Planting Dandelions (18 page)

He went back that time, but he never gave up. Like I said, you can start something with a southern man, but you can't make him stop.

By the time I met Patrick, I'd forgotten that Levon Helm came from Arkansas. Everybody in the world mocks Americans for being ignorant of geography beyond their own border, but all I knew about the twenty-fifth state was that the new American president came from there. Before Bill Clinton, I didn't even know how to pronounce Arkansas. I thought it was pronounced Ar-KAN-zuss, and was adjunct to Kansas. Like North and South Dakota, or the Carolinas. Kansas and Ar-Kansas. If I had to come up with a mental image, it would have been borrowed straight from
The Wizard of Oz
or
The Grapes of Wrath
: tumbleweeds and twisters. I didn't realize that it was part of the mythic American South (though the Old South scarcely recognizes it as such, situated as it is in the wilderness west of the Mississippi). But Arkansas is planted deep in Dixie, with cotton fields and magnolia trees, antebellum mansions and sharecropping shacks, blues music and barbecue pits. Among its less charming bona fides are slavery, Jim Crow, rednecks, and wrathful religion.

It was springtime when I arrived, after spending the winter with Patrick in Mexico. “Well, what do you think?” he asked, sitting beside me in Lucy, his '64 Comet, on the interstate between Texarkana and Little Rock. That car drove like a manta ray swims, undulating from side to side as it glided over the asphalt. The warm vinyl stuck to my bare legs. Empty cigarette packages and ashes were scattered around our feet. Our money was all gone, our bridges all burned. Now what?

I looked out the side window and shrugged indifferently. Dense stands of trees lined the highway. I hadn't expected it to be so green. “Bushy,” I replied.

I didn't know what to call things, the vocabulary of the land. I knew the pine, but not the hickory or the sweet gum. There was no spruce or birch, no alders. I didn't have the words to see: black oak, buckeye, dogwood. I saw forest, not trees. It was claustrophobic. Having lived on an island for most of my life, I was used to being able to gaze into the distance. The spacious high desert felt more like home to me. Here, even in April, the foliage was so lush it writhed. The vines that covered the trees seemed to be reaching out, conspiring to tie me down.

I resisted at first. I didn't care to learn the names of things. I liked being a stranger, which was fortunate, since the mentality, if not the geography, of the South
is
an island. I was what we in Newfoundland call a “come-from-away,” an outsider. I knew it was useless to try to blend in, so I made the most of my strangeness, enjoying the license it afforded me. For the first few years, I had a kind of diplomatic immunity when it came to transgressing the cryptic and convoluted code of southern behavior, aka “act right.” I was generally forgiven for not knowing any better, a benefit of the doubt that southerners don't extend to their fellow citizens who come from the North. I was a foreigner, but at least I was no Yankee.

Let's locate this South before I make another sweeping generalization about its sons and daughters. There are seventeen states that the U.S. Census Bureau calls the South. There are eleven states of the Old Confederacy that history designates as the South. But those definitions are just flimsy overlays on a map. The real South exists in the collective imagination of those who call themselves southerners; it's a compilation of stories that happen to be set in a particular place, often having very little to do with actual history, culture, or individuals. But that's neither here nor there. Just because a story isn't factual doesn't mean it isn't true.

One of these stories is that southerners are the trustees of higher civilization and social graces. Obviously, there are ignorant and boorish people everywhere, and plenty of the worst examples say “y'all,” fluently. Neither does genteel refinement make someone courteous or kind. There's a self-congratulatory aspect of “act right” that can be downright ugly when it's flung around in contempt. You can coat that shit in sugar, but it's still shit. Still, there is a value on decorum here that transcends class divisions and very often finds sincere and gracious expression. It's almost archaic, and it took some getting used to. I found it oddly formal at first that children were expected to answer their own parents with “No, ma'am” and “Yes, sir,” and quaint that they put “Miss” or “Mister” in front of adult family friends' first names. It took me a while to become attuned to the roundabout way southerners have of communicating. Sometimes it was all I could do to keep from asking someone to get to their ever-loving point, if they even had one. I still haven't figured out why it is preferable to stand behind someone in the grocery aisle, seething resentment, rather than come out and politely ask if they might move their cart aside, but I do know what it means when the subject is deftly changed midconversation (they disagree strongly with something you said), and that “Bless her heart” translates to “That is one crazy bitch.” I cannot imagine speaking English anymore without the indispensable pronoun “y'all,” equivalent to the French
vous
, in that it provides an oblique way of addressing someone, instead of the more intrusive and intimate “you.”

By the time “y'all” crept into my vernacular, I was acculturated, and my diplomatic pass was revoked. I can't claim anymore not to know better. I am expected to act right, and I have come to expect it of others, though we all fail regularly. I've lived in the South long enough to absorb the story, and perpetuate it. I find it jarring now to travel to parts of the country where people don't hold doors for one another, or are blunt-spoken and abrupt with strangers. It's possible, on such occasions, I have glanced down my nose at a very slight angle, and thought,
Yankees.

Like the Old Testament, the stories of the South don't always line up. Southerners have strong, and often contradictory, opinions about what is, or isn't, bona fide. I'm not one to let ignorance keep me on the sidelines of a good argument. I read
Southern Living
. I've seen
Gone With the Wind
. And I've drunk quite a lot of bourbon in my time. I think those credentials are unimpeachable, but my husband resists my attempts to correct him on the finer points of southern culture, particularly when it comes to food. Take, for example, strawberry shortcake. I prefer a biscuit-style shortcake, which Patrick refers to as “some northern idea of shortcake.” I insist it is true southern shortcake, one, holy, and apostolic. The oily sponge-cake-based abomination he thinks of as shortcake, I tell him, is not a
southern
delicacy at all, but a trailer park one. It's the trailer trash card, and I am not above playing it to win the culture war at home.

I ought to be ashamed. Patrick was raised in trailer parks, but there was nothing trashy about his upbringing. Like plenty of folks whose homes are factory made, as I was to discover when I moved here, his parents were respectable and fastidious people, who worked hard and lived modestly. They weren't sophisticates, but they didn't match up with the stereotype either. His dad was a meter man for the light company, and his mom, an office clerk. They put two sons through braces, cars, and college; helping them with mortgage down payments and seeing them through tight spots. Their homes may have been mobile, but that family was built on a rock-solid foundation. I never knew anything like it, though the house I grew up in had a poured basement and my parents had college degrees. But I have no scruples when it comes to being right. I have played the trailer trash card over scratch biscuits versus canned, cornbread with sugar versus cornbread without, sweetened iced tea versus unsweetened, mustardbased barbecue sauce over molasses-based, drop dumplings versus rolled, cheese grits versus plain.

Patrick is impervious to my siege. He's not insecure about his upbringing or his preferences. The closest he ever comes to conceding are the times he will allow with a snort that perhaps biscuit-style shortcake is what they eat back east on the coast or in some other pretentious, carpetbag-infiltrated part of the South, but it doesn't have a place in his South. “That's just some shit you read in a book,” he'll say, and he almost always has me there.

Food is gospel in the South. Nothing, not even guns, is considered as sacred. Cooking and eating are the highest form of storytelling there is. Recipes serve as heirlooms and pedigrees, to be passed from generation to generation. When I married Patrick, I inherited a wealth of them, but the jewel in the family crown is cornbread dressing.

The savory bread mixture that northerners stuff into birds before roasting is considered by southerners to be an abomination in the sight of the Lord. Cornbread dressing, baked in a separate pan, is what is served with Thanksgiving turkey, and every family has its own recipe. Ours came down Patrick's maternal line, and was thought to be unique until I learned that a friend in North Carolina inherited a very similar recipe, proving she and my husband are related by dressing. If DNA mutations can track human migration patterns, why not culinary adaptations? We may never know when or why my sons' Scots-Irish ancestors started pushing westward from the Carolinas through Georgia, Alabama, and on to Arkansas. But it looks as if somewhere along the way they added eggs to the cornbread dressing. Call it manifest destiny.

I used to make the dressing myself, but in recent years, Patrick has taken over, appointing our eldest son as his apprentice. My in-laws died within a few years of each other. Their last mobile home—a prefab on a beautifully landscaped country lot—was sold, and the extended family drifted into diaspora. Unless you count photographs and a couple of pieces of furniture, there's nothing tangible to connect our children to their Arkansas grandparents. Until we make dressing.

My contribution is to bake up cornbread in the cast-iron skillet I chose as a memento from my mother-in-law's kitchen after she died. A well-seasoned skillet is a treasure, something no southern kitchen can be without. Mothers traditionally pass them on to daughters. I am meticulous in protecting that skillet, as I am about very few objects, never letting a drop of soap near the gleaming black surface. I think Millie would be proud to know I have it, and would say I've earned it, even if I am a foreigner. I knew her only a short time, but I loved her, as she was beloved by all her family and friends. To the grandchildren who knew her, she was “Honey,” engraved upon her headstone beneath her name.

On Thanksgiving eve, I listen to her son reading aloud to his son the steps written in his mother's lovely hand. Amid the egg cracking and the cornbread crumbling, he tells stories about Thanksgivings past, and explains the difference between cornbread dressing and bread stuffing. True religion.

“You were born in the South, son. Don't ever forget that.” He says it loud enough to be sure I can hear, and when I look up, I can see the teasing gleam in his eyes, daring me to make something of it.

When we're not talking about food and good manners, I have conflicted feelings about the place of southern pride in my sons' psyches. It's a sensitive topic, because you can't separate southern pride from southern shame. It's not possible to invoke a glorious South without calling up the ignominious one. Slavery and segregation are entwined at its roots. My children don't have to dig very deep to find racism. Patrick warned me, when I came to Arkansas, that his parents were “old-fashioned,” but I never got used to the shock of hearing racial slurs coming from the mouths of people whom I knew to be so kind and loving in every other regard. To hear them casually drop the N-word or tell a racist joke was always blindsiding. I wanted to believe that the words were simply the hollow remnants of a bygone age; that they came from ignorance and obstinacy, not hatred. My in-laws grew up in a society where such language and thinking were not just acceptable, they were institutional. Patrick's mother's senior high school class was disrupted by the landmark desegregation crisis that shut down Little Rock Central High in the fifties. I had seen images of the mob all my life; the white teenagers and adults with their faces twisted in rage, the terrified black students clutching their schoolbooks. I was raised by liberal intellectuals, in a place that had virtually no racial minority population. From that high, academic vantage point, it was easy to look down on racism and racists, and condemn both as pure and simple evil. Encountering it in real people didn't convince me that racism was any less wrong, but it did teach me that it's quite a bit more complicated.