How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the South

When I first moved to Texas from my native Michigan, I hated the South. I didn't hate it so much because it was the South but because it wasn't Michigan where all our relatives were. And I wasn't alone in my distaste for all things Southern. My siblings and I cried so much about having to live in Texas that my father promised my mother that our family would move back to Michigan if we hadn't adjusted to life in the Lone Star State within a year.

Well, we adjusted all right, but for years afterwards, part of me could not help feeling like an exile who was forever banned from his native land. As far as I was concerned, everything was better up north: the land, the people, the music, the food, the weather. I was always comparing notes with my fellow Yankees about how bad things were in the South and, of course, how better things were in the North.

It wasn't until I was in my mid-twenties and able to spend a whole summer in Michigan that I realized that this wasn't necessarily so. Almost everything I hated about Dallas -- the traffic, the racial problems, the bad schools, the rude people -- could be found in Detroit, and the few advantages I enjoyed in Dallas -- cheap book stores, air conditioning, etc. -- weren't all that widespread in Detroit. Because air conditioning was not as common up north as in the south, the summers seemed a lot hotter than they had to be and the winters, of course, were a lot harsher. (Fortunately, the Northerners believed in central heating far more than they believed in air conditioning.)

I didn't realize how attached I was getting to the South until I realized one day in Michigan that I actually missed my life in Texas. I didn't kid myself that things would automatically be wonderful when I got back, but I did miss it in a way that I never thought would be possible.

I can't help but find it an odd coincidence that of the handful of women with whom I have actually fallen in love, at least six were Southern women. My best friend is a Southern woman (and gasp! a non-Catholic to boot) and, of course, the one woman I have ever got engaged to was born right here in Texas. The one time I dated a Yankee woman (actually, a Latvian immigrant who grew up in New York but I considered her a Yankee) proved a disaster. And when I got into a conversation last week with an Irish Catholic women from Chicago who insisted on badmouthing Southern women, my first instinct was not to say, “Right on.” It was to contradict her.

I'm not going to pretend that the South is perfect or that there aren't a lot of areas for improvement here in Texas. I'll never be the type of person who proudly displays the Stars and Bars or waxes nostalgic over the old Confederacy.

But I no longer kid myself that I would be happier up north than I am here in Texas. If I was forced to move there tomorrow, I'd probably learn to adjust. But it wouldn't be a process that I would look forward to.