Hale County, This Morning, This Evening.
I’m not sure when I started itching to leave the South. It couldn’t have been in high school because I think I only applied to colleges in other Southern states: Alabama, Georgia, Texas. I knew that I wanted to leave Tennessee, to have my adult debut somewhere that was at least a few hours away from where I’d grown up, but I don’t think I wanted to move all the way to a new part of the country: a coast like California or New York, where people were not just different, but drastically so.
For example, did LA have fireflies, heat lightning? Did people in New York like to walk barefoot on the grass (did they even have grass)? In Chicago, did people, because of the heat, slow all the way down in the summer—was it hot there? I mean, the answer is probably. Most places have at least some of the aspects of other places, and when it comes to culture, Black Southern culture is everywhere, as people—after slavery, after Reconstruction with its lynch mobs and its resentful Confederates—fled the South in mass and spread. Just as some of African culture stayed in Black American tradition, surely some of Southern Black culture remained in the ways of those who moved North or West.
Anyway, I don’t think I was thinking about all of that when I was seventeen. I left my house to drive down to Texas and—my mother likes to remind me—as I walked across the lawn to the car, I did not look back. As a teenager, I did not leave the South but wandered deeper into it (if we want to call Texas the South—it just might be, like Florida, A Whole Other Thing.)
After I graduated college, I still wasn’t really itching to move some place drastically different. Maybe, I thought, I’d go to LA or New York, but maybe I’d stay right here in this tiny Texas town, Waco, with its myriad of problems: an intense church pulling in more people every day, classic (though why here?) gentrification, and on top of that, there was Chip and Joanna Gaines—their HGTV show bringing in old-timey White ladies as tourists who would frown at me with my locs and tattoos, both of us like What are you doing here? Maybe I’d stay in this town because it was what I knew, but then I got into grad school for creative writing, got in the car again, this time headed for Iowa.
Living in Iowa City—even if it was small enough to make dating either awkward or impossible, and all of us artists at times got under each other’s skin, and (crucially) the snow and ice made me want to jump in the gutter—it was ultimately healing for me. It was the first time I hadn’t lived in the South and it gave me a clarity that, if I hadn’t moved, I might not ever have realized.
This probably wouldn’t have been true if I’d lived somewhere else in Iowa. I know that the Midwest can be as conservative as the South, though perhaps with less of the zeal and need for everyone else to adhere to their agenda (maybe this is because of the Civil War — the South as the ultimate sore losers, trying to prove once and for all that the whole thing was rigged?). Maybe if I’d lived somewhere more obscure in Iowa, I would’ve felt similar to how I had in Texas and in Tennessee, but Iowa City was special in the sense that the people around me had come from everywhere to go to our school—every part of America and from other countries around the world. They came from a number of different backgrounds and nobody went to church (okay like one or two people but they were the minority), and here I could finally look up for once, decide for myself who I wanted to be.
It had to be that after Iowa, I didn’t want to go back to the South. I didn’t want to feel like my worldview, my life, had to be constricted to those who believed in the Bible and nothing else. (Though this wasn’t true of every Southern person, this was the General Vibe. I didn’t yet know about the pockets of queer people who would later keep me afloat.) I thought of the South as mostly people who were proud to be Southern, which meant that though they were generally good-natured and kind, they also believed that if you weren’t supported in the Bible (never mind that the Bible was written in an entirely different context for people who had a lot of problems in how they related to each other), we cannot support you now. We will instead pray that you come back into the fold.
I didn’t want to go back into the fold. I wanted to move to New York or LA or—ultimately, as I decided, got into school there, signed a lease on an apartment and everything—Wales. But then Covid hit, and I ended up in Nashville, and from there, after a lot of work, I got into school again, this time in Atlanta, and in both Nashville and Atlanta, there was something that I’d missed very much in Iowa, which was the presence of Black people—lots of Black people—Black people doing all the things you could think of: running for mayor and making art and writing books and being alive without being an anomaly.
And (after this long preamble) that is exactly what I love about RaMell Ross’s experimental documentary Hale County, This Morning, This Evening. It is about Black people in the South (Alabama, specifically) just living their lives, and it is a reminder that life does not always need to be so high stakes or rushed. Sometimes, you stand outside and sing while the sky is lit by lightning. Sometimes you watch as the sun rises, making the grass glow. You play basketball or dance or sit on your porch or have kids who eventually have their own kids—making you somehow a grandparent. Sometimes, you have an accent that is so distinctly Southern and at the same time gorgeous, poetic, your own.
Hale County, This Morning, This Evening—in its quiet and its lingering and its beauty and its nonchalance, its simultaneous going and staying—reminds me of why I do love the South. Me and my friends camping out in the backyard just because, my mom and sisters singing “Who’s Lovin’ You” as we wait for a celestial event that’s supposed to happen any moment in the sky. Riding with the windows down, hugging and handshakes and ever-present humor. Forget its politics and its obsession with Christianity for second and remember that it is home to some of the most beautiful Black people you’ll ever see. Black people who will stop you and talk to you and look after you, who will joke with you and forgive you and have your back thoroughly as a fellow Black person, regardless of where you’re from. And of course there are all of the problems too—the close-mindedness, the reluctance to change, the sometimes very resentful ready-to-hurt you Whiteness lurking in the periphery—but there is space here and beauty and maybe that’s as good a start as any for something new to grow.
Image: RaMell Ross
