"Hey Jo Bob, let's you 'n me go down to the Git n' Go for some 'baccy 'n a sixer o' Bud."
I used to do a great "Bubba" impersonation. My Northeastern friends would be rolling with laughter, convinced I was distilling the South to them like a shot of Jim Beam. I even used to have a hawking spit to go along with it all. I won't do "Bubba" anymore.
I have come to realize that when I was ridiculing the South I was ridiculing myself; that I was not being funny, but as bigoted as those I wrongly hated.
I had to leave the country, spending five months in Europe as an "ugly American," before I realized that as much as I may resent where I come from, it has undeniably made me who I am.
In Europe I was constantly forced to defend myself and my homeland. No one knew what Oklahoma was, but they all knew Texas. And their next question invariably was, "Are you a cowboy?" American politics were constantly degraded; normally open people would become hostile if my American-ness became too visible.
The assumptions angered me. For all my life I had fought being precisely what my slight twang and yen for picante sauce had instantaneously revealed me to be. I was a liberal Ivy League feminist, not some "back-country, uneducated hick!"
Slowly it crept up on me that my anger at those at home was misplaced. Yes, I'll never fit in in Texas or Oklahoma. There my ear cuff isn't slightly geeky for its outdated trendyness, but downright bizarre. My red Doc Martens are a social statement, not a fight against acres of frozen mud, slush, and clumped sand. There I define freak: the pro-choice girl who bites her nails, has never been on a horse or driven a truck, and won't drink beer. The chick who went to Yale.
I rejected them by coming here, and with that move excluded myself from the mainstream South forever.
Yet this place, this ivy and stone playground for America's intellectual elite, is no more me than my old Sunday dresses. I despise the racism, the sexism, the Rush Lim-baugh worshipping that goes on at home. However, I am a product of the South. Woe unto the man who calls me "Honey," and excuse me if I tend to blurt out, "Get a rope!" when I hear the words, "Made in New York City." Oklahoma-home-has left its undeniable stamp on me.
I understand the South, and for all my rebellions, in a funny little way it understands me. I am patronized and argued with, true, but I am accepted as a part of the greater community. It is this community that draws me back-the sense of greater family.
I read about the events in Oklahoma City, events which missed stealing my mother from me by only a day (she had been downtown the day before, interviewing next door), and I cry. I do not shed tears for the lost lives of strangers but for the pain the community bears. I regret that I learned of these events in The London Daily Mirror.
I graduate in three months. And I am going home. I am drawn back to a state where Footloose never sunk in (Baylor just allowed dancing on campus this winter), where the politics appall me, and no one knows what Nutella is.
I finally admit that I miss chicken- fried steak, actually do own a pair of nifty black cowboy boots, and yes, dammit, I do know all the words to "Rodeo." I'll never be just one in the crowd. But I will be welcomed by it.
And I'll always have friends in low places, where the whiskey drowns and the beer chases
Copyright 1996, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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