Confessions of a Prodigal Southerner
by April Dobbins for South Summit 2022
When I write about the South, it is almost always a lie. Not a direct lie but a lie of omission. People only welcome the stories that they expect to hear from Southerners.
The land is wild and unruly. The green chokes the winding orange of the dirt road. Wildflowers and briars rear up in the warm months. The dogwood blossoms splatter the forest like spent snowballs.
I meander from page to page, waxing poetic about the pastoral like a bootleg Thoreau.
The kudzu is ravenous. Its eager tendrils devour everything — forests, homes, entire hillsides. In the summer, the heat burdens us all. The smell of honeysuckle hugs the breeze. At night, the darkness out here is astounding. Stars crowd the sky.
I labor over precious sentences. By the end, I want to slice them up and smash them. I want to stop playing at this game but I cannot. The natural world has its own allure. Busying myself with the wilderness is distraction.
The loneliest year of my life, I followed my mother around the farm like a clumsy anthropologist. I made it my business to document everything. She did not mind me writing, but she hated the camera. In truth, I hated it too, the way people changed in front of it — straightening up and holding their breath. With both pen and camera, no matter the documenter, the audience is still full of outsider eyes. So, we guard our Black Southern selves. I did not want the burden of record keeping, but the records were all that I had. Once I started telling stories, real ones, I alluded to trouble, always leaving out the details. Subterfuge is, after all, a Southern art form.
How would it feel, then, to tell an uncensored story, one that moves out of the abstract to render me fully human?
The year my daughter turned three, I turned 30. After several false starts, I packed up my car and my daughter, left her father and Philadelphia, and moved back to my childhood home in Alabama.
There was no victory in my return. I spent my formative years plotting Bible Belt escapes, and once out, I pitied those stuck in the South. When I spoke to Alabamians, both friends and family, condescension glutted my newly acquired city tone. I was the one who got out, and I vowed to never return, so coming back as a broke, single parent was especially damning.
Without the glint that nostalgia lends, the old house was dull and small. Time had rendered every room obsolete. Garish wallpaper accents sullied every space: Mallard ducks in the bathroom, geese in the kitchen, gardenias running the length of the stairway. The place was fully furnished with other people’s possessions, some familiar and others not. Though the house had been vacant for years, outdated clothes and shoes filled the closets. Old shopping bags and newspapers crowded the pantry. I did not have the motivation to make space for myself, so I lived amongst these tired things as if they were my punishment.
I cried every day for a year. I cried while cooking dinner. I cried in the shower. I cried watching most movies. At work, I teared up throughout the day. When my mom came by the house to check on me, I righted myself as much as I could, but she could see the funk on me.
Each season came bearing familiar infestations. In winter, daddy longlegs covered the front door in clusters of hundreds. I dusted them off to make a way for my daughter and me to get inside. Fall, millipedes traversed the house each night on a weeks’ long march to God knows where. They climbed the walls and reeked of cyanide. There were thousands of them. In the spring, red wasps made nests in the air vents and came barreling out, angry and frantic. I chased and killed them as my daughter screamed through tears. In the summer, the rattlesnakes hid in the flowerbeds and the front yard. Each night, I beat a path from the car to the front door with my daughter on my back and a garden hoe in my hands — ready to strike.
At night, the coyotes stalked the surrounding woods for hours on end, yelping like spirits in distress. Scrappy, the aging Saint Bernard that came with the house, charged into the woods repeatedly, barking as if under siege. I paced at all hours — checking the doors and windows. There was nothing to see outside but darkness — not a speck of light for miles and miles.
One day, a loved one came by with a gift; it was a .38 Special. The long-nosed revolver once belonged to my mother. I caught glimpses of it in her glove compartment when I was a child. “You can’t be living out in these woods with nothing on you,” he said. “Here’s something for you to hold.” The wooden handle was heavy in my hand. Giving a crestfallen woman a gun is a special kind of cruelty.
When my grandfather asked me why I left my ex, I explained and then steadied myself for a dressing down. “Well,” he said gently, “I learned a long time ago that if a man is drowning and you can’t save him, don’t let him drown you.” Though I appreciated his support, I didn’t know how to tell him that I was drowning, nonetheless.
We exist upon a multitude of layers. We walk with closed eyes and ears because listening to this land, to its spirits, will set fire to your heart, and we can’t live every day with a smoldering core that pulses ash and flame. We can’t make our catfish and hushpuppy dinners with all that fire in us. We wouldn’t be able to tend our cows or pick our okra without setting our hillsides ablaze. If we let that fire burn, we would char our children, our spouses, our dear friends. Instead, we cope by piling as much as we can on top of the history. We lose ourselves in football. We build churches on every corner. We create a decadent cuisine that pulverizes our other senses. Deftly navigating the rubble of our ancestors’ temples in such a way that neither destroys nor acknowledges, we assemble new things and set out to render them holy.
ABOUT APRIL DOBBINS
Born and raised in Alabama, April Dobbins is a writer and filmmaker based in Miami. She is completing a master’s degree in arts education at Harvard. Her work has appeared in various publications. aprildobbins.format.com
This piece was commissioned by the New Orleans Film Society for South Summit 2022. South Summit received critical support from JustFilms, which is part of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program and is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
