We're already tangenting, and this is buried enough that I suspect it won't be found except by anyone who's really intent on reading all the details (and thus hopefully less likely to be confused or completely put-off by the notion of born-and-bred).
It was never a slam for being born in Grand Forks; Southerners don't slam. They simply sniff. Or kinda cut their eyes at you sideways, although I suppose it does add up to a severe slam, the way it just hangs there in the air. My parents and their peers, never such a word, and even my father's parents (who were not military, and did not move all over like my mother's family) never made the comment. It was distant relatives, or friends of my grandparents, but always rather subtle-like (because no one wanted to directly insult my grandparents, of course, and they sure didn't want to raise my mother's hackles because when she got angry on her kids' behalf, she remained polite but still very direct about it, which is practically like starting a knock-down brawl in Southern terms, especially in the rural areas where such comments/looks ever got made).
It has to do with two things: one, that we're talking about people who were probably first raising kids in the Great Depression -- or earlier. They were already in their 80s when I was little, so we're talking people older than dirt... and they'd dealt with Northerners arriving and telling them what to do pretty much their entire lives, all the way up to and including the Civil Rights movement (which, strangely, many of them did favor -- they seemed to respect MLK; they just didn't like the Northerners who showed up and acted like they knew everything and were here to educate the ignorant Southerners). Add in the Northerners who came down and stayed... and it's really only a few steps away (on the face of it, at least) from a kid born in the very-definite-north who now is quote-unquote raised-Southern. There was no doubt of my credentials/pedigree as a Southerner, but it was just this kind of... I don't know, partly affectionate-teasing, but with an edge underneath. Like they had their eye on me, just in case I started showing "northern" traits like, say, telling all the ignorant Southerners what to do and acting like I was better'n everyone else, or something.
But it was also a sideways dig at my parents, too -- since it was my father who was originally a good boy from a working-class family in rural Georgia, who went off to junior college at age 16 and the next thing anyone knows, he's got his bachelor's at age 20, off to get his master's, and then he's getting his PhD, and he's an officer in the Air Force. It's one thing to get educated -- it's another thing to couple this unexpected rapid rise with being stationed in Chicago, Denver, Grand Forks, and Germany. Like he might've been infected with non-Southern cooties, or something, I don't know... but I think that taps into the Southern kids who leave the rural areas, get educated, and then come back acting like Northerners -- like they know everything, and they can't stand to be associated with their rural, poor, bible-belt relatives. (Which, actually, was never how my Dad treated anyone; he said "yes sir" and "yes ma'am" to his elders, and does it even now; he's always been a Good Georgia Boy, even if he has multiple advanced degrees and is probably smarter than the entire population of Lizella Georgia all put together.)
I guess you could consider it more like a warning: that being tainted by outside influences (whether by education/exposure or by birth) might warp you away from being a 'true' Southerner. It wasn't a judgment -- I think they genuinely liked and respected my father, but I think they may've also been rather intimidated by him, too -- so much as, really, a warning. "We know you've seen other things, and your world is bigger than ours, but we can shut you out, if you get too big" -- and losing that Southern part would be a much greater loss, in a way.
The irony? Maybe it was the sideways looks from relatives combined with my own ornery senses, or just personality, but I very quickly became a tomboy with a lot of ideas of my own and a bad habit of forgetting to mind my elders. I was, in a word, cheeky, at all the wrong times, though I could do best-behavior if threatened with fear of God and not seeing the next sunrise. But the more I went about doing my own thing (which my mother encouraged, for the most part), the more the eldest relatives would nudge each other and mutter stuff I couldn't quite catch but had a sense I knew what it was, anyway.
Not that it really mattered, in the end, except as a rueful kind of self-ingratiating joke as the years passed, because by the time I was ten, most of those older-than-dirt relatives were in the ground with the dirt they outdated, anyway. But it did make me sensitive to the undercurrents of insider/outsider that exist in the rural areas, though I didn't understand those currents fully until I reached adulthood and had a better grasp of the history that lay within them.
no subject
Date: 6 Apr 2011 04:03 am (UTC)It was never a slam for being born in Grand Forks; Southerners don't slam. They simply sniff. Or kinda cut their eyes at you sideways, although I suppose it does add up to a severe slam, the way it just hangs there in the air. My parents and their peers, never such a word, and even my father's parents (who were not military, and did not move all over like my mother's family) never made the comment. It was distant relatives, or friends of my grandparents, but always rather subtle-like (because no one wanted to directly insult my grandparents, of course, and they sure didn't want to raise my mother's hackles because when she got angry on her kids' behalf, she remained polite but still very direct about it, which is practically like starting a knock-down brawl in Southern terms, especially in the rural areas where such comments/looks ever got made).
It has to do with two things: one, that we're talking about people who were probably first raising kids in the Great Depression -- or earlier. They were already in their 80s when I was little, so we're talking people older than dirt... and they'd dealt with Northerners arriving and telling them what to do pretty much their entire lives, all the way up to and including the Civil Rights movement (which, strangely, many of them did favor -- they seemed to respect MLK; they just didn't like the Northerners who showed up and acted like they knew everything and were here to educate the ignorant Southerners). Add in the Northerners who came down and stayed... and it's really only a few steps away (on the face of it, at least) from a kid born in the very-definite-north who now is quote-unquote raised-Southern. There was no doubt of my credentials/pedigree as a Southerner, but it was just this kind of... I don't know, partly affectionate-teasing, but with an edge underneath. Like they had their eye on me, just in case I started showing "northern" traits like, say, telling all the ignorant Southerners what to do and acting like I was better'n everyone else, or something.
But it was also a sideways dig at my parents, too -- since it was my father who was originally a good boy from a working-class family in rural Georgia, who went off to junior college at age 16 and the next thing anyone knows, he's got his bachelor's at age 20, off to get his master's, and then he's getting his PhD, and he's an officer in the Air Force. It's one thing to get educated -- it's another thing to couple this unexpected rapid rise with being stationed in Chicago, Denver, Grand Forks, and Germany. Like he might've been infected with non-Southern cooties, or something, I don't know... but I think that taps into the Southern kids who leave the rural areas, get educated, and then come back acting like Northerners -- like they know everything, and they can't stand to be associated with their rural, poor, bible-belt relatives. (Which, actually, was never how my Dad treated anyone; he said "yes sir" and "yes ma'am" to his elders, and does it even now; he's always been a Good Georgia Boy, even if he has multiple advanced degrees and is probably smarter than the entire population of Lizella Georgia all put together.)
I guess you could consider it more like a warning: that being tainted by outside influences (whether by education/exposure or by birth) might warp you away from being a 'true' Southerner. It wasn't a judgment -- I think they genuinely liked and respected my father, but I think they may've also been rather intimidated by him, too -- so much as, really, a warning. "We know you've seen other things, and your world is bigger than ours, but we can shut you out, if you get too big" -- and losing that Southern part would be a much greater loss, in a way.
The irony? Maybe it was the sideways looks from relatives combined with my own ornery senses, or just personality, but I very quickly became a tomboy with a lot of ideas of my own and a bad habit of forgetting to mind my elders. I was, in a word, cheeky, at all the wrong times, though I could do best-behavior if threatened with fear of God and not seeing the next sunrise. But the more I went about doing my own thing (which my mother encouraged, for the most part), the more the eldest relatives would nudge each other and mutter stuff I couldn't quite catch but had a sense I knew what it was, anyway.
Not that it really mattered, in the end, except as a rueful kind of self-ingratiating joke as the years passed, because by the time I was ten, most of those older-than-dirt relatives were in the ground with the dirt they outdated, anyway. But it did make me sensitive to the undercurrents of insider/outsider that exist in the rural areas, though I didn't understand those currents fully until I reached adulthood and had a better grasp of the history that lay within them.