Dear Ex-Delawarean,
It was wholly a pleasure to receive your lesson in the Southernness of the
great (if small) State of Delaware. And I confess to having had a little fun
- okay, a lot of fun - at Joe Biden's expense when he described his state as
Southern.
Senator Biden's geography may have been be a bit off, but I've got to admit
his timing was impeccable. The first Southern presidential primaries will
soon be upon us.
I am indebted to you, as a former resident of Delaware, for letting me in on
Delaware's Southern character. I know you're not just whistling Dixie, but
the whole idea doesn't sound quite right: Way down South in Delaware?
Of course, geography can be misleading. Florida, for example, may be just
about the southernmost of the states, but that scarcely makes it the most
Southern.
Senator Biden points out that Delaware was a slave state in antebellum
times, but being a slave state doesn't equate with being a Southern state.
Else, other border states - like Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and even West
Virginia - would have been unequivocally rather than only peripherally
Southern during The War.
"Today's Delawareans," you claim, "are still quite bigoted and racist and
quite supportive of the Ku Klux Klan." As if this made them Southern rather
than just hateful. But I can see why, holding such an impression of the
state, you chose to leave.
Even if your unflattering description of Delaware were accurate, a
compendium of all-too-Southern sins scarcely makes a state Southern, any
more than having a caste system makes India an extension of Dixie.
We live in a time when being Southern has become the fashion. Every family
now seems to boast a Southerner in the woodpile - much like half of Arkansas
claiming to be Cherokee. It's quite the thing. And now Delaware turns out to
be a Southern state. To quote a line from "Southland in the Springtime" by
the Indigo Girls, "When God made me born a Yankee he was teasin'Š."
I have no doubt that many Delawareans think of themselves as Southern, and
probably make a lot bigger deal of it than folks in the heart of Dixie. That
kind of self-consciousness is a common phenomenon on the periphery of any
ethnic culture. Or in its diaspora. Is anyone more aware of being Southern
than the Southerner transplanted to, say, New York?
See the late Willie Morris' "North Toward Home," which I've always thought
his best book, maybe because I first read it in my little editorial writer's
cubicle when I was at the Chicago Daily News. I disturbed everybody else in
the office by laughing out loud at his stories of a displaced Southern boy
in Manhattan. And I certainly shared his homesickness.
To quote Lord Acton (and why not - everybody else does, and it gives a mere
newspaper column a certain faux-scholarliness), exile is the nursery of
nationalism. I have no doubt that there are Delawareans who are much more
Southern than the general run of Southerners, just as some of the most
fervent Zionists I've ever met are American Jews who prefer to practice
their ideology at a safe remove. See George Orwell's "Notes on Nationalism"
for other such examples. (Or his essay on almost any subject for that
matter. He's a master of clear prose-and clear thinking. But I repeat
myself. Writing is thinking.)
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