Half-Life Part 2 Sweet Home Carolina

Author's Note: This week, I will have met the requirement of living in NC for half my life. After this week, I will have lived here longer than anywhere else. While it has been hard to wrap my brain around this concept, it is a matter of life for me, for while I was flailing through my younger years, NC has given required order to my existence, as I hope I conveyed in the last part.

Like anywhere in the world, the South has its oddities and eccentricities, as well as its joys and celebrations. This week's essay hopefully covers both realities with respect and due reverence, as I explain my culture shock when I first got here and the essential experiences that a Northern lad has when he moves south and chooses to call it home.

Before I ever visited the South, my impression of it was based—like everyone else's, not from here—on the Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, USMC. Gomer was a spinoff of the former sitcom and brought Southern charm to the otherwise hardened Marine Corps. As for Andy Griffith, he lived in the fictional Mayberry RFD, ostensibly set in Griffith’s home state of North Carolina, and played a sheriff with excessive goodwill and bucketfuls of homegrown common sense. His dusty town had a brigade of colorful characters that gave humor to the rural landscape. Add Don Knotts, little Ronny Howard, and a laugh track, and you get solid hilarity that still doesn't capture the reality of life in the South.

To know a place, you've got to spend time there. I had no expectations when I got here, figuring that one state was the same as another except for sports team affinities and a few delicacies. I did expect the twang of the Southern accent, the sweeping farmland, and even a breed of that classic down-home Mayberryesque common sense. I wasn't surprised when that was my experience at first. However, the situation is far more complex after one has had proper steeping in the culture.

Pennsylvania, for all its mountains and farmland, nevertheless feels more industrial. The towns feel gritty. Steel towns and coal towns, and tiny communities like Schaefferstown, all have a slightly seedy feel to them. It doesn’t seem like a big deal if you are, like Hamlet says, “Native here and to the manner born”. This was my first real hitch when I moved South, because I thought that it would be essentially the same.

Not so. Even the most economically depressed villages have a quaintness and pastoral beauty that can be hard to ignore. I spent a lot of time wandering around my new county, and I couldn't ever seem to find that seamy underbelly feeling that Northern towns always have. Rather than a bar on every corner, as in PA, when I got here, Asheboro felt like it had a church at every intersection. Almost every breed of Protestant denomination was in evidence, and each church was, like some banks, the first. When there were two or more such churches of the same denomination, one was the first and the other had a geographical designation. For example, First United Methodist and Central United Methodist.

Speaking about bars and alcohol, Asheboro was the seat of a dry county when I arrived, and while some municipalities in the county sold alcohol at ‘package stores’ or grocery markets, there wasn't a bar anywhere, and you couldn’t get a beer or glass of wine with dinner, unless you drove to Greensboro, 25 miles away. Downtown was a ghost town except for the people who worked in the textile mills, so it felt to me. There was evidence of a once thriving economic center, but in 2001, it seemed to me that it was all but gone, except for a few shops and the antique store. I was from a busy, crowded part of PA, so even the smaller towns like Lancaster and Lebanon, dwarfed by Reading and Philly, had traffic, hundreds of pedestrians, and lots and lots of options for food and drink. I expected as much from Asheboro, but it seemed comatose by comparison.

In the suburban neighborhood cul-de-sac where we lived, life was quiet, almost idyllic. There was little traffic beyond the people who lived there. Everyone was polite, but intensely private. Neighbors didn't mean friends (at least for the adults), and though we lived in that house for the better part of a decade, we were never invited over to have supper with our neighbors. A block party was out of the question, I was told, which dampened my exuberant Yankee desire to sit in lawn chairs in the middle of the street, drinking cold beers or manning one of a series of grills churning out burgers and dogs, as we had in PA. For such fellowship, one needed to attend a church picnic, which was the same thing but with an ecclesiastical bent.

Up North, people are private, but there are close-knit communities where everyone gathers on weekends to cook out or play ball at the park. That sort of camaraderie was not evident to me in NC. The in-group mentality, while startling to me, is part of the underlying cultural structure of the South. Privacy and diffidence are the gold standards. Even people we are friends with keep boundaries in place. It isn't personal, just the way things are. The people we have visited with the most over the years are all former Yankees or married to them. Dropping in is unheard of. If someone asks you to stay for tea, you’re expected to decline gratefully, no matter how sincerely they ask. This was startling because, early on, I assumed that, if we had been invited, it was polite to accept. It didn’t take me long to learn the reality. Again, it isn’t about being rude. Quite the opposite.

In 2006, when the long and hotly contested alcohol referendum was passed and alcohol became available in restaurants, stores, and a few bars, the town began to sparkle, especially downtown. By then, as more and more people ventured downtown to new restaurants, the revenue helped to wake things from long slumber. Of course, anytime something beneficial happens, there are those opposed to it, and for years after the referendum improved the fate of our town, letters to the editor poured in as the writers hit the roof for a prolonged and agonizing period. In such a small town, though, each letter writer got limitless opportunities to submit their blather. If the editor of the once great Courier-Tribune refused to publish them, or if they edited the fare too much, the writers would go to the paper’s headquarters and browbeat them into complicity. This was alien to me. In the Reading Eagle or other papers near where I grew up, if someone wrote one letter that was their due for a year, or maybe longer. However, despite the doom and gloom prophets, our town has been booming ever since.

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Learning, as I did in school, that the Civil War was about slavery, and that the Civil Rights movement was about the horrid Jim Crow policies in the South, I fully expected that these scars would be evident, but I was unsure what they would look like. It was years later, after I started working at the library, that I finally got my full education about the situation, which, as I say, was complex. As they became evident to me in 2001, I struggled with the obvious artifacts of Jim Crow that can still be seen as part of the landscape. Segregation was long over when I got here, but Asheboro bears the scars of that era. Things are always getting better, and it would be futile to try to describe the things that shocked me now, but I was used to a much different reality.

It needs to be said, Randolph County has always been surprisingly progressive. The Underground Railroad ran right through our town. The anti-war and abolitionist movements were strong, largely because of the thick Quaker population. North Carolina was the last state to secede from the Union before the war, and that is in large part due to these facts. However, there are plenty of signs that, for some people, the Confederacy isn’t dead and the ideological battle isn’t over. It is sometimes hard to forget that we live in a former rebel state. A confederate monument displayed in front of the Old Courthouse and a handful of history buffs who still dress up in the confederate regalia at every occasion are just a few things that jar against the modern world. Discussions about removing the monument bring out shameful filial pride from people whose ancestors fought against the Union. As I said, it is complex, and it threw me when I first got here. It is still jarring today, though I’ve come to accept it, if not understand it fully.

As an observer of people, I had some issues getting used to this type of psychological difference. We are all Americans, and we all live in the modern world, but heritage plays a big role. Most people aren’t pleased about the nature of the bleak realities of the Civil War or Jim Crow. Some won’t fully admit that these eras were evil, but, like Churchill once said, a fanatic is someone who can’t change their mind and won’t change the subject. Every town has residents who live in a fantasy world, but when a man started writing letters to the editor about the steam whistle of the local textile mill disturbing the slumber of his Confederate ancestors, I wondered just how friends and neighbors could tolerate it. When this same person threatened and insulted my wife for a column she wrote in the local paper, I wondered how my fellow residents could ignore the abject and mean-spirited behavior.

As the years have gone by, I have learned that—personal attacks against my wife and family aside, but absolutely not forgiven—even the weirdos play a part in a community. At least the harmless ones do. This was one of the things that Andy Griffith got completely correct. There are a host of colorful people in each town who perform some kind of needed social balancing. To feel comfortable with a community like ours, there has to be a series of goofs who provide context. My eccentricities seem like nothing compared to the man who waves a Confederate flag by the side of the road in full regalia. There are a host of other ridiculous individuals who hang out downtown, or who call local businesses, or gum up the line at the gas stations. They are tolerated, even to some extent, revered. The community endures their depthless weirdness. They reside nowhere, seem to be everywhere, and though they are plain odd, they hurt no one. I work in public-facing service, so this may be where my Northernness shows up most. I have little or no patience for the eccentrics. We really did have a neighbor who was a mini Mussolini, and I was ready to have a real-life duel with him before he got very sick and passed away. Other neighbors knew his reputation and tolerated his nonsense, but I found that I couldn't. Maybe this is part of why I can never be fully assimilated.

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The most pronounced difference, though, is the Southern accent. I expected the twanginess and the sea of colloquialisms. To an outsider’s ear, every Southerner has a deep drawl. When I first got here, I found it equally enchanting and impenetrable. I learned quickly that the Southerner has a massive lexicon of agricultural references that are tinged with humor and local lore. The most challenging part was figuring out that some phrases are jammed together as one word, like “wallagoo” (a while ago), while other words are so drawn out that they feel like phrases. Here, I submit “shhheeyit”.

Given time, one learns that there isn't one accent. I’ve tried to document them, but there are too many. Everyone knows the rounded, aristocratic, softer accent, like Doc Holliday or Blanche Devereau. That is rare this far north, except for among older, large families that have been here for generations. The more common NC twang is fairly standard and ranges anywhere from nonexistent to a deeply “country” timbre that gives one visions of hay mows and fields of tobacco and alfalfa. Because the accent isn't uniform, it doesn’t follow any real rules. One half of my friend’s family pronounces the word ‘on’, like “own”, and the other half doesn’t, and he cannot explain why. Just like eye or hair color, accents brought to the family by parents from different areas create new strains that are unfamiliar to everyone, but that nonetheless sound like Southern English to me.

And yet, the blocky, staccato sounds of the PA accent (not including Pennsylvania Dutch, which we call “Dutchified English”) are dull, by comparison, but it takes some immersion to truly appreciate the Southern accent. I still find it irritating sometimes, but only when I cannot figure out what I’m hearing. The same would be true in other places where English is the main language, but the accent renders it impenetrable, say Scotland.

Because Southerners are born storytellers, a new arrival gets plenty of experience with the language. They are interested in heritage and they want to tell you about their history. Small talk is a big thing, but I learned right away that most serious subjects are off the table, except invitations to their churches, tales about their family history, the weather or college sports. Anything more than that is for close friends, but they are masters at keeping conversations going on thin rations. During the lockdown, depression rates in the region skyrocketed, as people who thrived on face-to-face connections were deprived of their favorite opportunities to chat.

Despite their friendly and gregarious nature, Southerners have hard and fast rules about those who come from elsewhere. I learned these quickly, though they were issued politely. One not born in the South will never be a Southerner. You may live here for decades, but you're never from here. It's not meant to be cruel or exclusive so much as a means of protecting and maintaining Southernness. This is an inbuilt mentality that grew out of the rejection of so-called carpetbaggers who invaded the South from northern states to make a profit on the Reconstruction.

Many of the stereotypes about the South are, in large part, true, at least to a degree. Southerners are charming, funny, easygoing, morally upright (generally), and friendly to a fault. They are intensely polite and have an unspoken but clear etiquette and express their expectations freely. They hate to be thought rude and despite a deep sense of privacy, they are supportive in a pinch and loyal friends. Every culture has its bad eggs, of course, but the ugly assumptions about Southerners—that they are sullen, shiftless, slow-witted, inbred or desperately poor yokels—are leftover propaganda from another age. There are hookwormy, dusty villages all over the nation, where these and other mean-spirited beliefs are true—especially in Pennsylvania.

After a few months of culture shock, I started to appreciate the pace of life, the leafy neighborhoods, the easygoing charm, and the polite interest in who I was and where I was from (I definitely sound like I’m not from here). There’s hardly any traffic by comparison to Reading’s sprawling suburban labyrinths of highways and roads. Every season has dribs and drabs of the previous and coming season in it, so that, again, like Scotland, the local idiom suggests that if you don’t like the weather, wait twenty minutes. North Carolina stretches from the Appalachian Mountains on its western border across lush piedmont to sandhills and thence to the coast. Every single square foot is gorgeous, whether you like hiking, camping, fishing, hunting, gardening, outdoor sports, boating, or just sitting out under the perfect azure “Carolina Blue” sky, North Carolina has what you're looking for. The region certainly won me over.

Sadly, all of it is slowly relenting to the influx of businesses and families coming here to work in industry or technology. The uppopping of franchise businesses like Starbucks and Chipotle to meet the frenetic consumer’s needs means more parking lots, more traffic and more people. It's not that bad, yet, mainly because most of our state is still very rural. Outside of the municipalities, one can still feel as if they are in the middle of another century. This might be off-putting to people who like traffic and crowds and high taxes and nosy township councils. The South is, by comparison, still quite relaxed, which is attractive. Every year, more Yankees are moving here and bringing with them their expectations, prejudices and assumptions based on mid-century television shows, but learning, quickly or slowly, that this is a wonderful place to live, whether or not you were born here.

There are some issues, of course. It is rare to meet someone from the country who isn't a little bit overbearing about their right-wing politics. It has taken me time to get used to the street preachers that pop up all over the place with dogma that is straight out of the most primitivistic doctrines. It can be daunting to know that politics is so important to your neighbors that, at one time, people wouldn’t use certain gas stations because the owner was a known Republican or Democrat or because they attended the wrong services. But this is usually tolerable, so long as one keeps their opinions to themselves. Recently, the national polarization has leaked into our world, but generally, aside from the occasional loony with a Trump flag mounted to the bed of his truck, it’s not been too bad.

In the end, given the choice, with all respect and affection to my father and my brother, and other northern family, I wouldn’t and have no plans to move back to PA. I’ve been able to—have been welcomed to—start my adulthood here, and I’m grateful. I’ve been to other places and found remarkable people, hikes, views, and even accents, but in the end, I’m always glad to be home. Something about not being born here appeals to my outsider mentality. I’m just weird enough as a Yankee to get and appreciate the Southern loquaciousness. I like a good chat that says much, but shares no real personal details. The food is splendid, and the weather is, if hot and humid, much more tolerable than up north. Hey, at least we still have fall and spring here.

It took me a bit to get used to the South, but that was, in part, what made me so grateful to call it home. If there wasn’t a challenge up front, I don’t think I’d appreciate it as much. And, if I do spend the rest of my years here, I can honestly say that in that time, I’ve made good friends, built a family, a career, and a community. For the welcome and the opportunity, I’m eternally grateful.