“It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.”—Sarah Orne Jewett

Corn fritters, crowder peas, tomatoes, and cucumber salad.

Well, this wasn’t going well. The employee had been babbling on for some minutes about how stupid Southerners were, bashing neighbors, co-workers, and everyone who lived within a few miles of her rural farm. Finally, she drew breath long enough for me to make a point. “You do know I’m from the South, don’t you?” I waited a few seconds, knowing exactly what was coming next. “Sure,” she said, “but you’re not really Southern. You are smart.”

It would take a long time to unpack the ignorance that lies behind that colossally impolite statement. That I have heard variations on the same theme from dozens, maybe even hundreds, of others about the South in general and the rural South in specific is enlightening. As many thousands during this pandemic rethink their commitment to living in the suburbs or the city, I’ve been mulling over what a move to the country might mean for them.

When someone moves to rural America, the South in particular, the fault lines of prejudice are often laid bare. And here I speak of the newcomer’s prejudice, much of which is centered in the post-war suburban ideal that you can filter out contact with those who are different from you. Like the Democrats who jettison blue-collar politics because they are uncomfortable associating with workers as a class and wish to trade them in for something different, outlanders who move to the country often ring clear their biases from the first day and dissatisfaction with what they consider their provincial neighbors on the second — as if the people whose family has lived on the land across the road for four generations could be taken back to Trader Joe’s for a new and more comfortable model.

If you are one of those considering a big move “back to the land,” then tuck this piece of advice in alongside your cultural baggage and worldly goods: Prepare to be lonely. At least until you have demonstrated an old-fashioned liberal willingness to accept people as they are rather than as you wish them to be. It is an age-old fault of humanity, holding up the exotic or at the very least the quaint and the picturesque as more desirable, more noble than the mundane. The reality seldom meets the dream.

Your new neighbor is unlikely to be an Amish farmer who plows with horses, conveniently providing a pastoral backdrop for your Instagram shares. Nope, he is going to be a part-time Primitive Baptist preacher, prone to washing feet on Sunday and voting for Trump on Tuesday. He is going to gut deer in his front yard. His very existence is going to affront your Peace Corps beliefs, and it sure won’t provide your cultural mining more than a meager payout for your social media posts.

Yet that same man can weld your broken bushhog (but will take offense when you offer payment); he’ll show up and help you mend a fence when your friends in the city only wish to text or Zoom their assistance. His kids will look after your animals if you’re called away, and his whole family will look after you when one of your family members is called home. Just don’t — and this is important — open your mouth to tell him how you did things back in Orlando or Ann Arbor.

Still thinking about that move? Let us do a final check, making sure that you are not that sad, clueless, insulting individual who moved to the country but wanted a different rural population from the one you are going to get. Start by asking yourself a question. Would you really move to rural Thailand and expect to find the cultural options, the governmental services, and the same people you get in a hip Upper West Side New York neighborhood? If that is the case, then you’d better prepare for a life of loneliness. Or, better yet, stay put.

Or, and let me just toss this out as an option, learn to embrace an actual, nonacademic notion of “diversity.” The choice is yours. And who knows what you might discover.

…………………………………………………………….

Reading this weekend: Kilvert’s Diary (Francis Kilvert) and The Country of Pointed Firs (Sarah Orne Jewett). The former is a new discovery (of mine) that has quickly become a favorite to read before “lights out.” The latter, at Cindy’s suggestion, I read this past week. It partly influenced this post.

Follow