Upon hearing that I was going to Davidson College in North Carolina for college, my Arkansan friends responded with, “North Carolina? Is that even in the South? It has the word ‘North’ in its name.”
My answer? To run through a mental checklist of things I thought constituted a Southern state. Southern hospitality? Check. “Y’all” as the dominant second-person plural pronoun? Check. Fried chicken and macaroni in the cafeteria? Check.
So … Yes? Yes, it’s in the South. But this answer didn’t satisfy them, and it didn’t really satisfy me, either. I’ve been at Davidson College for over seven months, and now my question isn’t just whether Davidson is in the South, but what is the South?
(Embrace your regional identity, no matter what it is! There are countless shops on Etsy where you can purchase your own “y’all” tank)
To answer this question, I turned to my friends Melissa and Katie, who hail from Georgia and Washington state, respectively.
First off, geography. Melissa unhesitatingly defines the South as everything below and including West Virginia and Virginia. Katie agrees, specifying southern states as those that seceded from the Union. Historically, Katie says that states in the Deep South were the “most militant states when it came to issues of racism.”
Easy enough. North Carolina and Georgia are in the South and Washington is in the Northwest. But where does my friend from Florida fit in? Yes, she is geographically from the southern United States, but is she culturally from the South? The U.S. Census Bureau lists 16 southern states, yet there are innumerable ways to slice the pie: Old South, Deep South, and Dixie to name a few.
Since we’ve already established the historical character of the South, let’s move on to its culture. It should be a given that a region where the lady at the gas station checkout counter calls you and your dad “honey” or “sugar” has a unique personality. If you want to test your level of Southern-ness, Melissa, Katie and I came up with a few questions.
1. Have you heard of/shopped at Publix? Belk? Piggly Wiggly? If so, you’re in a Southern state.
2. Do you use “BBQ” to encompass any cookout event or grilling of meat? Answer yes, and you’re not a Southerner. In the South, BBQ is meat cooked with BBQ sauce, not just any ‘ole thing you cook outside. The event of socializing outside while eating BBQ is a cookout. If your state has its own type of BBQ (like North Carolina), you’re definitely in the South.
3. Do you consider boat shoes (especially the Sperry Top-Sider kind) to be the footwear of a middle-aged man? Bless your heart, you are definitely not in the South. Boat shoes are essential for any middle or high school student.
4. Were you raised to say “yes” and “no ma’am/sir” to every adult? Were you eternally embarrassed by your mother’s tendency to talk to everyone and anyone in the grocery checkout line? Southern hospitality at its finest.
5. Do the boys dress in pastels and the girls in pearls? Those are distinctly Southern fashions.
To a Southerner such as myself, these characteristics are as innate as eating waffles with fried chicken. But if you come to Davidson from another region, you’re going to get into some awkward (but funny!) situations. Coming from what she endearingly calls the “granola” West Coast, Katie says that she “didn’t expect the South to be as different as it is. There’s definitely a cultural shift.”
But does that make one cultural region better than the other? Of course not. Boat shoes and Birkenstocks are equally comfortable.