Where I Come From: Stories from the Deep South

by Rick Bragg

I understood the power of words and formed a belief in my people, which I have retreated into when I was hurt to my bones by the rhetoric of this new New South. I guess nostalgia is our sanctuary in sorry times.

I recognize evil when I see it, and stupidity, and banality. I hear that many of the people who marched in Charlottesville were Southern men, but I didn’t know them. I saw men in custom-molded neo-Nazi helmets and designer flak jackets and hundred-dollar aviator glasses. It used to be that all they needed to dress up to hate was a good white sale. Southerners should be angry to be dragged down among them, by even the vaguest association. We can say that’s not happening, but it is.

Nostalgia, and the food, hold us.

But the stories will last whether I do or not, count whether I do or not, and the rich folks will just have to get used to the idea that their stories are only part of the story, and not the only part worthy of the clay, and the pines, and the years.

I guess it is just an entitlement or inheritance, like the family silver Aunt Minnie hid in the root cellar when she heard the Yankees a’comin’. If you’re rich here, you get a ghost—that and a fox stole and sometimes a Buick.

The fact is, all I was rushing home to rediscover was not lost because the planes did not fly. It unfolded, warmly, deliciously, timelessly, just out of reach, and it really is enough to know a thing endures, lives on, just beyond your touch, your presence. You can live inside that, knowing that it does. I hope this makes sense, somehow, and I hope you all make it home.