Kat Meads on Writing About the South While Far From it

Kat Meads on Writing About the South, While Far From it https://ift.tt/kXYWFr3

Researching an essay about Flannery O’Connor’s mother, Regina, for my new collection These Particular Women, I set off for the O’Connor home, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Georgia. Other Andalusia visitors and O’Connor biography readers will conjure a visual of that red-roofed, two-story farmhouse, its front porch lined with rocking chairs affording a splendid view of pasture and field. 

I hadn’t been east — or south — for some time. But I took no more than two steps into the O’Connor home before experiencing full-body recognition: Southern farmhouses are in my DNA. Although I’ve now lived in California for more years than I like to count, physically separated from the region of my birth, mentally I’m still very much a resident of Currituck County, North Carolina.

In the novel when the dust finally settles, I wrote:

Farther up the road, Amelia Nell is suddenly seized with the need to find the perfect hopscotch piece, gotta have it TODAY, mica or quartz, flat-edged, just so, and that means digging for anything that glints.

The road I described is the dirt road that linked my childhood home to macadam.

In describing Elizabeth Jane Anderson’s house trailer, plunked in the middle of a cornfield, in the novel In This Season of Rage and Melancholy, I replicated a house trailer “down county,” invisible from Highway 158. I wrote: 

Anyone who came looking for her had to, first, know the way. When the corn was high, the trailer couldn’t be seen at all from the secondary road. Once the corn had been picked, a hedge of overgrown bay bushes hid where she slept.

When Miss Jane returns to her mama’s kitchen in Miss Jane: The Lost Years, it is my mother’s Southern kitchen and canning habits I borrow — as well as my enduring fondness for a good (Southern) tomato sandwich:

Mom’s in the steamy kitchen canning tomatoes, stove heat amplifying day heat, the lot smelling to high vegetative heaven. Miss Jane folds herself in Mom’s folds for a sweat-sticky hug. “Want me to slice up one of these tomatoes for a sandwich?” Miss Jane surely does! Nothing beats a homegrown tomato; nothing.

And when my rebellious heroine Kitty Duncan, in The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan, flees her marriage to reside in a beach town —

As much as she loved digging her toes into sand piles and sniffing salty air along with the gulls, not even a confirmed beach gal like Kitty could work up much enthusiasm for outdoor activities when the sun looked as color muted as the Atlantic, incapable of warming the spirit or the flesh.

— it was the month of March on the Outer Banks in adjoining county Dare that I had in mind.

When I came west for a job in my late thirties, timber from my grandmother’s woods came with me. Everything I’ve written — fiction, nonfiction, the words I’m writing now — has been written on a desktop constructed by my uncle: three joined planks of pine. In my study, directly across from my desk, is a cabinet containing my other grandmother’s blue and red flowered pitcher; a photo of my dog, my dad, and myself in a boat on Indiantown Creek; and my father’s turquoise toolbox — all shipped from North Carolina to California to join me.  

My address might have been otherwise, but home was — and is — North Carolina. I returned often to my parents’ — and then my parent’s — house, staying for weeks at a time, visiting relatives, catching up on community gossip, land sales, and real estate development, the territory of my childhood over time shifting from a rural, farming community to a more thickly populated, commuter settlement. Flying west again, I always took some South with me: in my head, in my heart, in my nose (honeysuckle, gardenias), and on my tongue (fried flounder, my aunt’s cornbread). It was a gift, the longevity of that connection and reconnection, for me personally and for my writing.

After our mother’s death, my brother and I shared one last spring twilight together on the back porch of our childhood home, watching the magnolia tree, picnic bench, bird house, field rows, and pine woods as they darkened, listening as the swamp music commenced. When you come from a place, you never really leave it, even when you do.

We’d run that dirt so many times for fun, for games, run it just to run and now we ran in terror toward Linda’s house, streaked with black, still smoldering. The Meadses were okay; only the house had been harmed. But we hadn’t known that, trapped in Mrs. Simpson’s car. We weren’t afforded that comfort, separated from our own.        

                                                                        — from Dear DeeDee

Writing about the South helps keep the South close.