Emily Bowles
The Threatened Ecology of a Southern Girl
When I was twelve years old, I pretended that I was British. I affected an accent that sounded to me at the time perfect--intellectual, cosmopolitan, polite, poised, and replete in the greatness of kings and queens, of moors and crags, of voices, people, codes, and landscapes I did not know. Of course, watching family videos I see now how silly I sounded and how cut adrift, with my brother staring at me, my sister mimicking me, and my parents both sure only that my grades were good and my skirts and shorts always fell below my knees. My sister, at twenty-one, laughs at the footage. "I wanted to be just like you," she recently chuckled, "Isn't that silly?"
I don't know if she was thinking about my false voice or my too-contrived clothes when she said that. And maybe I'm again being egotistical. She may have just meant that she's different from me. She is at peace with who she is now. But I felt an implicit critique, biting and cruel. I had not known who I was then. I had not wanted to be a twelve year old girl growing up in the South, attending a school founded on the politics of football and eating meatloaf that my Mama tried to bake in competition with more adept Southern Living-style suburban housewife neighbors. I was so unhappy in my surroundings that I convinced myself at various times I had come from some place else, a changeling or an otherwise adopted baby with ties to something greater than the product of a meeting between a family of alcoholics who'd killed themselves out and left only an unflinchingly stoical Mormon (my father) and a family of artists who made quilts and sock monkeys, neither of which my mother had interest in or patience for.
To me, it seemed cruel. I could not be so common, so beneath common even. I waited for the truth to come out and when it did not, I simply fabricated it for myself. I detached myself and spent all of my time reading first, then writing.
As a reader, I was decidedly and quite consciously non-Southern. I read Wuthering Heights at least five times during the year that I was in seventh grade. My copy of the novel became progressively more dog-eared and tattered, not only from repeated readings but also from my excessive journal writing in the margins of the texts. Even in my writing, the privacy and concealment of choosing the empty spaces framing Emily Brontë's words showed that I was already hopelessly derivative and banal. As a twelve-year-old with braces and a football coach father, a house in the suburbs and a family history of migrating to trailer parks upon retirement, I obviously didn't understand Wuthering Heights at all. I just knew that it offered something beyond what seemed the only possibility to me: a minivan in the driveway, soccer practice for a different child each night, PTA meetings, doctor's appointments, and an unending repertoire of dishes based on Hamburger Helper or Rice-A-Roni. So I took the only parts of the book I understood and tried to make them my own. Like Cathy, I secluded myself and wrote my name in its possible married variations (all again entirely fabricated, since I wouldn't have a boyfriend in any broadly defined sense of the term until I turned seventeen) in my books. I wrote of my longings and my passions. I wrote explicitly sexual, visceral poems without recognizing the reality or corporeality of sex. I knew everything as metaphor, as I read it in classics and in historical romances, adolescent fictions, any of the books I devoured when my Mama took us to the Snellville Public Library once, sometimes twice, each week.
I did not at any point during my years of voracious reading even glance at Faulkner, O'Connor, Welty. Did not think of picking up anything that might seem to hit too close to home, too close for comfort.
It wasn't until I was far along in graduate school that I began to even remotely suspect that I might have, in relegating Southern literature to the same category to which I relegated movies like Joe Dirt or comedians like Jeff Foxworthy, made an error that cost me something of myself.
I had been in college for six years--four years as an undergraduate and two years working on my Master's degree--before I applied to a private college to work on my Ph.D. When I began my Ph.D. program, I was steeped in dead women. I had never actually known a woman who died then, not personally until a few years later, so I found something reassuring about women who had written against the odds and died, acquiring posthumous fame centuries later (for most of them, at least, fame that extended only among academics, particularly those seeking publications and a new author to discover and critique). Women like Aphra Behn, so threatening to phallocentricism during their lifetimes, were dust now and I could safely interpret their writings through a variety of critical lenses, in combination with whatever texts I chose, without endangering them and without putting myself at risk in anyway.
I knew that, just like Wuthering Heights years ago, Jane Austen's novels could help me detach myself and would not make me accept the reality of my accent, which was now simply Southern since I had at some point realized that the mock British one sounded ridiculous and false.
I didn't want confrontation. I didn't want to see what I knew, that I didn't fit into the schemas that I elaborated and interrogated with just enough jargon, just enough egotism.
The confrontations, I quickly found as I entered a program of ten entering students rather than thirty or so, would not be with the literature. Crisply, cruelly, fellow students with clipped accents asked me where I did my undergrad--already knowing, of course, and only wanting to reinforce the fact that they went to such-and-such Ivy League or so-and-so Seven Sisters.
My accent, my openness, my idealism were all things that made me vulnerable. These qualities made me realize how self-aware I was of my Southernness and how ashamed--yet how inextricable it was from who I was and am. I didn't know what to do with that shame, not among people who hadn't just read about "high teas" but had also been to them, who knew the difference between sherry and bourbon, having had experiences with liquor beyond Pabst Blue Ribbon or boxed-up wine.
I didn't feel at home and, sometime in between listening to barbs proffered as pseudo-compliments, darts thrown like imaginary offers of friendship, I decided that I needed to leave. I needed to figure out where I fit, because it was not among these glossy Ph.D. candidates with perfectly colored hair and perpetual parental subsidization.
In some ways to escape them, to find myself, just after my twenty-sixth birthday I moved into a cracker shack. I wish I could say the decision was entrenched in a burning desire to reclaim my Southernness, to rewrite myself. That took awhile longer still. My move was more overtly dictated by money and by my desire to move in with my boyfriend, stereotypically cracker decisions but based more on need than on a desire to adhere to or to enact type, class, region.
I didn't know then that there was a name for the particular contraption, box-shaped and perched just off the ground, that offered me shelter and my first miserable experiences with a septic system. No, I just knew that I wasn't living just outside of Atlanta anymore. Somehow, that recognition was what I needed to start looking for my family and myself in literature instead of using literature to evade my past, to escape my future.
I read Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (1999) in some ways as a joke. My boyfriend--after having met my parents, seen the huge plastic light-up figurines my Mama put outside for each holiday and heard about my cousin's marriage to his stepsister--told me I'd probably like it.
I don't know if it was spite or the desire to prove him wrong that made me pick up the book, but I brought Ecology with me into the bathtub each night for three days, savoring the pages and also shuddering, seeing too much of myself and my hometown in Ray's depiction of Baxley.
"That's me," I thought as I read about how Ray played school either with her brothers or her dolls in the junkyard. Or when I read about her job in the library. Or when I recognized in her mother's collection of knickknacks my mother's own.
The most important identification that I made, however, was in her chapter on shame. Ray concludes the chapter:
Turning back to embrace the past has been a long, slow lesson not only in self-esteem but in patriotism--pride in homeland, heritage. It has taken a decade to whip the shame, to mispronounce words and shun grammar when mispronunciation and misspeaking are part of my dialect, to own the blood. What I come from has made me who I am. (page 33)
That was exactly what I needed then. Stretched in the bathtub, I read the passage over and over, crying. I couldn't deny who I was, who I am, and I had to accept the landscape, the language, the life to which my identity was ineluctably bound. For me, Ecology is about putting together in print the things that I had previously thought not only unworthy of print but also avoidable through it.
Reading Ecology, I did learn about the longleaf pines. I learned about pine ecosystems and about human ecosystems, about how the two are inextricable from each other. What makes Ecology life changing and even life saving, however, is how it brings people and nature together through a literature that allows the South to be home--home for literature as well as for human beings.
For a woman who had avoided Faulkner, Welty, O'Connor, who had steeped herself in women and men who wrote about landscapes that geographic and temporal restraints would always make unavailable, who had willfully unlearned stereotypes of Southern manners, Southern vernacular, Southern dietary predilections, what Ray offered in Ecology was hope. I found myself willing to embrace the writers and the world that I had shunned, recognizing that anyone who judged me as an ignorant, bigoted, grit-eating, porch-sitting Southerner would not let my education and my frighteningly tenuous accent trick them into accepting me and that I needed to be comfortable with the terms of my origin if I ever wanted to create anything that wasn't horribly derivative. I knew that I wouldn't immediately have unbridled, unmediated access to even my own Southernness--or even the Southernness of my neighbors, like the woman in my aerobics class who threw seasonal crop parties or the Mary Kay saleswoman who told me all about how she found Jesus and placed her products only just after Him and her husband. Ecology simply showed me that I needed to reassess the way I define myself in relation to my place, my landscape.
Parts of that process for me included reading Ray's more recent book, Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home, as well as consciously choosing to read Southern authors, particularly women, and glorying in the connections I see between them and myself--but simultaneously trying to sort out differences. How is my South different from Flannery O'Connor's, from Rosemary Daniell's, from Mab Segrest's, from Dorothy Allison's?
Going to the Southern Women Writer's Conference in Rome, Georgia, recently made everything crystallize. The days formed, in my mind, something so hard and multifaceted that I could not destroy it with over-contemplation, with all of my pseudo-analytical academic training and intellectual skepticism. I felt myself acquiring something precious, something created by the convergence of the right amounts of passion, beauty, despair, anger, self-consciousness, pride, and power all in one crucible. Something that, for me, needed to be made at this particular moment, in Georgia, among self-defined Southern women, and writers to boot.
The crystallization was not permanent--it wasn't intended to be.
Instead, it provided me with something beautiful by which I could measure my own reintegration, assimilation into my environment, my home in semi-rural, semi-urban Alabama and my past in the Georgia suburbs. It provided me with a sense of the stories that I could tell from my life, not of great passions enacted in Napoleonic France or Medieval England but rather of my own passions, my own place. In those few days of listening and learning, of walking through the longleaf pines with Janisse Ray and a small group of conference attendees, of listening with rapt attention to Dorothy Allison speaking from the pulpit, of watching hundreds of women announce what exactly made each of them individually a Southern woman writer, I discovered what it is to be a Southern woman, what it is to want to be a writer, and how the two fit together.
To understand that life lived is worth writing down, and that a Southern life is no less worthy of print and of pride than any other one, is something not often taught in Southern schools to Southern children. We know from such early ages about poor school systems, about poor people, about poor diets, about poor politics, but I don't think we cannot know much else until we look around us and see the South as full of storied objects and of storytellers, something that sadly I did not do. Until now.
Like Ray, I am searching now for the landscapes in which I will see the story of my life inscribed. Having grown up in a well-planted and manicured subdivision, having encountered nature at Stone Mountain and at the Yellow River Game Ranch, my landscape requires more interrogation and what amounts, for me, to multiple tactics of reclamation. I need to look at people and places through eyes trained not to scoff at soccer moms and janitors, not to dismiss kudzu and Queen Anne's Lace.
As I search, I bring with me books by others who have succeeded. Not to take from them images, events, and emotions, as I did when I tried to make Heathcliff my own lover and Ophelia my own insanity. No, I need them to be my sisters. And with sisters like them, like the women cheering as other women explain their own identities as women writing the South, I do not need to look much further than the exposed septic tank of my cracker shack and the heavy limbed pecan tree outside my bedroom window to know that there is much left to be told, much that I know.
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Emily Bowles lives in Auburn, Alabama, and graduated from the University of Georgia.
