31.

there's been a lot of missing going on lately.

i've been thinking a lot up here in the North about where i come from and where i wanna be whenever i take flight next. i work on memory management - filtering one at a time, letting it enter me and then exit before it stays too long and singes the periphery of emotion that causes all this missing. lately, i'm not sure why, i've been burned by the memories that surface. maybe there it's a matter of sheer quantity, maybe its that i've been putting myself in places where hear banjos and little ladies who explode at the mouth with a drawl that hints of a gritty past with dirt roads and cotton fields. all i know is its here and images of the south and my past have been on my heart. i miss it. my spirit rises when i meet a fellow rabble rouser from the south up here.

i celebrate something, but i wonder what it is i'm celebrating.
i can't help but wonder if in my romanticization of all that is southern and good i am buying into the factory-made vision of the south that fuels myths and ideas which don't always feel like home.

so, I find myself asking that age old question…what feels like home?

sometimes memories of arrowhead hunting are home. i think of pine forests and red clay. then i remember an old saying i came across about that red clay - that it was died red from the blood of slaves. i shudder…but i go on.
i sometimes think of bonfires out in the country with stumps from old pines serving as seats. then the fires make me think of burning crosses in small Georgia counties. it is terrifying, but i keep studying. i read about the streets i biked down in Atlanta nesting riots over skin color that were charged with fear, i see photos of human beings dangling, the strange fruit, from trees that surrounded one of the universities i attended. it gets awfully murky when you swim so deep.

i guess what i'm coming to realize is that never before in my life has my love of place been so directly challenged. up here, in the north, studying American slavery, the history of this country, and the politics of race, people want to tell gruesome tales of southern lynchings, they want to call Maryland the South, and they sometimes study georgia – my home – as a foreign place and talk about it in abstract ways. i don’t know much what home is, but I do know what it isn’t.

i know more about my mother region than i ever have in my life. i read about it every day. i study old newspapers, sermons, and the fictions infused with southern truths. all the ugly that i’ve learned, the many hidden secrets of the south, haven’t pushed me away. i’m drawn even closer in. i think it’s like when you are in love, really in love, with another person and they do things that make you want to scream, but eventually those things – falling asleep during movies, burping at the table, smacking gum – somehow wedge into your heart and become endearing…make you love that person more. yep, i think that’s the way it is…i’ve never loved the south as much as i do now that i’m unearthing her dirtiest secrets, her most irritating traits, but damn it if I’ve only just scratched the surface of that red clay.