DANGLING ROOTS

Dorothy Hampton Marcus

Dorothy Hampton Marcus is writing a book entitled I Didn't Know What I Didn't Know: A Southern White Woman's Story About Race

Lacy was my pastor in Philadelphia. He was Southern. He/we were, are, ever shall be Southern. One doesn't get over it. Lacy was probably the first person to express for me what Southerners often feel when we're transplanted. He said to me one day, "I feel safe with you. Sometimes I feel like all those others are somehow out to get me!" Lacy summed up all our Southern mixed up feelings: shame, guilt, denial, defensiveness, which are written all over us, making us feel exposed. Here was this tall, good looking man, highly educated, respected in Philadelphia, and deeply loved by his congregation, who still felt the twinges of Southern disComfort in the midst of all these damyankees. I knew what he was talking about.

Our thin layer of paranoia is not based on crass overt damyankee mistreatment. We feel that we are being looked down upon. They think we're dumb because of our drawl and circulatory way of talking. A subtle patronizing attitude that we sense or imagine on the basis of what we internalized long ago: those damyankees think they are better than we are. And they don't even don't know how to cook vegetables. In fact they don't cook them; they just heat them up a little with no seasoning. Anybody ought to know they taste better if you cook 'em till they're soft and they've had a chance to soak up the flavor from the fatback.

And of course the Damyankees always assume we are bigots, when we know that those of us who have grown up with segregation and had an opportunity to see the light, understand more about race than they do with their superficial liberalism based on some intellectual thought that "we're all just alike." Sure -- "But don't let them move into our neighborhood and ruin our property values."

Being Southern is a class thing. We had/have our own class system in "the South" that is not unlike "the North's," based on economics, job, neighborhood, degree of sophistication, education, etc.

Regardless of our class down home, when we come North we are in a different class from the damyankees. It may be our self-perception or perhaps more nearly our perception of their perception. Anyway, it's a matter of feeling like our Southern roots are dangling and we can't get them transplanted so they don't show. The accent never quite disappears. The Southern expressions keep seeping out.