Don't Wash the Cast Iron Skillet

Hy-Vee becomes Schnucks, becomes Publix, becomes Piggly Wiggly. No more Kum & Go. The final Casey’s. Then the first Bojangles. All the other fast food chains littered across the landscape like beer bottles tossed along the highway. I’m on the road in America.

Monotony, but with a rhythm - the physical culture always shifting just enough to reflect where we are. This week, I passed the Gateway Arch and launched across the Mississippi. A final eastbound crossing for some time. Plains and wind farms become rolling mountains and roaring TVA rivers. 

Camping World’s massive flags. Dispensaries littered across Missouri and Illinois. Jesus everywhere. BBQ sauce shifting from sweet and thick to white and vinegary.

My travels ahead will shift my perspective again and again. From the U.S. to China. Shanghai to Beijing. Bangkok and beyond. New foods, new flavors, different styles between north and south. Even dialects in languages I’ll never know shift from east to west.

I got me a sweet tea at QT.

There’s a transition somewhere south in Illinois where it starts to feel like “home.” Although it’s become more and more alien to use that word to describe it. Maybe it’s Kentucky. The big rebel flag? Maybe it’s when I pass Clarksville and the hills start rising and falling again.

Dekalb County is the epicenter of “home,” but my complicated feelings about the South spread out, even when I’m in Atlanta or anywhere in the fallout radius from Sand Mountain. Sure, there are distinctions. Atlanta’s a real cosmopolitan city, Henagar has one traffic light. Nashville is literally turning into Brooklyn, my old college town has the KKK. Birmingham has James Beard winning restaurants; Fort Payne has The BBQ Place.

But the throughlines carry: the geography, the drawls, the bless-your-heart bullshit. Crosses everywhere. Churches everywhere. Anti-abortion monuments in the same towns building bombs. The crooked politicians in charge in the small towns as much as the big ones. 

I am aware of my surroundings. I am on edge.

Then I pull into a driveway in East Nashville and just pause as the weight shifts, Tears well up out of nowhere. I turn off the car, run to the door, knock, and can wait no longer for an embrace. I hug Shay for what feels like a lifetime, and I don’t want to let go. A sibling of the mountain, not just surviving, thriving. We fellowship, cast iron sharpening cast iron. We’ve both been a little rusty over the years, but we sit across from each other well seasoned. We grab some burgers, smoke a joint, just talk and talk and talk. I’m reminded why I still call it “home.”

The South is a part of my identity I can’t shake. The accent comes out. My defensiveness leaps out of my body real quick when someone criticizes:  Yes, it is a shithole, but it’s MY shithole, you don’t get to say that. I always found it comical when people in the Midwest would say “we’ll never go to Florida” I’m like, you’re standing in Missouri. 

The religion here stifled me. The healthcare and dental care didn’t just neglect me, they actively harmed me. Some of the nastiest people I’d ever met were Alabama Democrats and Christians. My parents always said they didn’t intend to shelter me, but what else is gonna happen in a small town in one of the most conservative places on earth? And compared to other homeschooled kids, maybe I wasn’t. But my worldview was limited until I left.

My parents took me around the country, sure. But it took leaving the South,  really leaving it behind me to understand why it had never felt like home in the first place. That doesn’t mean everywhere else is better. I can assure you, it’s all flawed. But it just means the truth of this place is often glossed over.

Many of the straight folks I know sing the praises of Dixie, shaded by Alabama’s broadest tree: privilege. My queer friends here generally fall into two very different categories, either stuck or thriving, but all carry what to me is an unbearable burden of love and resistance. They stay for family, for work, for movement-building, for the community, for hope. I admire them. 

But me?

I’ve seen too much now. My world has gotten too big. Sometimes I wish it hadn’t.

But now, I know, with certainty: the South isn’t mine anymore.

I’ll still love the mountains, lakes, and streams. The food (with Tums). Sometimes even the music. But I cannot shake its history. The politics.

It is a dark, twisted place.
Wrapped in racism and tornadoes.
Snakes and waterfalls.
Religious and generational trauma.
Poverty.

I didn’t grow up in poverty, but I grew up inside it, educationally, culturally, spiritually.

Now as I drive down Highway 72 I stare down the mountain made of Sand. She stares back. Menacing. Bigger than me. I feel physically ill.

But I know I can climb her tiny peak fast. The peaks I’ve seen in this world would swallow her whole. I see the scars of self-abuse climbing her spine — trees sliced down for chert pits. I’ve dreamed before about the place sinking into the earth.

But while I slide out of the Crimson and the Clay, I’ll carry its embrace with me, not the embrace of physical place, but Shay’s embrace, my Momma’s smile, the nieces and nephews wearing me out running through the yard. I’m keeping the parts that love me back, and the rest of it? I’m done fighting for it to love me.

Y’all can keep what never embraced me.