Summer in the South

I've been home for not a week yet, and I miss Colombia, but at the same time I love the South so much. For all its blemishes and scars, for all the fact that I feel like a stranger here half of the time, it's still where I belong better than anywhere else.

I can't hardly explain it. Sometimes it's something about the way the air smells just won't let me go, and other times it's pushing me away like hell but I look down and my hands are gripped tight around the door still, refusing to let it get rid of me. It's a bug I can't get out of my system. It's sticky grits and sticky jam and it'll get you just plain stuck.

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In Birmingham with Josh, who had to work a trial here this week. Yesterday I hung out at the research library across the street from the Tutwiler Hotel and came across a book titled Away Down South, a History of Southern Identity by James Cobb. Cobb writes that U.S. identity has traditionally been equated with the ideals, conceits, and myths of the North, against the South and its attendant pathologies as a foil. In recent years, however, what many have termed the Southernization of the States has occured alongside a loss of what has traditionally considered Southern. Instead of the New South, we have the No South, whose chambers of commerce and leading citizens have dedicated their toils towards eradicating the slow southern ways and replacing them with a bland American sameness (Atlanta, anyone?) It's worth a read.

Birmingham feels more like the south than Atlanta does to me. People still greet each other on the street, and ask for directions and you'll be offered a ride. It's racial history is much starker than Atlanta's, though - I wonder what this means for city residents, whether it's been exorcised to a greater degree because it was so public, or whether the scars still burns in the sun.

Linn Park

Sculpture garden

Museum of Modern Art, Oscar Wells Memorial