Photo by Vaschelle André
September 20, 2021
Dear Bitter Southerners,
I wrote a poem years ago: “South the Name of Home.” That South, the one of my longings, has been carried inside me wherever I have traveled. It remains vibrant, even now.
Today I live on a hillside in Northern California, and what I have been mourning these last weeks of summer is the destruction of my peach trees by bears. As most Southerners know, especially those from Georgia, life isn’t the same without plenty of peaches — at least enough to fill a sizable tin tub. Then there are the chickens underneath the peach trees that look exactly like the ones that ran about our yard near Wards Chapel, in Putnam County, and there are the delicious eggs, though sometimes Reginald the Rooster has planted seed, making them inedible. There is the same garden my mother would recognize if she were alive: the collards, the kale, the turnips, the bushels of tomatoes, the peas and beans that did not do that well this year. The potatoes! And yes, mixing my metaphor with hers: flowers! Everywhere among the growing food. For flowers are what the Spirit eats.
Sometimes grief turns to bitterness, and that is what the soul devours when it is in despair. I know this intimately because I fell so in love with where I was born that I named myself “Straight Pine” after one of the trees. Losing connection with the skinny pines of Georgia was incredibly difficult. But there was insight to be gained even here. I know what it feels like to have no place in the actual spot where you were born; and this has fired my activism wherever I have traveled in the world. What!? I have exclaimed internally while facing snarling strangers sometimes holding guns: You intend to blast these people out of their homes, their land, their orchards and vineyards and ... their Earth that is sitting atop the gas or oil or uranium you and your gadgets have found?
This intensity of solidarity with others like myself is grounded in my Southern upbringing and uprooting. I am grateful for it and consider it a gift. How could I stay in a land of so many tears? So much violence? And yet, more of the world than ever reflects what so many of us hoped would remain in the Southern past.
We are now called, I believe, to teach what we have learned and know.
Which is why The Bitter Southerner appeals to me.
My own bitterness was transformed, through much work and meditation, into a different emotion, over time. Sadness, yes, after a decades-long period of mourning. But then, acceptance that Life is what it is and we are incredibly fortunate to have any part of it. I began to see Northern California, where I live now, very much in terms of its own particular loveliness: giant oaks, magnificent mountains, a bobcat or mountain lion right outside my window traveling so fast one only glimpses a tail. Bears! I began to love the little wooden teepee I found on half of the 40 acres once promised to ancestors and me, and never delivered. I saw the sun beaming here, too, and heard water rushing down the mountainsides all winter long — before our droughts and fires!
I am convinced, by the serenity that has followed my years of sadness and regret, my bitterness, that Life has always adored me — if Southerners of “the opposite race,” as they were called years ago, could not. That it is in Life itself that I find my home, am nurtured splendidly, and am settled.
It makes me happy to affirm a magazine that reflects our diverse faces and races. Together, and in solidarity with stubborn ancestors on all sides, we can be a beautiful, a powerful, offering to the world.
Alice Walker
Alice Walker’s childhood home in Putnam County, Georgia. (Photo by Amanda Greene)
