Revered Southern writer Eudora Welty once advised us to “write what you don’t know about what you know,” gently informing us that we can’t know everything, even (or perhaps especially) when we think we do, and that if we dive below the surface of our beliefs, we might come across a deeper, more complex meaning than what our general assumptions have led us to think.

The place I call home, here in the South, is often – increasingly -- unknowable to me. In these days, it feels even more burdened with its people who cling to a memorialized past, as if there could ever have been anything benign or correct in its closemindedness about race and religion. Maybe we’re returning to the Jim Crow South – or maybe we never left, the law notwithstanding, and the shameful, hateful, sinful voices had just been temporarily hushed by the social thrust of the past three generations. I am nearly deafened by those voices, which have returned with a vengeance, unleashed after decades of reproach by people like me. This voice yearns to be the single voice of the South. 

And so, for me, what is it about the South that’s so compelling? I know I love the land, I love the storytellers, I love the music, I love our foodways, I love our diverse accents and colloquialisms, I love the gentle and familial nature of our people … and I try to remember that none of those features and attributes are limited to people whose sensibilities are similar to my own. Even the most hardhearted bigot loves his mama. 

It’s visceral, a sense memory, this attraction to and ambiguity about the South. My sister, who like me left as a teenager, has said that she craves our home state of Florida – its landscape, that is, the Florida of rich black swamp soil and live oaks and Spanish moss and the river we grew up on. I do, too. Here in the Upper South, where I have lived most of my life now, when the wind brushes the tops of pine trees, I still instantly hear river and ocean tides, whispering palm fronds. I hear early morning birds calling as they cross the sky and, to this day, a full 50 years after leaving home, I first think of sea gulls and sandpipers, not woodpeckers and blue jays. 

My feeling of ambiguity, then, is rooted in our weighty history and our sagging present. I am bogged down in, trapped by, the image we send the rest of the world when Confederate battle flags flutter alongside the national flag, when we insist on keeping the old bad ways – disrespecting one aspect of our heritage and people in order to condone another, as when schools refuse to let loose of racially tainted mascots and names, as when we insist on a single true religion, a single true political party, as when we double-down, white-knuckled, when asked why we feel this way, act this way, think this way, when “this way” runs counter to common decency and common sense. 

These are broad strokes, but regardless, we are a people with a collective chip on our shoulders. We dare not forget what atrocities were visited by or on our ancestors. Our skin is raw from constant vigilance against the heavy slap of violence and disrespect, from being judged as ignorant and backward, as poor in education as in ambition – the twin hardships of Southern Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta writ large across the entire region.

It is true that the South stands apart from the rest of the country. As historian C. Vann Woodward pointed out, we are the only American region to have lost a major war and to be occupied by our vanquishers – vanquishers who are, in fact, our siblings, a terrible truth. As door after door down here slams shut, allowing entrance only to a single-minded, razor-focused point of view, I have to wonder if this narrowness is the cry of a people who yet taste bitter defeat and so insist on winning at any cost, at denying others of us air and space to breathe and thrive. It feels like death and defeat. We are the victims of self-inflicted ruin – today, nearly as severely as we were at the end of the Civil War. 

Another revered Southern writer, William Faulkner, once told an audience that for writers, there’s “no room … for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” 

Those universal truths can transcend confusion and doubt, reminding us that no land is above reproach, just as no land is immune to the possibility of redemption. This, at least, I know: Much evidence to the contrary, we are not ephemeral and doomed. Good can be found anywhere, as long as we remember to look for it and as long as we acknowledge that a true home locks no one out. 

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8 May 2026

Lightkeepers House, St. Augustine Beach, photo by author