on being forgotten
Like many of us, I’ve been watching what’s happening in Minnesota from afar and trying to wrap my worldview around it, to make sense of it, to try to learn some lessons and look to it as a future of resistance.
ICE’s occupation of the Twin Cities has supposedly eased up since the firing of Greg Bovino, but we’re hearing from folks on the ground that things have not gotten better, that in fact ICE’s tactics have changed, are more insidious. They’re posing as Uber drivers and staking out elementary schools as a matter of policy now. This time, it’s without the backdrop of multiple murders and national attention. What ICE is doing is being done knowing that Americans can’t pay attention long enough to a news cycle that is ongoing and neverendingly horrific.
I went to college in the Midwest and have always felt like the region was a sister to my home in the American South in its rural identity. When I visited friends in Wisconsin one summer, we pickled cucumbers with her family - I pickled cucumbers with my family back home. We traipsed through prairies full of tall grass - I traveled through our grasslands just the same. When my friends describe the flyover, I am transported to the Everglades and the pine barrens and the wild swaths of countryside where trailers sit back a quarter mile into the woods on borrowed wells and homemade plumbing. Midwesterners were quieter, maybe, but their relationship to land and home felt more familiar than anywhere I had ever been.
What the Midwest didn’t have, though, was a history of chattel slavery permeating every structure, every relationship, every street and every law. And that’s what I pay attention to most in these moments where ICE has deployed on the people of the Twin Cities to terrorize them. That what we are seeing in the Twin Cities - both ICE’s original deployment and the disappearance of what’s happening from the news cycle - is exactly what it’s like to live in the South.
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I’ll tell you a story. In 2012 I was sitting in a booth at Archibald’s in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, eating a barbecue plate with field peas and white bread, when the police came in, took an elderly man by the back of his neck, and slammed him down on the bar.
In 2004, I was 14 years old and watched police traffick a woman on the side of the road going to New Bern.
When I moved onto the farm, my back neighbor took down my property markers and stared me down with his hand on his belt, where he held a pistol that would blow my fucking head off if I tried.
Last winter I spoke to a county board room full of evangelical white men about being queer and I know I can never go back to that place again without protection.
I do not ask my Black friends to visit me.
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I like to write love letters to the South. I like to remember what is mine about it. I like to believe that I made the right decision staying here, because my kin is here, because this is the devil I know, because I believe the best way to John Brown these motherfuckers is to stick around and be gay with guns.
And that in and of itself is a purely Southern ideal, what Robert Penn Warren called the Great Alibi of post-Civil War American South, the idea that created an identity of the “South” out of the Confederacy, the idea that we would always be the losers, so why not stick out our chins and continue being the evil we were destined to be by history? Spite isn’t big enough a word for what this is, and it goes both ways. For us radicals, our churches preach to us like we’re monsters, so we become more monstrous to them. For right-wingers, they see liberal politics as a personal affront, so they become that much more affronting.
When I talk to other white Southerners and Appalachians about this, we all know what we’re talking about but don’t quite have the words. We saw it early in our lives, a belligerence among our people that on the one hand turned dangerous and on the other turned silent. As one of my favorite zinesters has written, the only way to describe it is to call us The Damned. That trend among conservatives that has confounded the liberal wing of our politics, the meme-ification of fascism, the way a government can laugh at victims of sexual abuse and roll their eyes at federal agents murdering people. I scroll through thousands of comments begging someone to do something, wondering how this could happen here.
You cannot understand a lick of it unless you understand the South.
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The Southern Gothic as a genre represents all the darkest possibilities our current reality leads to. The pitch black of the laurel grove becomes the place where we go mad. The close ties between family members leads to grotesque relationships. The old time religion that has us speaking in tongues becomes the pretext for sending someone to their death.
What we are seeing in mainstream politics right now is the Southern Gothic coming home to roost. For decades, there has been a widening gap between the South and the rest of the country. To put it straight, we have been left behind, sacrificed. Gerrymandering was born here. We have been told “This is what you get” when the churches were still practicing conversion therapy. News stories of modern-day lynchings, killings that white police call suicide, they get buried and disappear.
And I guess people have a right to ignore and degrade us. I guess people have a right to tell us this is what we voted for. Warren also wrote about the flip side of the Great Alibi: the Treasury of Virtue, where the North would always be the victor with the moral high ground. For all the problems with Warren and his early politics, his essay on this dialectic speaks directly to why we never really dealt with the creation of the South after the Civil War. We didn’t have to.
But now the Southern Gothic reaches its way into the everyday lives of good liberal people. The morality is upside down. This wasn’t supposed to happen to us, it wasn’t supposed to happen here. We were supposed to forget about the South, we were supposed to cut them away and never have to reckon with the people we were cutting away. In the backs of our minds, we hoped for them to secede again, we hoped for Black, Brown, and queer Southerners to magically appear in safety, and we hoped that we would have the chance to move forward without ever having to face the role we played in the creation of our greatest evils.
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This essay is not a hopeful one. We disappear into the woods or we disappear into a bottle or a needle or we disappear from the world all together. We write dispatches from the interior. We pick in a minor key with closed eyes and upturned chins. We drive two hours to sit in a crimson-lit bar and woop and holler. I think many of us look at the solidarity happening across the country in support of Minnesota and we frankly feel hurt. We grow up in fear, knowing that the only way to be saved is to be born to the resources to leave. There are no Go Fund Mes. There are no campaigns to return our children.
Every day I choose to remain here in the place my ancestors settled. I honor my Appalachian traditions by seeking justice and hard work where I’m able. I want so badly to wrap my arms around my home in these moments of uprising. To remind her that she is not forgotten, that our hope is in the holler, that we will keep us safe.
If you’ve gotten this far, I want to thank you for reading. I don’t always feel qualified to talk about politics, but these things feel important to say. If you liked this type of essay, I’ve also written about growing up queer in the South. You can read it here:
I hope you’ll find some time in your day to research and support some Southern and Appalachian causes. Some of my favorites: