How We Write a Better South
/By Josina Guess
Photo by Sarah Baugh
If there’s anything we can do for this sick world, it might be to give it a healthy dose of more stories.
For the past six years, The Bitter Southerner has gathered a community of makers, storytellers, musicians, teachers, artists, and visionaries to tell true stories of the South, as it is, in all its beauty and brokenness. These stories help us understand where we come from, who we are, and how far we have yet to come. They make us think, laugh, and sometimes cry. These stories, like good medicine, make us better.
I’m excited and humbled to join the team as assistant editor of a magazine that loves the South like a grown child loves its own dysfunctional family: remembering and holding on to all the good that’s worth keeping while tenaciously exposing and getting rid of the junk you don’t want for yourself or the next generations. Since you will trust me to help curate The Bitter Southerner’s stories, I believe I should trust you with a few pieces of my story along the way.
I’ll start with where I’m from. I get asked that question a lot because I have European and African roots and people can’t easily place me in a box based on my voice or looks. There used to be anti-miscegenation laws on the books against families like mine, who dared to marry across the man-made divide of race. I’m from Quaker farmers, Union Colored Infantry soldiers, Eastern Shore fisherwomen, tight-laced business men, poets, preachers, teachers, cooks and cleaners. I’m from bluegrass music and hip hop, bare feet on gravel roads and polished shoes on hard concrete. It’s taken me a lifetime to admit it: I’m from the South.
My family lived in a little yellow trailer in Epes, Alabama, just long enough for me to get born and learn to walk, but Washington, D.C., is the place that formed me. My dad worked for the Federation of Southern Black Farmers Cooperatives in Alabama, but it wasn’t long before we moved further north for better jobs and more opportunities for an interracial family like ours to thrive. Educated in D.C. Public Schools, I had the privilege of being steeped in the words and wisdom of writers like Douglass, DuBois, Hughes, Wright, Baldwin, Hurston, Morrison, Angelou, and Giovanni before I realized what a gift that truly was. I also bore witness to the destructive power of crack cocaine and murder that rose to epidemic proportions in our neighborhoods in the late 1980s and 1990s and the tenacious courage of community leaders who refused to accept that as normal.
In D.C., my three siblings and I learned early to navigate public transportation and the rough terrain of race, class, and educational disparities that keep our society fractured. I found a way to become whole across those divides. We spent summers connecting with my mother’s Appalachian roots: square dancing, knowing the mountains and the names of birds, milking Jersey cows and tasting my grandma’s homemade treats. We also spent time with my dad’s family in Philadelphia surrounded by my grandmother’s collections of African American books and dolls, old issues of The Crisis, Ebony and Jet, and 78 records by Paul Robeson. All of these experiences nurtured in me an abiding passion for writing, history, beauty, community, and justice that has sustained me into adulthood.
Some red clay must have gotten lodged in my belly button when I was a baby because, even though I’ve traveled the world and lived in big cities, something pulled me to set my roots in rural Georgia. For nearly a decade, I’ve carved out a life of writing, community organizing, gardening, and parenting that makes me glad to be just where I am.
Photo by Sarah Baugh
Most of that gladness comes from my neighbors, who share their lives, stories, and surplus food with me and my family. There’s my next-door neighbor who hauls in more catfish than he can eat and keeps our freezer stocked. There’s my friend who sent me on a trip with a bag full of tamales, because tamales are the best traveling food. I have neighbors who came here as refugees, who raise their own backyard chickens and lush gardens of chili peppers, roselle, and bitter eggplant. I have neighbors who turned their backs on the rush of materialism toward baking their own bread, growing grapes, and fig trees and mending what’s broken.
The more I have learned about healing from trauma, the more I’ve wondered about our nation’s recovery process from the horrors of slavery and the Civil War. I was raised by hippies who said, “War is not the answer.” But my family also took me on regular pilgrimages to Civil War sites like Harper’s Ferry and Gettysburg with a deep reverence and appreciation for people who fought and sacrificed their lives to end an economic system based on human trafficking. The Civil War ended slavery and dependence on free labor — on paper, but not completely in practice. Our nation is still struggling to right a terrible and ongoing crime against humanity that no war could correct.
If war isn’t the answer, then what is? What could help a land so thick with ghosts and violence, so wracked with legacies of greed, terror, and racism, become a place of hope and healing?
But I’ve come to believe we could be the answers to our grandparents’ prayers.
The Bitter Southerner is like a big front porch, where we can all sit and listen and dream together of a better land. I’m excited to sit with y’all and sift through our Southern stories. Accounts of our intricate and overlapping religious, cultural, and linguistic diversities; of us working together; of cruelty and callousness that must never be repeated; of those long-dead who never got the honor they deserved in life; of love, resilience, and hope against the odds.
Somebody better bring some music and something good to eat and drink, because we might be here a while. No one can rewrite our ugly past, but I come into this job believing that together, we can write a better future.