This place we live in

In my last post, I had started writing with the idea of pinning down the oddities of moving from the West to the South. When I digressed into writing about the accent, I decided I should probably get that out of the way first. I figured I would get back to the blog a week later with a fresh sense of where I was headed.

Well then we all got sick, then when we started to feel better, we plunged into potty training Chloe, and then, last week was another bout of illness, this time strep and pinkeye. Finally on the mend, I am back. Chloe, by the way, is now 100% "propre" as we say in French. Literally, it means "clean", but in this context, it means she has passed potty training with flying colors, as officially celebrated in a classroom potty party today.

Anyway, I suppose it's this hot presidential race that has me thinking about this strange place I live. To the rest of the world, NC is a red state, the Jesse Helms state. I sure wouldn't be able to tell by looking around me, I would guess Durham is going to be a sea of blue on November 4. The contrasts between perception and reality are stark in the South, which is accentuated by a strong sense of civility that disguises conflict even more than it did in the West, where it was termed "political correctness."

Many times, riding the bus to work, I used to feel the urge to ask the person sharing the seat next to me what their view was, and I'd spend the entire 15 minutes fighting my shyness. In hindsight, I would never have had a straight answer even if I had found the courage, especially as a stranger, and across racial barriers. I want to ask my neighbors further down the street in the formerly segregated black neighborhood of Walltown, "Tell me, what was it really like? Why don't you walk on the sidewalks, but in the middle of the street? What do you really think now? Can you ever really trust again?" I'm almost certain I would be told, because I am a stranger and white, "it's alright, it's all in the past, it was crazy it was, but Lord, it's passed!"

One of the books I finished this summer was "The Best of Enemies", a book about a former Durham Klan leader and a former black community organizer who became close friends. Much of the book is a collection of sometimes completely unrelated historical events, and the epiphany that made these two people able to understand each other doesn't come until page 200 (I'm not exaggerating, it was infuriating.) But among the many inflammatory episodes it related was the shooting death of an unarmed black serviceman in uniform by a white bus drivers (they were allowed to pack heat!) on the busline I used to take, because the officer did not sit in the back. The driver shot him in the back on the sidewalk after he got off. This was not even 50 years ago. It's a short time, and people around us everywhere are sure to remember this painful history. How could it not affect your vision of things?

Having lived here almost 4 years, I now feel defensive about this place, about its chronic mischaracterization and resulting inferiority complex. And I would love if NC would go blue and show everyone they were wrong. I was approached by a canvassing team this weekend who wanted to encourage us to use early voting starting this Friday, because they were predicting extremely long lines on November 4, filled with all the newly registered voters they would be helping get there.

I'll leave you with a few pictures I took three weeks ago at the Durham Pride Parade. It's the biggest in the South. It was Chloe's first parade, she clapped and hooted and got stickers from people. It was grand. It's an image of the South that probably doesn't make it out too much.