? Will they be able to piece together my biography through the short stories I've written? But I'm sure whatever way I choose to deliver it, my children will be able to hear the South in my voice. And I guess now I'm not afraid to admit that.
posted by Jeff 12/29/2003
