A Story Asking To Be Told
By Beth Yarbrough
The South is more than a place. It is a feeling - the scent on a breeze, the sun rising on a field of red clay, a blues guitar on a Saturday night and a hymn on Sunday morning. Some hearts are born here. Others come for a visit and stay forever.
When I founded Southern Voice in 2013, I understood that there was a story asking to be told - the story of the real South. Not that I have a handle on such a vast and complex subject, because I don't - cannot - never will have. But what I do have is a lifetime of experience as a Southerner. That truth I can speak with authority. That story I can tell.
Change is inevitable, of course. In many places, the backroads aren’t quite as empty as they were when I began rambling a decade ago. Some of those wide fields of red clay now contain row after row of identical houses, hastily built, lined up like dominoes, with snazzy entrance signs announcing the name of this development or that. Most all of the names contain words such as “farm”, “meadows”, “woods” - paying homage, I suppose, to the thing they have just erased but now lies dead and forgotten underneath the tracks left by an earth mover.
Paying homage with words on a sign, however, does not land with the same effect as making sure that we save the essence. And while the path of progress is the age old story, I can tell you that there are towns and communities, still, where a sense of place remains. Much of that is due not to luck but to hard work and a purposeful sense of planning by those who understand how to save what matters.
I’m going to start featuring those places right here on Southern Voice. They deserve to be known, celebrated, applauded, and, now more than ever, protected. If the place that you call home is one such, I’d be delighted to hear from you. The coming series is one that I suspect will be ongoing for months, if not years, and I cannot wait to begin.
Photo at top, fields at Adelphia in Edgecombe County, NC by Watson Brown. Photo of azaleas and oaks in Aiken, SC by Beth Yarbrough.
Watching our beautiful forests and pastures, farms and fields replaced with Generica has added a constant under tone of sadness and loss to the last dozen years. Hearing nasal complaints replacing "y'all come back now, y'heah" has become the anthem of the changed South. It's how it is and will be, and it's why I appreciate so much your pointing out where the Beautiful South yet remains.
We have been found. We've been discovered. Our South is their 'New World.' And what once was, has no value for them. They just want the dirt. Dirt is the only thing of value. So it's up to us to hold on to the treasures they'll nver find.