As a kid and well into my teen years, I fought my GRITS status. For those unfamiliar, GRITS is an acronym for Girl Raised In The South– grits are also one of my personal favorite breakfast sides. My typical spiel of an answer to the question, “Where are you from?” has always been a mix of the following:
“I was born in North Carolina, but I went to boarding school in Boston, and my mom lived in New Jersey for a while, and I’m always out of town for summer breaks, so I’m basically a blend of all over.”
“My parents are from D.C. and Pennsylvania, so like even though I was technically born in NC, I’m like basically Northern raised.”
“I spent like every summer since childhood in New York and most of my family lives in Prince George’s County, so I’m like a blend of the East Coast.”
While each of these statements holds true to the person I am today, they all reveal something quite telling of me: the shame I carry of being a girl raised in the South. The South is often, historically and politically framed as the epicenter of America’s most brutal racial injustices– enslavement, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights struggle, need I add more?
I often find that this can make it feel like a place of stagnation rather than progress. The association with conservative politics and regressive social attitudes made ‘Southern’ an identity I wanted to escape rather than embrace. Being raised in a majority-White, Southern environment most likely also heightened my awareness of racial dynamics.
For example, some people have stories of the moment that they ‘realized’ they were Black, but for myself, this is a fact I have always known. My parents sent me to majority-White schools in a majority-White area, so my race was something that I walked in the door with. My mom even tells this story of me when I was 3 years old, walking up to a customer in her store and telling them, “My daddy is a Black man!” To this day no one is quite sure what I meant when I did that, but it is a clear indicator that my identity was never up for interpretation.
This past year and a half, wrestling with the fact that I chose to stay in-state for college, I have also explored the unique facet of my identity which is the rich history of the South, as something tangible to what makes me… me. I have also become more aware of my identity as a girl raised in the South. You see, the Black Southern woman is a testament to the ancestors who were brave enough to remain below the Mason-Dixon line and not voyage during The Great Migration. The distinct choice that it was to remain in the South, despite oppression, was also a form of resistance to the systems against them. Black Southern women’s roots are what prepare us to diagnose the problems with American society so easily while having the capacity to envision something better.
In the search for other recollections of Black Southern women, I resonated with snippets from Imani Perry’s South to America, our experiences as Black women born in the South were parallel. She so eloquently highlights why a Southern identity is not only important to her but why it is important to the foundation of this country. There is confusion surrounding the significance that over 50% of the nation’s Black population resides in the South, due to the electoral college and how Southern politics have shaped the nation’s perceptions of the South.
Perry argues that the South, as a region and as a culture, is intrinsic to what it is to be considered American. Ranging from its vulnerability in music, telling the stories of anguish and hope, to our American taste for sugar as not just being the location of cultivation but the production of such defining what it means to be a hardworking person in our capitalist nation. It is also the wealth of the South, that has allowed the United States to become a global superpower and remain a prosperous nation, all based on the premise of what it meant to have unfree laborers.
Perry also speaks of an ancestor of hers who experienced enslavement as a young girl. Perry questions what it must have been like to be an enslaved girl, witnessing the creation of a nation where you are not being contemplated as a citizen, where you have not been considered beyond your economic and reproductive purposes.
The anger that boils inside of me when I read of the horrific facts of enslavement is the same anger that allows me to have empathy for a woman like Margaret Garner. Toni Morrison recalls this deep anger in her 1987 novel, Beloved, inspired by Kentucky-born Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who ran away with her family, was found and captured, and faced with a return to enslavement. In confrontation, Garner took the lives of her children as a means of protecting them from the future that would await them: resolving that death was a better outcome than enslavement.
The layered forms of psychological, physical, and spiritual abuse that so many of our ancestors faced are what planted the need to create a deeply grounded sense of oneself and one’s capabilities. While processing how to survive in the face of an environment that is not only, not built for you but also built to wring you dry, your internal voice must be louder than what is around you.
Another historical figure who personifies this belief in one’s internal excellence is Ms. Ella Baker. Ella Josephine Baker was born and raised in Littleton, North Carolina. While serving as Executive Secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SNLC), she organized the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina during Easter weekend of 1960. Baker was close to colleagues with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who financially supported this conference and Baker’s efforts.
In her speech at the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta, Georgia, Baker concisely states, “In order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we’ve been, but we must understand where we have been.” The fact of the matter is that the Southern Black woman, no matter what generation, is required to interact with the “yesteryears” of the United States. But this all the more equips her to stand focused in demanding better tomorrows.
Over my year and a half back in North Carolina, I have come to the understanding that the South remains a part of me no matter my location. My critical lens, sense of history, and even my personal tastes, like my love of cheesy grits on a Sunday morning, are all deeply Southern. The South, for Black women, is not just location but a crucible of history, struggle, and cultural richness. In the process of trying to distance myself from the South, I have realized that it is inextricably part of me, as I am a result of surviving long enough in this world that I will have the ability to change it.
North Carolina is a place I will only ever leave physically because, by the time you acquire the skills to navigate life as a Southern Black person, it is already in you, so you are always facing the world with a hypercritical lens. No matter where I go, the South remains my home base, so these days, when people ask me where I’m from, maybe I’ll answer with:
“I’m from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where the sky bleeds Carolina blue.”
