Guy Smalley illustration • smmalleyart.com
Welcome back to the south
Grasping my Southern identity is about as easy as grabbing a fistful of Smoky Mountain fog.
The question “Where are you from?” always provoked hesitation growing up.
Should I respond with where my first memories were? Where I’ve lived the longest? Where I was born? Half a dozen distinct addresses could serve as answers. Military kids often consider this simple question with existential complexity.
Sometimes I would skip the drawn out explanation and respond with the place I was born, Eastern Tennessee, but said it with uneasiness of someone trespassing on land that wasn’t rightfully hers.
If I can claim “Southern-ness” by lineage alone, then I’m as Southern as they come. The heritage on all sides of my family can be traced to a single point, a small town at the foot of the Smokies, Greeneville, Tennessee. Not only is all my kin from there, but they tend to stay there in perpetuity. My immediate family turned out to be an exception.
When I was two years old, Sunday meals were an occasion at my great grandparents’ farm, and if it was in season we would all get a taste of Big Papaw’s prized mush melon. I would dawdle up to the house on the hill in no rush, while my cousins scampered through the wire fence to make it out to pasture, avoiding the bite of the electric shock. They zipped around the front porch or “rassled” in the living room. When I finally hem-hawed my way inside, Big Papaw would announce my arrival, the pipe perched in his mouth’s corner accenting every word: “Here come Granny!” The nickname stuck. I was a slow poke.
Sundays at Big Papaw’s stopped when the Air Force gave my dad orders to North Carolina and we left. For the next decade, we crossed oceans and continents as a family.
I grew up capturing geckos in Guam, visiting castles in Liechtenstein with the requisite boredom of any nine year old, and watching the exhaust of the Thunderbirds, a performance fighter jet team, melt the Nevada desert behind it in a wavy heat haze before take off. I wouldn’t change a thing about my childhood.
The semi-nomadic lifestyle was my normal. I developed the essential military kid survival trait of quickly adapting to new environments. I also learned to cut ties with everything. Leaving was an expectation. Movement was my comfort zone.
There was always vague evidence that hinted of the culture I moved away from. It was in our family origin story, when Big Papaw introduced himself to Big Mamaw by offering a slice of black licorice gum while she was collecting water from the family well; the curved scar on my dad’s left hand, from when his tobacco harvesting knife missed the stalk and cut into his flesh; and the stuttering Honda 50 that sat neglected in the garage, a starter motorcycle my mom used to buzz around fields as a child.
My birthplace is informed by the haze of early memory and family mythologies. It’s romanticized and faulty, shrouded in a fog that both feels like home and obscures my understanding of it.
At 19, I decided to return to what was familiar to me—change. I enlisted in the military and the instructor in basic training yelled the slow poke out of me. For seven years, I moved with a sense of urgency, relocating to Texas, Maryland, and California. Each was packed with the potential that only the unknown can hold.
Then two pink lines on a pregnancy test outlined a new path. When I became pregnant with my first child, I moved back to the South. Despite the dozen or so homes I had in the past, it only felt right to build my nest here.
I’m still figuring out how to claim my Southern culture. How to fit into the region that I’m both a part of and removed from. But this much I know—when that Smoky Mountain fog descends off the mountains and casts everything in its blue gray haze, a part of me settles with it. My jittering urge to keep moving is cradled to a lull. A calmness spreads that I can sit still and linger with. The part of me that Big Papaw named “Granny” will always call Greeneville home.