The State I Love

My home has deep roots. My street is lined with mansions bought with slave labor. My county is the home of governors, one of them being my state’s defining figure George Wallace. My family’s religion is the same as most everyone else’s in my South, college football on Saturdays and Southern Baptist on Sunday. The country in which I grew up breeds a love for one’s native land, while understanding the soil is thick with a rich and sometimes troubled past. My South isn’t all magnolias and dogwoods; it teems with the sting of the southern pine’s sharp needles, and it warns of snakes and haints. My South is a land of beauty, ease, affability, and contradiction. Fishing, front porch sitting, pickin’ & grinning, dancing on Saturday and praying on Sunday are common in my South. Bourbon, honeysuckles, rows of cotton, firm handshakes, straight talkers and bullshitters are all home in my South.
The State I love can be perplexing. We’ve stood in schoolhouse doors and challenged the authority of the President and perpetuated a stereotype. We’ve welcomed NASA, Mercedes-Benz, and established one of the best junior college systems in the nation. The State I love is belittled by outsiders as uncultured, uncouth, and uneducated. She has given us Nat “King” Cole, Harper Lee, Hank Williams, Hank Aaron, Jesse Owens, Lionel Hampton, and Helen Keller. We’ve introduced you to Mardi Gras, electric trolleys, open heart surgery, and the many uses of the wonderful peanut. We built the rocket that put the astronauts on the moon, issued the command “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”, we taught Willie Mays to play baseball, and Joe Louis how to box. The State I love has gifts.
The State I love has seen many things. She’s witnessed the bare feet of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Mobile press silently against the carpet of her forest. She watched as de Soto marveled at her beauty, and the French, British, and Spanish fought over her lands. She was the cradle of the Confederacy and is still the Heart of Dixie. She bore the Civil Rights Movement, country music, and some of the most beautiful women on the planet. From Mt. Cheaha to Orange Beach, Horseshoe Bend to Muscle Shoals, and Lake Eufaula to Natural Bridge the State I love has aged well.
We are connected through our differences, in the State I love. Only here can a “Roll Tide” or a “War Eagle” send chills of elation or detestation though a soul, and only here is that language not considered hyperbole. We are rivals on gridirons across 67 counties on Friday evenings—and friends at the field party later that night. We change with the times, right our wrongs, and forgive our brothers, in our own due time. We cuss the government for telling us where not to pray. It is acceptable to wear team affiliated colors to church after the Iron Bowl, and a ticket to Talladega is a valid excuse for missing church this week.
We have shed blood over the color of a man’s skin. We’ve burnt crosses, burnt houses, and hung men for no less than a look toward a woman. We’ve also marched from Selma to Montgomery, sat down in buses and diners, and buried Jim Crow. We lived what you read about in the State I love.
We have monuments to Confederate heroes, but these are things of our past--a past that can not help but bleed into the present. These men were Scots-Irish, sons of German immigrants, and the descendants of fathers who died tossing off the crown of British tyranny and they would be damned if they would lose their rights. Slavery is a stain on all of America, a vile product of a culture that possessed so much beauty but refused to see how so much of that beauty was maintained. Many of the men who fought and died were too poor to own slaves. Many of the men who fought in the War Between the States were those who were fighting for homeland, for country.
That is what some don’t realize, we aren’t just from this place; this place, Alabama, is in us. She has protected us as infants and allowed us to roam as children. She lent us her trees to climb, rivers and lakes to swim, and mountains to scale. We’ve tilled her soil and she has fed us, fished her sea and she has provided a bounty. We’ve buried our loved ones in her and she protects them while they rest still.