A Southerner's Thoughts on Acquiescence and Lost Respect for the South
by: Jimmy O'Reilly

My Grandmother, born in 1892, often spoke of "The War" [that's all we ever called it around here] and 'those people' [we all knew who they were] with an acid venom and always in the first person. I guess it was the stories her folks told her, and her being a Forrest girl by birth who was directly related to Nathan B. may have also contributed to her feelings on the subject. My Grandfather, born in 1875, very seldom spoke of the war at all. But he'd always answer whenever I questioned him. His momma, older brothers, sisters, and folks, tended the farm while his daddy "was off trying to run those people off and aways from here for everybody." Do you know why he seldom spoke of it? Because he'd been conditioned by his momma, brothers, and sisters who all told him his daddy was a "Parolee." Parolees are usually criminals who can be jailed for breaking the terms of their parole. Right? So it naturally followed to my Great Granddaddy, the Parolee, that talking about politics and/or the war was a danger to his freedom. My Grandfather merely continued this family thought pattern throughout his life. Whether this was true or not does not matter. They all thought it was true. But they got that idea from someone, didn't they? What a brilliant way to shut some folks up! The Original Homeland Security Act maybe.

While I certainly cannot speak for all Southerners, I can respond from both personal experience and reasonable conclusions drawn from a lifetime [now at age 51] of listening, asking, reading, thinking, and generally sticking my nose in at every chance I had. I have two brothers, two sisters, and my mother is still living at age 85. I know and care more about this subject than any of them combined could ever tell. The sad fact is, they could care less and have often asked me: "Jim, why do you waste your time with something that won't do you any good?" Read "any good" as "making money." Therein lies a partial answer to your question. I could never answer their question anyway and wish I knew why I cared so much. This is probably the most costly lifetime endeavor anyone could ever imagine and I've yet to receive one cent for my efforts, and barely any thanks either!

My mother left her parent's farm in 1939 at age 21 to go to Nursing School in Norfolk, Virginia. She's told me countless stories of her life growing up, the hardships, the intense labor, her hands scarred to this day from 21 years of picking cotton and other farm/field chores, the floods, washed out crops, lightening killing a desperately needed mule, etc. Yet her stories of woe are always far outweighed by the stories of love and caring of her Christian parents and her 'folks.' Read 'folks' as the elder blacks who also raised her up, and their children with who she played, worked, and loved as much as her own parents, brother, and sister. She had a horse named 'Star' which she rode to school, she ran through the woods at night on coon hunts, she has many such stories which I cannot relate here, but trust me, she had fun. It was a good, decent, honest, Christian life of which she can be proud. In fact, she said: "We were poor, but never knew it because we always had food and clothes [which her momma handmade] and we were always clean. But most of all, we were loved and we knew it." I asked her why she wanted to leave that life and go to the city. "Those color magazine ads that we saw" was one of her answers. She saw a bunch of phony color ads which lured her away to a 'better life.' But who decided that it was a better life? Ask yourself where a young Southern girl would get such an idea. How would it come to pass that a young Southern girl, who dearly loved her parents, folks, and her life, would ever arrive at the conclusion that there was a 'better life' than the one she had?

Momma wanted to go to nursing school because she knew an older girl who had gone off to nursing school and often came home driving her own new car, and wearing "nice" clothes to see her parents on their farm. That dazzled my mother.

They were poor is what momma said. She'd seen her, "daddy more than once have to tote a fifty pound bag of peanuts ten miles on his back and come home with seventy-five cents." I don't know to this day what the equivalent amount is to that sum, but I bet it isn't much. I'd also bet that not many people would do that today either. They had livestock, but couldn't afford to raise it up for meat. The money was needed badly for seed, supplies, and feed. They only ate meat when my Granddaddy hunted it up. Sometimes he'd be gone for a week or more. When he'd come out from the woods and start out across the front field with a deer on his back it was a holiday on the old place. However, more often than not, he usually just had coons, squirrels, or a live possum, some birds, and sometimes, maybe, a turkey. They ate anything and everything because that's all the meat they got. Momma can tell you how to fix up all that meat too. I'll be glad to send the information to you. Of course they raised up chickens and ate lots of chicken, when possible. And they had a garden. Folks say today: "I never seen anything like it! Your Granddaddy could raise up turnips off a rock!" I guess he could. If he didn't they'd have starved. When it was hog killing time the youngins stayed home from school to help. They'd get sausage then, and if possible, put a ham or two, and maybe some bacon, in the smokehouse.

They didn't even know there was a depression and it didn't matter to them because they always had food and clothes. But, they never had money anyway, so, who cared about a depression? Momma never even heard a radio until 1939. There wasn't electricity around the county until 1942, and their place didn't get it until much much later. My Grandparents never even a had a bathroom their entire lives. They washed up out on the back porch. My brothers and I always thought that was fun. My sisters, of course, hated it. My Grandparents never had running water in the house until my father paid to have it put in for them back about 1961. I always thought that was nice.

Maybe my momma was shamed from seeing Southerners in the 'picture shows' portrayed as inbreeds, narrow minded, and not just poor, but "dirt poor." Perhaps she listened to lies and propaganda of traveling politicians hunting up votes telling them about a "better life." Well, in my thinking, if there's a better life, then there must be something inferior about this one. Then there were all those "Farmer's Daughters" jokes. Maybe there were "better schools" out there off the farm and aways from the old place. Maybe that's what it was all about: education. But then a relative of ours has a stack of letters written by my Great Grandfather back during the war. I have seen and read those letters. There must be thirty or forty letters in that stack. The handwriting is both flawless and elegant. Even with a Masters Degree I'm hard pressed to understand his frequent allusions to Greek and Roman mythologies and the Latin phrases found in those letters. He never even went to school! He didn't have any degree. Not in nothing! He was a farmer. Yet his children, their children, and me neither, could hardly decipher what he was talking about and we all went to "better schools" than he did. Maybe momma was shamed by not knowing Greek and Roman mythology and that compelled her to go away for a better life. Well, that better life didn't do me any good because I don't know none of no Greek and Roman mythology, or no Latin phrases neither, at least not without an encyclopedia and Google.

I live out on the old place now. My cousins gave me my Grandparent's old house. Last night it got mighty cold in here while I was laying on the couch watching Iraq about to get reconstructed so I pulled my Grandmomma's handmade quilt over me and couldn't help but notice the fine detailed and intricate stitch work. It wasn't long before I got to thinking, again, some more, about handmade and store-bought items and forgot all about Saddam's woes. No one knows how long it took Grandmomma to make the quilt. Momma said, "She had to make it out of scraps because she had no money." I bet my wife and I have bought a hundred blankets by now and probably have two left that are worth keeping the dogs off. Our blankets are all store-bought, too.

When I was a Navy brat teenager in Norfolk any kid who came to school in something "homemade" would catch a pile of ribbing. Yeah, we all had to have Levi's, Gant shirts, Bostonians, Alligator belts, et al. My sisters' closets made Imelda Marcos' look barren. We weren't rich, but we lived nicely on my dad's navy officer's salary and our parents made sure we were always dressed nicely. I often think of momma's emphasis on always being clean and having "good clean clothes." I've seen other clothing my Grandmother "had to" make, which all must be over eighty years old and there's no frays, rips, or rents. Maybe she used kryptonite cotton? But the point is that somehow my momma got to think that "store-bought" meant good and "homemade" meant bad. Where did she get such an idea? I bet you could put every store-bought piece of clothing her entire family ever owned into one steamer trunk. None of them ever had "store-bought" clothes. So where did that idea come from?

Behind me now, on the old place, and back in the woods, abandoned and all grown over, is the old black community of Jerusalem, Virginia. Most all of them folks packed up and went off to the cities up north in the mid to late 60s to help with the creation of The Great Society. The old folks, with some common sense that stayed, have all died off now. There's still an old house back there, with rusting farm equipment, and an old pickup truck, among other junk. Jerusalem was a genuine community, not like the type we have thrown at us religiously everyday on some idiotic news reader type show. They talk of this community or that community as if these communities actually exist. I often think of what type of community the descendents from Jerusalem are living in now. Do they even know about Jerusalem? How much of their land went to the state for unpaid taxes? There's still one old man who lives out of town and still owns his five acres which he rents to a local farmer. I walk back there a lot to go hunting, hiking, or just to sit on the old rusty plow and think. I read once that some Englishmen had nothing but contempt for the Irish because they could sit all day out in a field doing nothing. I understand that now. I also would bet that those particular English were of Puritan lines, and not of the Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry type English lines. I understand all that now too. This might answer some of your question also. I also find it hard to respect someone who would abandon a reality held firmly in their hand in exchange for a government huckster's hawked pipe dream. I often wonder if I could have talked those poor folks out of leaving their homes. Could I have reasoned with them? I'm sure somebody tried.

The men who built the South into what it became, a bastion of intellectual and Christian thought, love of liberty, etc., were not just born, they were raised up to be what they became. Read John Taylor of Caroline as he explains this very well, and particularly the aspect of northern jealousy and their desire to quash Southern society if their true intentions were to ever be realized. I'm not sure how many of those Southern men, like John Taylor, went to better schools. But someone had to raise them up for them to even want to become so smart. No one much does that anymore. I asked my momma once if they ever read and discussed things of interest. She said no, because when it came dark they were so tired all they could do was fall in bed and go to sleep. John Taylor of Caroline explains how this came to be also. How was it that my Great Grandfather, the Parolee, was so well schooled and smart, but he never even went to school, and had no degree whatsoever. Yet his family, all raised up on the same place, had little time except to work long and hard just to survive, but they all went to better schools than he did. It all seemed odd to me and it got me to wondering about such things when I was small.

Probably the biggest reason we acquiesce is the old "bazooka word" - racism. Most folks down here were raised up to be polite, considerate, and willing to compromise, which is a fantastic ideology to have combat when you are willing to be rude, abrasive, and demanding to get what you want. So, we're sort of set up from birth to be "had" and "those people" know this. I would interject this here, at this point: "Those people" can now be read as: the pests who are bred from busybody Godless Puritans, Internationalists, Shop-till-you-drop-Materialistas, Pee-Wee Gray and his race gangstas, and any other groups and/or persons including, but not limited to, those haters of Christianity and the Southern love of liberty, which we call down here "Traditional Southern Values." By the way, have you ever heard of "Detroit Values" or, "Cleveland Values" or, maybe, "Traditional northern Values?"

'Those people' have had about 140 years to re-educate us. Hopefully, now, with what's left of us Southerners, we can re-re-educate ourselves with a love of place and sense of self and thereby regain our self respect and begin to demand some respect from them as well.