Yes, we are.
This is in response to myrch's observations on Tennessee.

"Shitty food, poor English, country music... I mean, this is what the entire South is like."




I am a Tennessee native. Western Tennessee, to be precise--home to such meccas of sophistication as Memphis (home of Elvis!), Jackson (home of Casey Jones and Carl Perkins!), and Boliver (home of that guy from Walking Tall!) I grew up, literally, in the middle of a cottonfield, the last remnants of a family farm that has been rented out to various local farmers who take the cotton every fall to the local gin, in the nearest small town, Medina, population 800.

The population is much bigger now than it was when I was a child, though I'm not sure by how much. When I was in high school the Madison County School district made the "painful" decision to rezone their school systems, and immediately residents of Jackson began moving North to Medina, the first incorporated district in Gibson County, in droves. They didn't want their children going to school with all the Blacks.

Medina, where I went to school for 8 years, had an excellent K-8th grade school, and school money (that I never saw when I was in school there) started pouring in from all over the place once the rich suburban white kids started moving there. Medina became overpopulated and suburbia took over the outskirts of what once was a downtown with a main street two blocks long with a stoplight at either end (both just hazard lights now). They flocked to the high school too, and as a 12th grader, in an English class that literally could not get enough money from the school board to buy new textbooks, we were so overpopulated we had to borrow used, 20-year-old textbooks from an elementary school 3 counties away.

The Gibson County School Board members were all arrested for fraud and the commissioner was jailed for 25 years the year after I left.

Gibson County High School has the highest teen pregnancy and highest drop-out rate of any public high school in West Tennessee.

(It does not, however, have any Blacks.)

My childhood was spent surrounded by green things. My grandmother has three gardens which she has tended every day of the summer and most of the spring, every year of my life. She has a garden for tomatoes in the front yard, another for soybeans in the side yard, and the biggest garden of all in the back behind the smokehouse, the well house, and the barn: there, year after year, she has grown corn, huge corn stalks, high as an elephant's eye, like the ones in Oscar Hammerstein's dreams; squash, soybeans, green beans, shelly beans, lima beans, sweet peas, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, strawberries, watermelons, pumpkins, cabbages, cantaloupes, melons, beets, red onions green onions, red peppers and green peppers, spinach, collard greens, and mustard greens.

She doesn't get a break in the early spring or late summer and fall either. In the spring the trees in the orchard, the trees spread all around our lawn, bear fruit: plum trees, pear trees, cherry trees, and apple trees. In the late summer, the blackberries and the muscodines grow ripe on the vine. All must be picked and plucked and cleaned and cooked or eaten raw or made into jam or preservatives and canned. In the fall come the persimmons, dropping off the trees all over the place and leaving a thick gooey mess on the bottoms of all your shoe soles if you don't watch where you step. And the walnuts, which will drop right on your head if you bounce too abruptly in the tree swing. And the pecans, which are hardest to find and crack open and chop up, but which always provide us enough for pecan pies galore throughout the entire holiday season and usually well on into the new year.

I asked my grandmother once why she spends so much time in the garden, in the fields, chopping and hoeing and bending over and sowing.

"It's fun," she said.

The cotton gin hasn't run the last couple of years. In the depression Medina had two cotton gins, as well as a busy packing business that was destroyed completely by a huge fire. When I was young the cotton gin opening was always the sure sign of fall, and all the cotton trailers would emerge from somewhere and surround it like bees at a hive. They were always bright colors--bright blue, bright red, bright yellow, rarely just white or brown--and always, when they were at the gin, they were filled to the brim with fluffy white cotton. Thinking about it now it must have been awful to be an asthmatic in Medina, or in any other of the dozens of small towns in Gibson County who had a gin in the center of town, the relic of economic surety back in the days of plenty. The prosperity is gone--main street is a drab and dinghy affair. Someone painted over the 50-year-old mural that had been on the wall of the local bank with a cheap layer of whitewash. No one really cared. The mural was of a debonair man, a William Powell prototype, drinking a coke.

The debonair men are gone from the town too. All who are left are an odd mix of farmers and the children of farmers who have been on the land for generations--like us--and the local suburbanites with their kids in school. The World War Two generation, the closest thing to an independent class I have ever known, with its ideals of hard work and its sense of community, and most of all, its vast, vast memory, has been dying out, and with it are dying the stories.

They are stories of a time when the South was more than just a conglomeration of fast food places and fast food churches and easy-to-digest conservative religion. They are stories of a time when the South was not defined by its political spectrum, but of a time when it was defined by community, hard work, and a love of the earth.

In my childhood I knew a man, Dr. Morris, who was the most venerated man in town. In the days before his retirement, he made house calls. He did not serve in the war; he stayed here as a wartime doctor at home. He delivered babies with his own hand, long before the days of extended hospital stays and "precautionary" C-sections.

My old substitute teacher, Miss Virgie, was the meanest and most dreaded substitute teacher of them all. She would walk right up to you and grab your ear amd yank it and make you behave. She taught at the Medina Elementary school for nearly 50 years before she retired. On Halloween, because she lives right off main street in the center of town, Miss Virgie's home is always a prime target for being "rolled," or toilet-papered. Miss Virgie, after a few years, learned her lesson. And every year on Halloween she sits on her front porch with the porch light on, calmly holding a shotgun, sitting in her rocking chair, rocking back and forth.

My grandmother, who was born in 1919, is the only surviving member of a family of 7 children. She tells stories. One of her sisters was mentally disabled. I have heard mention of this sister only once in my life, when I was looking through old photos--but the sound of my grandmother's voice as she talked about her sister was unforgettable. I know, without my grandmother ever having said the words, that she loved this sister the most of all.

My great-uncle, a war veteran, told stories of the war to anyone who would listen.
He would tell stories of the war, and then he would take out a violin, and play it. My grandmother would play too. She collects violins, and fiddles, and mandolins, and banjos, and even harmonicas. She keeps them all in the walk-in closet in her bedroom, and she likes to take out her fiddle and scratch out a tune--maybe "Listen to the Mockingbird" or "Amazing Grace." She knows the bluegrass songs. She grew up with them.

And so did I, even though I was trying hard not to listen.

Welcome to Tennessee.