Remembering

It’s been three and a half years since I moved to southern Louisiana, and I must say it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself. Ever. I’ve written about my family elsewhere, so it’s enough to simply point out that I very much felt the need for a change, and Acadiana has given it to me. I feel as if I’ve come home.

My part of NC was settled, generations ago, first by Scots refugees after the Jacobite rebellion. Later the English joined them, migrating inland from the coastal regions where they’d first settled. The Anglo-Scots heritage is a beautiful one, but in my area it had become stultifying, at least for me. This was less about the ancestral heritage and more about the Reconstruction/Depression culture in my family; my area had not fully recovered from Sherman’s March to the Sea and Reconstruction when the Great Depression hit. Later, the NAFTA would see our textile industry lost to Mexico, decimating the local economy once again. Much of the area was heavy with a poverty mentality.

Yet we enjoyed a warmth and a strong sense of community. I grew up in a small, traditional southern town. Everyone knew everyone else, which was a lovely thing. When one of our neighbors’ daughter was born with a serious heart defect, the town banded together with bake sales and all sorts of other fundraisers to help the family with their added expenses of trips to Duke Hospital for the girl’s treatment. Any trip to town meant catching up with people, cheerful conversations, a truly social event and not just business. Most of the girls in my school, from second grade, were in Girls Scouts together; the boys, in Boy Scouting. Much of the town showed up for athletic events because, even if Mrs. Jones didn’t have a son on the football team, half of her neighbors and church friends did, so Mrs. Jones came out a couple times a season decked in red and grey to cheer for the Red Devils. We supported one another. When a boy in the community was a bit too rambunctious for his own good, a couple of parents went to the principal of the high school and pledged their support for whatever disciplinary measures he needed to take — but they did expect him to keep order in the school!

Over the years, that sense of community has disappeared. The deaths of our elders, the moving-away of so many of our schoolmates, the influx of strangers from other parts of the country, particularly the North, have not only deprived us of the sense of familiarity with one another, but have undermined old traditions. The downtown area is dismal, since the larger businesses have moved to larger shopping centers that have more floor space and far better parking. Big chain stores have replaced the mom-and-pop dime stores and the smaller regional variety stores. You’re bound to see someone you know when you go to Wal-Mart, but you used to know everyone you saw when you went to Pope’s or Aberdeen 5 & 10, or Collins’ Department Store.

When the area high schools were consolidated, in 1970, we lost not only the friendly rivalries between our school sports teams, we lost a lot of the community support of the high school in the whole of its life. That new high school has always been a sore point in the community, for many and good reasons, but its part in the loss of our sense of community ownership of our education and our personal investment in the lives and well-being of the students has been a long-lasting bitterness.

Then the northern retirees took over, for the golf, and further destroyed our character and the intimacy of our traditional Southern communities.

One used to know almost everyone one saw on a trip to town; now, one recognizes very few faces almost wherever one goes. We used to be able to strike up conversations – now, a greeting and an off-chance remark (“What a beautiful scarf!”) invites a recoiling of distrust and aversive moves. The newcomers are scornful of our longstanding habits of friendliness. We joke about the yankees leaving an area they were tired of but trying to turn us into what they’d left behind — but it’s true. The area just doesn’t feel like home any more.