Who we is, Part 2..

My accent slowly and surely acclimated, especially after I started school. The new kid always catches shit in any small town, and in rural Arkansas that’s especially so if you act and sound like you just got off the bus from Yankeeville. I was a quiet, observant kid anyway, so I just stayed out of the way, watched and listened.

I learned that poor southern white people are very clannish and distrust outsiders; it takes a long time to ’get inside’. It comes from their Scots-Irish, Irish, Welsh and English ancestors - they had escaped from a place where being too open with people you didn’t know could get a whole village of your folk wiped out. The same distrust holds true for government, especially powerful government.

I learned that poor southern white people are polite to a fault; coldly so with strangers, very cheery and warm with friends and family, but always polite…up until about three minutes before they kill you.

And there was something else. I sensed it. I couldn’t quite get my finger on it. I could see it in people’s actions, a certain beaten demeanor just under the surface. I got it from everybody, old and young - teachers, preachers, parents – an almost downtrodden, yet angry feeling - and it didn’t seem to my young eyes or heart that anybody noticed, or maybe didn’t admit.

A dim light came on when we learned about the Civil War in history class. Here is what we were taught, in a nutshell:

Southern white people were bad - they owned slaves and hated black people. Northerners were good - they hated slavery and loved black people. The bad Southern people rebelled against the good Northern people. The good Northern people defeated the bad Southern people, then taught them how to be good Northern people.

Something didn’t click. I went to the library and did some reading. Nope. Didn’t happen anything like that. Hmmm. State’s rights as guaranteed under the constitution. Slavery was already dying of natural causes. Anti-free negro sentiment very high in many Northern states. A very, very small percentage of Southerners and Southern combatants were slave owners; most fought because their homeland was being invaded. And what really caught my eye: Southern forces had soundly whipped Northern at almost every juncture with fewer men, arms, and supplies, for the first two years of a four year war…and attrition and lack of resources were the true reason the South ultimately lost. Hmmm.

Next history class I paid real close attention. I had been lied to. I was onto something…



[Note: Don’t go hollerin’ "RACIST!" yet. In the next installment I actually type the words "nigger", "cracker", and "fuckin’ Yankee-ass carpetbagger". Also, this fuckin’ Microsoft Word can STILL kiss my ass with its little squiggly red or green lines under words it don’t like.]