I cannot wait to see what you have to say regarding poverty and thriftiness in the South! That is going to be a wonderful thing to read.

winebrightruby:

We make virtues of our lack, is one way to look at it. “I can’t believe you don’t have a stamp for your address to do those,” a coworker exclaims as she watches me address one of my wedding invitations by hand. “Noo, you have to hand-write it so they know you love them!” I reply with a laugh, like I’m joking. I can’t afford a stamp for my address. Or, maybe I could, but I don’t want to because I’m too used to not having enough money for everything (anything). I’d rather take the extra time than spend the extra money.

And we say that like it’s an inherent good thing – “it took me hours” “I did it all by hand” “why of course I did it myself honey” – not a trade-off in cost. History in the South is a history of poverty, and even those fancy houses people love to come down here and take pictures of and get married in were designed to maximize comfort with the absolute minimum cost. It’s a thousand degrees outside? Forget AC; high ceilings and ceiling fans are where it’s at. Still a thousand degrees? Well I guess we can spring for a window unit, if we must.

My parents divorced when I was young; my dad remarried not long after. (One of my best friends and I set our parents up to fall in love, and they did. We thought it would be fun to be sisters. We were wrong and fought viciously for years, but eventually we became better sisters than friends.) My mother raised three girls on her own while struggling hard to make ends meet, earn her bachelor’s degree, and retain her dignity. She played coupon games with us at the grocery store: the person who could save the most on their portion of the grocery list won a piece of 8 for $1 candy. She challenged us to keep track of how much money was in our buggy as we shopped and then to calculate tax and change before the cash register could – because we were smart, quick girls, sure, but also (looking back) because we weren’t distracted by stress and anxiety about whether our groceries would cost more than she had in her checking account.

After school a lot of days, she took us to the consignment shop, which … either she called it something else or I just didn’t know what “consignment” meant until I learned it later in a different context. My sisters and I would play with some of the toys, tucked up under the racks of secondhand clothes. Sometimes we even begged my mom to take us, just so we could look through the chests and racks in the kids’ section. I didn’t understand – and I don’t think my younger sisters understood – that this was a place people went to buy previously-owned clothes because they couldn’t afford new ones. I didn’t understand that she let me buy clearance clothes and clothes not exactly in my ‘section’ from Sears because they were so much cheaper than what I “should” have been wearing.

I have bought a pearl necklace for my wedding – the first time I’ve ever purchased pearls. Up until literally this summer, any time I had to dress up, I wore my mom’s pearls. She handed down two strands to me when I was in grad school: one from her mom, and one strand of rather irregular freshwater pearls that I think my dad (or her mom) bought her before I was born. And yes, tradition. Yes, heritage; I love them because they were hers. Yes, I plan to treasure them and have them restrung if necessary to hand them down to my own girls one day. But above and beyond all that, I couldn’t afford fine jewelry until this year.

Everyone comments on the flavor of Southern food; I have to put up with seeing shit like “Collard Greens Are The New Kale!!” as stupid headlines in not-the-South parts of the country. But Southern food is delicious primarily because “add a lot of fat” or “cook it for a real long time” or “have you considered throwing All The Spices in there” were fervent attempts to conceal the fact that Southerners were cooking the dregs. “I’ve got this plant that grows literally everywhere; I wonder what happens if I cook it for like three hours with leftover bacon drippings.” That’s not a decision made because you want something to taste good; that’s a decision made out of “how can I make these only two things I have left taste moderately palatable so that I can eat them and neither hate my life nor starve.” That’s why we fry shit. Like, categorically. Whatever it is, if you fry it, it immediately tastes better and is more filling. Broke people in Louisiana eat seafood because the seafood is in their backyards. Lots of fruit because it just grows here. Lots of vegetables because you can pretty much sneeze up tomatoes. Chicken because chickens are cheap. Pickled pig’s feet because they’re super cheap. Like. Southern food is one of the most widely acclaimed and enthusiastically-consumed-elsewhere aspects of Southern culture, and nearly all of it stems from “how can I not starve”, and that just gets totally neglected or breezed over practically everywhere else.

I feel like I have wandered far afield from our original discussion! Sorry for that ^^;;

Also, and I don’t mean to be rude here, but if you weren’t born and raised in the South – as in, lived here for more than ten of your first 18 years of life – I don’t want to hear any amount of arguing about this or sharing your own personal experience or anything else. (I am willing to make a very tentative exception for people who have lived below the Mason-Dixon line for more than ten years post-turning 18.) I’m not interested in what you have to say on this subject, unless it is some flavor of “This is an interesting read.” The last time I posted something about living in the South, it got over 200 notes and I heard opinions from all over the country about a particular Southern habit and, y’all, I just don’t care. I apologize if that’s rude; it’s not meant to be any kind of a personal insult. I just have a finite amount of time and am not interested in the personal experiences or unfounded opinions of people who aren’t even from here/living here. Just, please. Don’t put me through that again. Reblog all you want, but I don’t need your opinions.