Tattered Roots Part I: Confessions of a South Bashing Oddity

by Lanascopic

Have you heard of many Southerners who felt repulsed by their own southern roots? Even now I don’t strongly relate to all things Southern. I may never be fully Southern at heart. Although there was a time when, well, I flat detested the South.

There are people who’re proud of their roots. When you first meet them, they’ll say, “I’m from Santa Fe.” Ooh, the artsy Southwest. Or, “Yeah, I’m from Pennsylvania.” Hm, sounds historical. My husband’s from California. It made me feel pretty sophisticated and ultra cool to nab myself a handsome Californian man. Although my impression of his homeland culture was sweetly distorted— I thought all Californians had easy going liberal attitudes that could publicly outsmart the meanest calf-catching, bull-bashing, meat-mongering conservatives found among the vast environment of my Southern roots. Serious labels, right? 

“Yeah, get 'em Liberals.” Imagine that caterwauled, in my younger party voice, of course. 

Unlike those proud natives of everywhere else, there was only one desperate situation in which I could ever imagine telling anyone that I was from the South. And that situation would be This: being lassoed in some Midwest WalMart parking lot by Tall Tex himself, held at pistol-point, robbed of the Budweiser and barbeque grill I’d just bought then locked in my own trunk. Only then would I cry out, “Okay, okay. I’m from the Deep South. I confess!” After which he’d be obliged to set me on my feet and apologize saying, “My mistake, ma’am,” tipping his hat’s brim. Then he and his masked outlaw brother would trot off on their horses, sipping the loot, and whistling Oh-De-Lally together. Can’t think of any other reason I’d have confessed my roots to anyone. Well, maybe if I thought Tall Tex’s brother was kinda cute. 

Well no, not even then, as I recall. I restricted myself from ever dating any cowboys, and to date I never have. 

I guess I wasn’t into westerns, square dancing, and all-day whole-pig-roasting— mostly because on hot summer days these all draw a lot of flies. And all of these are abominable at varying degrees. And the company can host some gory conversations about shooting this and killing that. And about, well, how they’d once had this black neighbor and one day they showed him.   

How am I supposed to engage in that kind of mouth-mush with a friendly smile? Impossible. 

I still reserve a little bit of shame for being brought up in the Deep South in general. I have disdain as well for some of Southern culture, though not on purpose; my disdain isn’t derived from my rationale against common southern quirks but first and foremost from my inborn repulsion to ethnocentrism. I loathe it because it’s counterproductive, deluding, isolating, and pumps out ignorance. 

Plus, it hurts people. 

You’d never guess it now that I’ve said that, but I am a lover of all the fascinating peoples of this globe and wish I could personally eradicate disunity, suffering, arrogance. Still, ethnocentrism remains a number one turn-off for me when it comes to Southern culture. Prideful southerners can get so extreme that they regard real human beings of other cultures as meaningless paper cutouts at best. 

There are other turn-offs, like all the rowdy public expressions of satisfaction by the habitual Bambi-killer who appears utterly unaware of what belligerence comes out of his own gloating mouth, whether the kill is necessary or not, and the general impulse of extreme white Southerners to insult anyone who isn’t white, and the hard-ass child spanking policy, and the occasional inhospitality of even moderate southerners towards outsiders. Embarrassing. 

This is why I’d have to be hogtied and locked into the trunk of a car before confessing that I am born of that. Ironically, I didn’t always think of myself as being tied to this culture by birth.   

That’s because I my entire childhood was sheltered much like a Russian doll: sheltered inside Acadiana, which for me was the land of French as opposed to Southern roots. Within that I was sheltered by my mother, who had lofty ideals and secretly fantasized about becoming a Northerner or moving to Virginia. Even Canada. Finally, I sheltered myself in my own timid cocoon.  

For the first chunk of my life, I honestly didn’t identify as a southerner. I just thought my people were French. My mother, the main determinant in this unusual scenario, didn’t raise me to recognize myself as a Southerner. That was because she was void of the stereotypical sentimentalism toward modern southernism. She was fond of the Old South’s charm and referred to it simply as the old days, not as the southern days. She said that people were ultra-polite back then, and she preferred the bygone tidy old social order between male and female, as well as the old fashions, manners, and close-knit, mentoring parenting styles. 

While most of these were just common delusions, I didn’t know it. Though I’ll say, as far as parenting, she did not spank or hit me. She didn’t believe in that, at least not by the time that I— being around an average of a decade younger than my six siblings— was born and had bloomed into the only child left in the nest. In fact, my mother held contempt for the modern South, though she often directed it at our Cajun roots instead of at the whole South or Deep South. 

While I'm from the Deep South I either hadn't heard or hadn't noticed the term until maybe a decade ago. And I've only recently read that the Old South is not the South as I've known it but consists of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and others. 

As a matter of fact, I had to ask my husband if he knew the meaning of the term Deep South just a few years ago because I didn’t. He did, though, thought I was playing. Before then, I thought deep meant literally deep, like in the middle of a bowl or basin. It was an oddity which meant nothing to me. Whenever I first heard it, I must have ignored it because it contained the term South, so sounded disinteresting to me anyway, thus I never got engaged in reading anything with Deep South included in its title or main subject matter. Frankly, I thought in the case of this term I was supposed to imagine the South as a bowl and to see the word deep as meaning the central geographical region of the South. I assumed Deep South meant places between Shreveport and Atlanta. Arkansas. Laugh, it's okay, I do. Guess I never looked at the U.S. map as a pitcher standing with a bottom near the Gulf of Mexico. Growing up, we didn’t stand the maps up by hanging them on the wall— maybe that was the problem. And in more ways than one. 

So, we weren't members of the Old South, Deep South, Upper South, or South. My mother often spoke French with my aunts and uncles. They didn't call it Cajun French, either. Just French. So, I thought we were just French, not Cajun. 

My confusion didn’t end there: I almost bought a pair of Leiderhosen, ‘cause my mother said we were also German. Bonn Polka anyone? I did attend the first annual German Fest in Robert’s Cove, Louisiana, though. I sat on the green grass cracking the German-French hybrid sentences all day long, but people just gave me blank stares. It was fun. 

There's another reason I thought we were just French, not Cajun. My mother was embarrassed of being Cajun, so said sometimes defensively to others in a feigned hard-Cajun accent that was only exaggerated by her sheer contempt, “Aw, go on, you! I’m not cajun.” She used the term as an adjective, as if to say, “I’m not simple-minded.” She’d cap off the comment with, “I was raised better dan dat.” 

My retrospective guess is that she couldn’t resist consoling herself with her personal pride in being a little more discriminating than to declare ignorant, all-inclusive pride in her roots. Plus, in her eyes Cajuns who proclaimed loudly that they were Cajuns and Coon-asses were coarse and aggressive, so she didn’t want any part of it. Though she did take all-inclusive pride in her nuclear and extended families, called them, “My people.” They connected her to her cultural roots since they were all Cajuns. Wait, what? Exactly. 

I was Cajun-blind. We can start to see why a little girl, often isolated, became pretty disconnected from the reality behind her own heritage. I guess I was like a Chinese person raised somewhere in Asia but convinced I was Scottish, an oddity which could make a pretty bizarre sit-com. As for the adjective use of the term, she was convinced she could insult the worst of the loud Cajuns just by saying, “Oh, look at you, you’re so cajun!” Although my non-Cajun Cajun-French mother did brown a mean roux— with caramelized onions that any toddler would prefer to Cheerios. I did. 

This tendency to declare being unlike the vast majority of southerners became instilled in me and was the backdrop of my irreverence for Southerners.  

And to think, I was a black sheep to begin with. Why? For two initial reasons. One being that I was born into a birth order that practically resulted in my mother and I being our own family of two, because, as a first grader, I was too young to be of interest to my young-adult siblings and so was invisible to them, especially after they moved out. All I had was my mommy. The other being that in first grade I quietly ruled myself out as a candidate for self-confident membership in any crowd of kids because I was both timid and ashamedly fatherless. Being a little girl, I obviously could not have known about all the associated social struggles of the fatherless. I only knew how red my face got when adult women asked me some question about my father and I’d reply that he died, then they’d parrot me in some well-meant, flamboyant gush, “Oh, your daddy died, sha? Aw, I’m so sorry.” 

I didn’t say when he died. 

My head lowered. Timid people don’t like that kind of spotlight flashing near their vicinity. Other kids in the classroom would all be staring at me, silent. Eventually, those children’s mothers— or daddies— would arrive to pick them up from school. Rarely, some daddy figure hugged his little girl, and I thought it was curious for a man to hug a little girl. I mean, no daughter-daddy pairs even came to visit at home, so how would I know if it was normal? Neither had any man ever hugged me. I got the back-pat at most. I didn’t understand this specific interaction between any little girl and the daddy figure. It scared me, even, because I wouldn’t know if it was proper for any man ever to hug me, and when I found myself someplace, maybe church or among distant relatives, and several people there— including some other girls— were hugging some daddy I was never sure whether I was expected to do the same or not. Or why. Or whether I’d humiliate myself if I did. It was scary, standing there not knowing how to respond to these interactions. 

Some daddies hugged girls who were not their daughters. Were they nieces or just friends of the daughter? If I was school friends with the girl, should I hug her daddy? Everybody’s hugging the daddy but me, so what to do? 

The potential for a mishap, a misunderstanding, an innocent faux par in which I’d be laughed out the door and look like something was weird about me, scared my timid head so much that I wanted to run away and cry. Especially when I imagined being polite enough to hug the unfamiliar daddy then immediately imagined someone rumoring on the spot that I had a crush on him. No! I’m no purveyor of crushes! Mommy would be angry. 

And on many days my friends would start talking about their daddies in the schoolyard, then I’d quietly walk away because I didn’t want to risk anyone asking me about mine. I had learned to tightly guard the impressions I gave others about me at all costs, a priority, a defensiveness in my blood which ran through my tiny self-conscious veins. So, I knew this was the end of the line for me, that I’d probably not be a good fit for this gang then wandered off to try another, only to grasp well by eight years old that everybody had a daddy but me, and that this daddy thing was a big part of other people’s lives, a fact that was an uncomfortable, alien concept to me. My schoolyard peers even had brothers and sisters who went to school with us. I was like the lone ranger. If they asked me about my siblings my answer would have been the strangest of everyone’s, that my siblings were grown-ups. Some of the kids laughed, mocked, didn’t believe me, called me a liar. And when they spoke of their siblings, I felt I had nothing to contribute to the conversation since I didn’t know what it was like to share my bedroom, my clothes, or my friends with a sibling. I felt too different. 

And my mother dressed me strictly in fancy little Old South style dresses, never jeans. So, I also looked different every day. 

I can't think of a single person I could then identify with.  

My irreverence for people in my culture, whether they were Cajun or Southern or both was thus complicated by my sense of social alienation. The isolating, overprotected upbringing I received and assumed was normal at first, didn’t help. The over-structure of my outsider foundation was that my mother, who was anti-babysitter so took me everywhere, often visited her sisters. I listened to and observed their chats, trying to figure out indirectly and invisibly who they were, what they accepted or didn’t, what kinds of reactions they’d have to one another’s sentiments about whatever. What were these relationships people had? They could yell at each other and still stay close. Why did some of them seem like the meanest, or the kindest? Why did some of them notice me, talk to me about things I didn’t resonate with? Why didn’t I resonate? I vividly remember being the silent observer while considering such questions.

Intrigued, lost, and timid I literally lived in the shadows. I always sat someplace away from the busy mecca, the beaten paths, and the others in the room. If the table was the only place, I could sit to observe people only then would I sit at the table. I didn't want to just stare at walls. 

In high school I had three friends, and one of them didn’t like me. I know, that sounds like the lyrics to the intro-track of my hypothetical Scottish-wannabe sitcom: You know, like, “I-had. - - Three-friends- - but-even-one-of-them. - - Didn’t. See-the-world-my-way. - - I-was-the - - redhead goldfish-out of-water. - - And. Woa-woa. Everybody’s almond-eyed-Scotty-Scot-clown…” Sad lyrics indeed. And weird also. Just switch the character from Asian to Cajun. And then the wannabes from Scottish to Northerner. And bam. We got a Netflix show-deal. 

As an adult I broke away from my Louisiana roots, many times, going to live in the elsewheres, plural. While elsewhere, I’d have spontaneous conversations with one chatty random local or another, without revealing myself as a member of my own tangled Southern-Cajun-French roots. If I had any accent, it wasn’t outright Southern, and it was barely Cajun. I hardened my soft Rs to be sure no one would associate me with my root-land. I felt more well received this way. 

Rarely someone would add things up over the course of the conversation, realize that I was from Louisiana, like if I brainlessly mentioned parishes or Mardi Gras or some other buzz word a buzz context. "So, your Southern." I denied it, "Well we're not Southern, we're Cajun." They insisted that if I was a Cajun, I was a Southerner. I objected to myself. I could accept being Cajun at this point but Southern was too far a stretch, and conceptually to me it meant Texans and Alabamans, not Louisianans. I hadn’t traveled to other parishes in Louisiana, so irrationally believed into my twenties that all Louisianians less like Southerners and more like Cajuns. 

There are at least a few stark cultural differences between Cajuns and Southerners. The French. The religion. The devotion to ritualistic hospitality. 

On the other hand, the Southerners I met were generally more uptight, bossy, and far less compassionate in my view. So, linking me with Southerners in general sometimes made me wax defensive, and my random local chatter always thought I was out of my mind for not identifying with the whole South. I quit mentioning that I was Cajun for a long time. The only reason I had ever confessed it in the first place was to sound different, unusual. I didn’t significantly feel Cajun. Though I did take pride in Cajuns not being general Southerners. Man, ain’t that divisive. 

Yet this was a big deal to me, that people couldn't tell the difference between Cajun and Southern: Aside from my homeland, I had never lived in any other state before then, and specifically because I didn't want anything to do with Southerners. 

I’ve lived in Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, Washington, Florida, and other states instead. The term elsewhere here is an umbrella term for those places. 

After this I decided to be more careful in my conversations with the elsewhere locals, so even if they raved about the best Louisiana boudin and gumbo they’d ever eaten I refrained from confessing my Cajun roots in the hubbub of it all. Why get into an argument over the distinction between Southern and Cajun if I didn’t even feel like either of those? 

I hardly felt like a proper American half the time, being fascinated with European culture. So, I went stealth-Cajun in conversations with new random locals. These were great conversations. 

Eventually, the local might start chuckling and blatantly bash the south. If they did? Yes, bold-faced I confess, I bashed along with them. If they mocked, invalidated, or snickered about southerners, I was their willing accomplice. No. I didn’t do this to fit in. I seethed. I felt like the South hated me anyway, a conclusion based on another story- or ten. I distrusted almost all of the South, in fact, down to just a handful of people in Acadiana, many of whom I love-hated. 

But I never, ever, bashed another Cajun. Unless it was personal, having nothing to do with Cajun culture, of course. 

Despite my immediate family having been rooted in Acadiana for generations, I didn’t even know what the terms Fais Do Do or Lagniappe meant until about my mid-twenties, and my oldest sister had to teach me this after we got pretty close awhile. And despite my weird stepchild-of-the-Cajuns syndrome, I had gotten into a couple of arguments in Wyoming about Cajuns, who I defended even if I did not personally see myself as a Cajun. 

Why? Probably because my family members, and the handful of them I trusted, strongly identified with being Cajun- and not exactly Southern, by the way. I was always thrilled to run across another Cajun in such parts. That’s when I had to re-tweak my accent for a few minutes, sha. Immediately after this delightful exchange, though, I’d adjust it back to the elsewhere setting, harden the R. I considered it good practice anyway in case I ever got to be a TV journalist. 

Sometimes I’d run across a standard Southerner living in these elsewheres. Clearly, I used to engage in lots of conversations with strangers, on buses, in lines, at restaurants, convenience stores, laundromats, and waiting rooms; anywhere. I wasn’t so timid anymore. Long conversations were often in bars or at parks. My accent being in disguise, this Southerner didn’t know I was from Louisiana. That was my secret. We’d chat just fine awhile. Then I’s see they seemed so very lonely here, so far from their homeland state. So, in these pitiful cases I often decided to be merciful by opening my big mouth to reveal my true origins. 

Big mistake on my part. Elated, my Southern conversationalist always assumed I was one of their cultural kind. So, they’d strip away their When in Rome public image to reveal a naked confidence, gushing, asking me if I like some country music artist. I'd be polite, shrug, say that this artist sounded familiar, concluding, "Yeah, I think so." And when they returned from the jukebox they’d twang on over the music, deeply endeared halfway down to the coccyx with the south. 

They’d just be so glad to meet another southerner, assuming I was enamored like they were with all the traditional southern attitudes they hoarded. I didn’t mean to cause this awkward situation. I should have let them continue to assume I was an elsewhere local here in elsewhere. Too late. My ears would tremble, bawling into one another, longing for more Pearl Jam or U2, blues, even. Some song that sounded like it was composed of just one tone then given artificial tone variations caused by mild static grated on like it was scraping my soul. I mean at least Blue Grass or Honkey Tonk if you must, not the dull and harsh. 

I’d then have to listen to their nostalgic seepage, which slowly ran down their spine. It occasionally surpassed the coccyx, and soon joined the ranks of what I saw as ‘this shit.’ So, I’m sitting there listening to ‘this shit’. Fake-smiling because I want this odd branch of the overall conversation to get over with so we can get back to the cooler stuff. I couldn’t let my honest face diminish this soggy jaunt they kindly dragged me through because I knew doing so could immediately condemn our conversation at large to the quick death of their resulting disillusionment in me as a trustworthy southern chat-pal. Outside of their agonizing twig of sentimental disclosures I could chirp with them in these treetops for hours. They were nice people, though some unwittingly smelled of racism, even if they remained behaved, which I didn't know how to deal with, frankly. So, suspended my discomfort. And laughingly sometimes I suspended my disbelief in this unreal situation: two dogs laughing but one's really a cat under the mask. 

Worse than fake smiling was fake-cooing-along and nodding, and I did that too. Well, I was young. I just wanted to hang-out. 

I eventually found myself hiding, at first, like a scorched vampire on Holy Grounds when I moved, and reluctantly stayed, in the non-Louisiana South. I'm still reluctantly here, but now I've seen that there are a few natives who quietly disagree with their own roots, who aren't in the racism circuit, or the gun culture, or the womanizing culture, or any of that. 

I don't identify strongly with the South, but enough to get by. 

I became fairer. Sort of. When running into some south basher from elsewhere who is gearing up to villainize the entire southern or Deep South population, I recoil invisibly with a smile. Nodding along. Pretending to embrace the identical toxicity in my own heart. What will I hear from them? Often, they’ll point out all the nasty flaws that I’m well aware of, except these will be presented out of their real proportions and unaccompanied by the basic decency of my commentator’s conscious to at least reluctantly acknowledge that there is some good in the South. Well, if I reluctantly acknowledge it first then they will, too, to save face. And in their shoes all bashers, even I, do that in halfway polite conversation unless we are having a very bad day— and are demented. 

I now appreciate the opposition for this one thing: For making me examine and distinguish between what’s true and what isn’t true about my tangled roots. 

When I think about my process of making those distinctions between true and false, I consider an experience I had at age forty. I started teaching myself how to render photographic drawings by pausing the TV on Star Trek and drawing Doctor Crusher. I’ve always admired that character. So, I spent a couple of hours examining this paused TV image. 

I identified angular relationships between specific points like the tip of the eyebrow to the tip of the eyelashes, the crease of the nostril to the corner of the lip. I measured the distance between those points by eye. Forehead height. Face width. Chin size and shape. Ear setting. I even taped a transparent grid on top of Crusher’s TV face. Then carefully, despite much erasing and restarting, I finally felt confident that my rendering was perfect. I was so excited. Then I got up and I laid my paper drawing over the screen so I could gloat and rejoice in how perfectly they matched up. I was seconds away from my gloating goal. 

Crusher’s image radiated from the TV screen through the paper overlay brightly enough for me to honestly compare my work with the real image that I’d meticulously copied. The first time I did this I immediately started searching my phone for conditions associated with delusions. I thought my mind was seriously fried: my drawing and her TV image were far, far from twins. How could this happen? I grew hysterical with the fear of being bonkers. “How am I not seeing reality! What the F is wrong with my brain! I have made every diligent effort to see and measure and perceive accurately, yet the TV Doctor Crusher and my paper Doctor Crusher can hardly pass for twins, even evil twins, much less carbon copies!” 

Then I sat down and bawled in my living room. I said to me softly, “There is something wrong with my perception. It’s like I don’t see as other people see. I wonder if they’ve known this about me all along. I’m a walking malfunction. What if nobody looks the way I think they do?” Yeah, that messed with my head. And I was perplexed at this new devastating view of my reality. 

Eventually I gave myself a pass after considering that most people require a lot of art training to successfully render images that look like carbon copies. I thought of my art as unintended impressionism. I accepted that out of eight billion people there are eight billion perceptions, each one different. 

But is that a bad thing that proves we are all blind, all the time? As tempting as it can be to answer a fast yes, I thought a few years longer on this. I saw that even people in the south will genuinely see what I see. Even Southerners can perceive, each in some unique way, that not all faucets of their own culture are just. Southern people don’t all like bull riding or hitting their kids, or watching an innocent young calf get lassoed and dragged. There are many southerners who love all animals. 

They can see that helping others compassionately, taking an interest in ideas not native to their family's world view, keeping an open mind, and steering away from extreme culture is proper. When I see my Doctor Crusher with a too-narrow face and they see it with a too-wide face it won’t matter because the point is that we can all see that this is Doctor Crusher, a kind, intelligent TV doctor, no matter where you come from. I think that even crosses language barriers. So, the differences in our perspectives are there but to a degree in which folks can potentially still see all the same things in the same basic way. 

Yet we get all butt-hurt and bent sideways over our mildest differences. We prefer to argue about the doc’s face being too wide or her nose being too long. Does one still identify this face as Doc Crusher, a compassionate TV character? Then that’s the point of resonance. To resonate. Not to carbon copy views but to perceive subjects through human impressionism.

To complicate matters, our personal language can create the convincing illusion that people are insincere, or that you think Doc Crusher is a pushover. That's the other layer of our sight, the impression others get from it based on the words we chose to reveal our opinions to them. Language is often a poor representative of us unless everyone is calm and contemplative. Distrust is the enemy of Language, these are not compatible, they do not work well together. They cause the appearance of more differences than actually exist between people.

Clearly, a few people may always see Doc Crusher as a space alien, not a woman, not a human. They may see the skilled drawing of her as revealing buggy eyes and sharp teeth. Yet those people do not represent all the people in the South. Frankly sometimes it's sad because some perfectly decent, clear minded Southern people get caught between disagreements in the cultural arguments.

Despite all that, though, people are not as different as we seem. I perceived all southerners as brute cavemen on horseback just because they didn’t all look exactly like me in terms of behaviors or personal preferences. Clearly there are still people doing things I consider not nice in the South, and everywhere else, too. But overall, I can see them as people.

Yes. Southerners are people, too.

Now, for my distrust of Cajuns, possibly passed down by my mother: It's hard not to feel like an outsider when you are brought up blatantly as an outsider. I've had mixed feelings about being Cajun, two opposite ones, in fact. Pride and shame simultaneously. The pride came from feeling, no matter how distant, that I technically had a claim to a group I could call 'my people.' I needed that sense. I also felt a kind of pride when I attempted to escape being labeled southern by openly claiming my Cajun roots. And even now I happen to think Mardi Gras is the best good time in the world, second only to Oktober Fest in Germany. I guess we rave and boast about the things we love.

The simultaneous shame came from the associations the public makes between Cajuns and swamp people who, for whatever reason, find the prospect of spending their time shooting alligators attractive. I don't want to cuddle with alligators, obviously. But I think it's, well, arrogant to move into their neck of the woods then start killing them. The people on that TV show who do that, however, do have endearing personalities: I don't dislike them. I just don't want to be identified with that activity. The real-life Cajuns I've known have never even traveled through the swamps. I never have. And the only way I would, would be in a glass-enclosed, airconditioned vessel with a professional camera and my curiosity about nature.

And then there are other assumptions people have made about Cajuns that aren't appealing, and they're similar to the prejudices my mother had. That we are ignorant, uncivilized, racial, and practice freakish forms of Voodoo by sticking pins in dolls when people piss us off. Wow. They see us as everything negative about the South on steroids, and while I know better, I can't deny that Cajuns, like Southerners in general, do have a few choice characters among them. I've met some of them, them face to face, many times. Occasionally these slur the N word freely. They are rough, rowdy types, sun-cooked from a lifetime of hard, callousing labor outside, and say unacceptable things loudly and with an extra heavy dousing of French and English curse words. People like this, well, mock people like me, and consider thoughtfulness and honesty a pointless luxury. 

In fairness, they've lived hard lives and are still human. And in fairness, well, I hope they get reincarnated until they recognize their own faults. Sometimes I have to say things I'd rather not say if I am to present an honest picture void of gaps.

Somehow the people like this and the Cajuns in my life became blurred together in my memories of my experiences as the 'native outsider.' Yes, that sounds like an oxymoron, like 'jumbo shrimp.' But it's no figure of speech unless I am a walking figure of speech. Native outsider: born inside as an outsider. To such a person, many things become blurred.

It was not until decades after I left Louisiana that I looked back with a clear mind. And I was shocked by the truth about some of the people in my roots after sitting down for a few days to really immerse myself into old memories. To examine them. To try to remember outside of my impression. That sounds impossible but it's not. Not when your impression has been unfair and not based on what you really know. You can deny what you know, you see, burry it, give it the backseat to whatever you prefer to focus on. I searched my memories it for specific details that I hadn't looked for before.

It never occurred to me until fairly recently to search my memory instead of making assumptions about the people in my roots. I discovered that the vast majority of my relatives could be separated from the villains in my mind's dismissive blur of perception. As I started to untangle my roots, I realized that they weren't defined by the smudgy wax of negative stereotypes I had applied to them in order to justify my indifference.

Yes, indifference. To me, they had been so unimportant that I didn't care enough about whether they were or weren't stereotypical to concern myself with them either way. I just let the blur do its thing in defining almost everyone in my root system. And when I removed that thick waxy coating from my past memories, I saw the truth about what kind of people they were. And I started digesting that truth for the first time. I allowed it to enter my bloodstream, to warm my frigid fingertips in my handling of their legacy, of their meaning to me.
That meaning did not disgust me, surprisingly. They were not just more of the same.

I realized that my Cajun relatives, unblurred, had more in common with me than I thought. They didn’t have any guns on display, if they even owned any at all. They didn’t hoard dogs or tie them to any trees, never. They weren’t immersed in the worlds of beauty competitions or bullfighting. Overall, they leaned more normal than not. In fact, my four late aunts were, in some order: A renter of rooms, a homesteader, a teacher of children with special needs, and one short, stout, food-loving, French-speaking, jolly schizophrenic widow. Their equity consisted of, in the same order: A giant pink antebellum home in the thick of sad-town, an off-highway country home on land that was covered in cows, donkeys, edible roots, and dozens of cats, a craftsman-style college-neighborhood house painted in a forever friendly blue, and a small home in an out skirting subdivision just blocks from her family’s hardware store. And on my father’s side there was the disabled one who always gave me candy, her son living in the garage.

Overall suburban, all quite common, normal people. No one lived in a tent in the swamp, one-eyed with five guns and a wooden paddle for the kids.

Before I started middle school, my uncles were all either deaf, dead, or distant. My brothers-in-law were in law enforcement. My dainty sisters drank more than the old men did. My mother never did drink or smoke. She was kind and made herself of service to anyone she could regardless of their skin color. Growing up I never saw a gun except on TV— and I wasn’t supposed to be watching that. These were my living experiences, which aren't always conspicuous until one removes the blur of indifference.
So, you see, or more accurately— now I see-- that we Deep Southerners aren’t all piggish, crude, barefoot, gun-giddy, dumb drunks, and whatever else I used to call us.

Yes. I am, Cajun. I am, Southern. I’m not prideful of my heritage. But not because it’s a bad one. It’s because I'm just not the type to take any serious pride in heritage, not real patriotic and barely sentimental.Yet I am no longer ashamed of my roots. Even if Southern culture is still pushing its outdated traditions its people are waking up, its societies are transforming. It’s cultural evolution.

Even in the case where one has skeletons in the family, new paths are forged by Southerners. There are many who genuinely persist, resist, and free-twist from the tangled mass of moss and whiskey-lit veins that plagues even the enlightened ones through some misfortunate kinship of either blood or marriage. They are not their relatives. They are themselves. They should not be blurred over by the waxes of indifference or dismissed as stereotypes.

Many southerners are compassionate, intelligent human beings who embrace change, education, and other cultures. And if one lost fool exists among every three, five, or seven, civilized, open-minded Southerners, well then, must we make the lost one the poster child of the South? I’m glad to have opened my eyes to see that the South, Deep South. Old South, and Upper South, all have good people. We even have enlightened ones who will never object if you reject the confederate flag. because it doesn’t mean the world to them. They are not ethnocentric, overall.

Well, look at this. I’ve cleaned up my roots with the towel of contemplation. They don’t shine but they aren’t rotten and putrid at least. And something about this conclusion reminds me of Back to the Future, where the doc comes back to say, "It's your kids, Marty." Because I've cleaned up my perspective of the South. So that part is finished here. But wait. There's religion, now. So, the show must go on. 

But it won't be dark or joyless.

Religion is a separate layer of my roots that I can’t ignore. The effects of religious roots can be distracting at minimum. It can play with your soul and mess with your head worse than a funny drawing of Doctor Crusher named Doctor Emmet Brown.

I made a good decision and now hold firm, and kindly so, no matter how many times anyone invites me to church. This is the root that is most personal to me, the one I own. Religion and I, know each other pretty well. I will never give away my free mind for church 'cause it always turns out more like when a lone recovering addict goes to an NA meeting to get clean, yet they end up just finding more of the same and end up worse. I've done that to myself too often as a churchgoer.There are plenty of lost people inside and outside of church. Each person has his or her unique, individual balance of light and shadow within. The unique balance of each person combines to shade-in the balance of the whole group. Every group is the sum of its parts. Every group has its quality, it's character. When I compare the churched group with the unchurched group, the overall character of each of these groups is identical to that of the other group. The church people are composed of both harsh and kind souls, courageous and fearful souls, they are no different from unchurched people just because they go to church, not in my examination. They can't be different because they are, like all of us, earth beings. No one among us is some enlightened alien.

The non-church types just don't say Hallelujah. I see little difference. Church people do not shine with more love than unchurched people. There's a pitfall involving humans gathering in big groups, in or out of church: they are fond of inventing rules for everyone that have nothing to do with the bottom line of Love. The rules don't protect the dignity of the most vulnerable among them.

Often, the churched are just more distracting as opposed to being more thoughtful or more sincere than the unchurched. I wouldn't say that anyone of them are bad people based on whether they do or don't go to church.

Back when I used to go to church… Continued in Tattered Roots: An Open Mind Unbuckled