My Southern Season

            Once again we’re making a home away from home. This semester my husband is teaching at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Once again, I’ll be writing about a place that is new to me.

            Before I begin, I decided to reflect on my particular perspective on this place.

What baggage---mental, emotional, spiritual--- comes with me? How might it effect my perceptions?

 I saw Singapore through the lens of my previous years studying at The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Still, there was much surprised me, like Lee Kuan Yu and the management of diverse languages and ethnicities of the city-state that calls itself “the red dot.” Much remained opaque, although English is widely spoken and written, and Singaporeans analyze themselves endlessly in the state owned newspaper and the state funded universities.

            To Switzerland I brought my early education in the French language, my study of European art history as an undergraduate, previous travel in France, Germany and Italy. I reveled in the layers of history, Celtic, Roman, and the formation of the Swiss Federation, and like Singapore, multiple languages. Still, much of the Swiss way of doing things remained a mystery to me.

            The mental baggage I’ve brought to Chapel Hill was packed in my earliest childhood by the most important woman in my life: my grandmother. Anna Louise Connor was born in Waxahachie Texas to a South Carolinian father and Irish Catholic immigrant mother. I can recall the Nanny’s warmth, the feel and odor of her aged skin. I can see the oasis of gentility she created in New York City’s bohemian Greenwich Village, furnished with finds she picked up in Asia, Europe and Mexico. I memorized the family history she preserved in her diaries and scrapbooks. I wrote a youthful story about sifting through those fragments. In short, I idolized her life as romantic and colorful, so different from my suburban existence in the 1950s and 1960s; so different from my no-nonsense died-in-the-wool Yankee mother.

            She was not a native to New York City. But even as an octogenarian, she took me on adventures in Manhattan: for haircuts at Best’s Department Store, to the pushcarts of Bleecker Street, to feed the pigeons in Washington Square and to devour lunch at Hamburger Heaven around the corner from her beloved Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Her cousins from the Carolinas, Mississippi and Alabama, came to visit on holidays, usually bringing pecans.

She had married another Southerner with family from both South and North Carolina. She and my grandfather established themselves in the mid-western city of Toledo, Ohio at the turn of the century. They oriented my father to the Eastern establishment. Widowed, she followed my father to the Big Apple.

            Before she died in 1967, I followed her trail, with travel to Europe and to South America. I balked at visiting Ireland, which persisted in its book-banning, birth-control blocking ways.

In spite of my abhorrence of the atrocities of Jim Crow and Southern resistance to the Civil Rights movement, I ventured South some five years after she died. I drove from Washington, DC to New Orleans. I stopped to visit her niece in South Carolina, who pointed me to our distant cousin, still living in the decaying white-columned house in the tiny piedmont town of Cokesbury. I searched for traces of Nanny when I visited Shadows-on-the-Teche in New Iberia, Louisiana, as she had, on a railroad trip from Texas to South Carolina.

Over the years, I have learned more about my Connor and Bowen antecedents in the South. I’ve learned that some were slave-owners; some were preachers, some tradesmen, some Irish, some Welsh, some Huguenots. Some fought in the Revolutionary War, some in the Civil War. Part of me wants to indict those ancestral Connors and the Bowens for their roles in the white people’s south. My grandmother never spoke of the dark side of her family history.

I’ve learned that other sections of the United States share responsibility for injustices to non-white peoples. Where was I when the Chapel Hill Nine sat-in at the Carolina Café and many marched down Franklin Street? I was in the auditorium of an all white high school in suburban Westchester County. I listened as a speaker from the N.A.A.C.P. explained what was happening in the South. I cried in incredulity that our Constitution, was failing to give Blacks the equality I thought it guaranteed. I did nothing.

So there you have it. Here I am, on hollowed ground. It is not my ground, and yet it is. All I can do is look, listen, read, tell you what I perceive, and hope you learn with me.