Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born in the Halifax County, Virginia and other than two years I spent doing undergraduate in China, I never lived anywhere else but the South. I finished my undergraduate at Duke in North Carolina, and I study now at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Y’all, I’m a reader for a magazine called “Barely South Review” for crying out loud. But seriously, all that aside, I don’t know what kind of haybale-sniffing, tobacco-pulling, Gospel-preaching upbringing makes a Southerner “legit” but if you read my story, you’ll understand what the South means to me. It’s a lesson I was taught as kid and retaught over and over again, but the man who summed it up best was my boss at my first real job as a newspaper reporter for our local paper. He said to me, “Look, everything you need to know about this land is rooted in slavery.” I think he should have added genocide and colonization to that list, but to this day, I find his advice is the best I’ve gotten for understanding myself and my home. It’s painful. But any honest Southerner will know what I mean.
The Definition
When we see our first Trump flag, Gibson can’t help but bring up race. Gibson is white, so he doesn’t realize he doesn’t have the right.
The four of us are driving to my parent’s house. The sunlight is streaming through the loblolly pines lining the road, not a house in sight. I’m driving; Ruth is riding shotgun; Gibby and his Chinese girlfriend Xuyi are in the back. I specify her nationality because the rest of us are all Americans, though everyone who studies at Duke is from somewhere else.
The Trump flag is the old 2016 edition, not the new 2020 one. We barely see it through the trees, hanging from a tobacco barn in a field, a red and blue flash as we race by, but despite my best effort, Ruth notices it and groans, and then Xuyi asks what’s wrong, and Gibby starts explaining race to her.
“It’s really not as bad as it used to be,” Gibby says, “I mean they used to lynch people if they looked at them the wrong way. Now it’s different.”
I am thankful I can hide in my driver’s seat, pretending to be too focused on the road to participate in this conversation. I have been driving these roads since I was fifteen. I have driven them with my eyes closed.
Ruth, though, is perfectly happy to participate. She tells them that in fourth grade someone called her the n-word to her face. She laughs like it was a joke. I remember in elementary school someone did that to my friend and he cried. Ruth is tough. She tells us that she didn’t understand what it meant back then.
“Thinking back on it, people said a lot of fucked up racist shit to me when I was growing up,” she says. “There was this teacher, well this guy and I both applied for MIT but I got in and he got the wait list, and this teacher said, ‘Well, he had the disadvantage of being a white man,’ and everyone was celebrating her for being a great teacher and she was funny I guess, so no one cared about that microaggression.”
Ruth is slender with dark eyes and red weave down to her shoulders. She puts on a thin chain with a crucifix and a ring shaped like a snake so that she feels like she’s gotten dressed up for each day.
“I’m not trying to say that wasn’t offensive, but is it really racist? I don’t think you should count that as real racism,” Gibson says, and for a moment, despite myself, I can’t help but secretly agree with him. Who knows what Xuyi thinks.
Ruth purses her lips, and our eyes meet. Her eyes are asking if I agree. She suspects that Gibson’s words touched an old part of me, but I know better than to admit it. I’m not lying. With a moment to process it, I can see what she means. But there is always the knee-jerk reaction to blame our failures on a system. Conspiracies are popular for a reason. But I know not to.
Ruth can read this in my tight lipped, expressionless face. We’ve had conversations about microaggressions before. Now her eyes are asking if she should say anything to Gibby, or maybe to Xuyi. I shrug, just the tiniest lift of the right shoulder to tell her that it is her decision. And by now Gibson has kept going.
“I mean, in China, that’s real racism. Isn’t it, Xuyi?”
Xuyi shakes her head, “In China, some of the old people will try to pinch the black off of your skin. They think it is dirty. But that’s not racism. That’s just ignorance. People in some parts of China have never seen a foreigner, especially not a Black foreigner.”
“But what is racism but ignorance?” Gibson asks.
“I think the only way forward in all this is to just keep knowing each other,” I say, in hopes that this will be the end of it for now. “How can you hate someone you love?”
I touch the back of Ruth’s hand. She gives me a quick smile. I pick up her hand, driving with one hand on the wheel, and trace the snake ring. Her hands are warm and soft.
“You like to date black women because you’re racist,” Ruth says.
“Not just black women,” I say, “I like all women. Why’re you asking?”
I know what she’s teasing about. Ruth and I live in this place where we taped our eyes open to the horrors of our world. I’m white. It is going to be relevant every time we kiss. I dated a woman once who refused to listen to any other black people who talked about slavery, because she was tired of hearing about it. Ruth refused to be like that. She wanted to see the world as it was, horrible as it might be. We tried not to hide from anything together.
“You’re accusing him of being racist?” Gibson asks.
“I am,” Ruth says.
“Everyone is,” I mutter.
“I’m not,” Gibson says. “I think you’re applying racism to things that aren’t racism. They aren’t good, but they’re not racist. They’re, I don’t know, racial, but they’re not racist. Do you understand?”
Ruth stares at him with a pleasant expression that I would be terrified to see directed at myself.
“No I don’t understand,” she says. “Would you explain it to me?”
“I mean, you said you’re afraid of being up here. You’re afraid of being shot. But you know, I am too! I’m a liberal up here, and those guys would come out of their houses with a shotgun if I was on their property.”
“She’s right,” I say.
“Why?” He asks. “Why is she right?”
I point at a house we drive past.
“The man that lives there is a white supremacist. These days, he doesn’t put on sheets and hoods and chase people around that much, but when I was a kid, his son came to school wearing the whole costume. I swear to god it’s true,” I say. “Gibby, you and me, we’re not like that, but when it comes down to it, this guy will count us as one of his own. He’s fixed my family’s lawnmower, and my car. My mom taught his daughters to ride horses.”
“That’s what I mean though. They’re normal people.”
“That’s why they’re scary,” I try to explain. “They’re normal people.”
I look at Ruth. She shakes her head. I didn’t explain it at all, and I feel like I ought to just shut up. She smiles just a little. Her hand touches mine. It isn’t forgiveness. She knew I would fail from the first time she kissed me. Love works when we decide that the things we don’t like about our partners matter less than the things we do.
“What’s the difference between racism and communism?” Xuyi asks.
My road is coming up around the next curve. There are probably three minutes left in the drive. Ruth cocks her head, and I can tell from her expression this is a new one. I wonder if I can try answering it. I raise my eyebrow at her. She dips her chin, slightly, the trace of a wry smile touching the corner of her mouth. Daring me.
“Well, communism is a philosophical and socio-economic theory of government,” Gibby explains. “And racism is this weird, screwed up prejudice people have against each other based on skin color.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I mean–” Gibby starts.
“He’s asking Xuyi,” Ruth says.
Xuyi shifts uncomfortably with all the attention focused on her. She exists in my mind as a tourist, someone who is not really connected to us. I imagine that her relationship with Gibby will last until she graduates and goes back to China. This makes me think about my own relationship with Ruth, which we pretend is going to last forever.
Likely it won’t. I have had previous relationships, so I am not scared of breaking up with Ruth, but thinking forward like that makes everything we say and do feel false. Like performing. And I am frightened to imagine a person, less than a stranger, somewhere in the world who knows my innermost thoughts, who can read my face as if I were speaking out loud.
“Well they both end in ‘-ism’ and that means a philosophy, right? Communism. Stoicism. Utilitarianism. And racism.”
“Race is a social construct,” I say.
“What does that mean?” Xuyi asks. “Is it not like a philosophy then? A way of seeing the world? You said that everybody was racist, but how can a villager in China who has never met a foreigner in her life be racist?”
“He means that race is made up by people,” Gibby explains.
Ruth and I are silent. I can see she is thinking about this seriously. I am actually watching the road now, because my driveway is coming up, the mailbox choked by kudzu. But I wonder if Xuyi is right, and what that would mean.
It would mean this whole conversation is racist, this treatment of race as a real thing, social fact. It would mean that explaining racism would be teaching racism. I don’t have time to explain these things before I see my mailbox and decelerate.
Ruth says, “I like your idea. I think that’s what I mean when I say everyone is racist.”
“What about the village lady?” Xuyi asks.
I turn into the driveway. The wheels crunch on gravel.
“There’s no way she would not know,” Gibby declares. “I mean even Chinese people have an idea of race.”
“Yes, but is it the same as the European idea of race,” Xuyi asks. “I mean, if race is made up, then you’d have to teach the village lady to be racist.”
Ruth is clearly thinking about it.
At the gate, I stop and get out. The sky is blue. Red earth and green grasses. The fields are speckled with yellow buttercups, and the rusting old gate hangs akimbo when I push it open. I have to pick it up and lift it so the bottom does not drag in the gravel. Only then can I get back in my car and drive up.
Ruth takes in my childhood home. The four board fences, soaked black with creosote over the wood. The horses standing in twos or threes in the fields. The pale gray stone dust riding ring with its whitewashed jumps, the paint peeling. At the end of the tree lined driveway, my two hundred year old house stands in a grove of black walnuts. Tall trees with full canopies, all planted a hundred years ago.
I can see even before I park beside my father’s fig bush that the first person she will meet is Jim. He is coming across the yard, back up from the machine shop carrying a weedeater in his hand. The inside of the weedeater’s orange hood has been plastered with cut blades of grass. When I park, I steal a glance at Ruth. Her eyes are fixed on the black man raising his hand in greeting to me.
“Welcome to my house, where I lived for eighteen years,” I say.
Gibby and Xuyi begin gathering their things and unbuckling, but Ruth sits still, watching Jim walk across the yard. I don’t know what to do. Her eyes are unreadable. Her expression is pleasant, and she has her hands clasped on her lap. I get out and, seeing me, Jim raises his hand again.
“Hey Mr. Danny!”
Feeling the intensity of Ruth’s gaze drilling into my back, I have a choice to make. Either I reveal to her the way I have silently acknowledged Jim’s presence in my life, as if he were another feature of the farm, or I make some performance out of this moment, and reveal to her that everything I have ever said to her has been a performance too.
