Stay out the way of the southern thing

Left: Kudzu (from The Fruit Fly)

I am from a southern mother, and like Rita Mae Brown, I repatriated as an adult. Moving south was like coming home, only it wasn't.


Being an ethnically-displaced person is strange and oddly transcendent. I think of VS Naipaul, an Indian and Hindu, born in Trinidad. No one else makes India more real to me. He loves India as an insider and outsider, and in his writing, he shapes-shifts, back and forth, inside and out.

I never felt like a yankee. My family was looked down on and called hillbillies, but I had never actually lived in the "hills" at all; I grew up in the city. To me, "hillbilly" meant that my family played in a country-and-western band, and we ate certain foods like cornbread and pinto beans. My grandfather said "shit fire!" which shocked my young yankee schoolmates--one of them asked: what is 'shit fire'? (I had to admit I didn't know, but it was reserved for situations that nowadays would call for a response like "Fuck me!") So I was never a proper yankee, but when I first got here, could not in any way feel like a southerner either. I remember being in tears when I couldn't understand about half of my neighbors, so deep were their accents.

After over 20 years of marriage into a deeply-southern family, I feel that I finally belong.

I can still remember when I first saw kudzu, covering everything like a thick, lush, wavy, symmetrical, emerald-green blanket. Upon my arrival in Columbia, SC, I even took photos of it. I have photos of kudzu snaking up telephone poles and electrical wires; enveloping houses, abandoned gas stations and shotgun shacks, turning everything beautiful, as snow does. Transforming the whole world into green leaves. But there are snakes and other varmints in there. Kudzu chokes other plants and kills them. Southerners cuss the kudzu, and here I was, in my neo-southern repatriated ignorance, wanting to plant more.

Kudzu hides things, as southerners tend to hide things. How fitting that it has traditionally been used in herbal medicine as an alcoholism remedy and to detoxify drug addicts; conditions that thrive on what is hidden.

Some people go to war with the kudzu: goddamn shit is gettin outta my yard if it's the last thing I do! And other people resign themselves to it: you can't kill it. Surrender Dorothy! As an herbalist, I am dedicated to understanding the kudzu, but I daresay, it is the way we once tried to "understand" the Soviets. Shades of "we will bury you!" come to mind. Does the kudzu want to co-exist? Or will it take over?

It's indestructible, and will survive the nuclear war, they tell me, just like cockroaches. Probably.

But I can't help it: I love survivors. Particularly southern ones.