“To be a Southerner was a matter of life-and-death importance during my formative years,”

“To be a Southerner was a matter of life-and-death importance during my formative years,” wrote the American-born Duchess of Windsor in her memoirs, The Heart Has Its Reasons.  In her sentiment, she was not alone.  As a child, the same attitude lived, devoutly and freely, in our home.  I heard its stories and walked in its path. Maneuvering over battlefields and through homes laden with antiquity was nothing so much as a weekend jaunt.  When on the occasion that my family might venture up north, beyond the ardent confines of the Ohio River, my father would give what my sister and I came to call “the Yankee Talk.”  It was meant to relay a difference in culture and all that might stand for, which I came to appreciate even more when, as an adult, I welcomed tour groups from the mysterious lands beyond the Ohio.

As a green, just out of college historian for the state parks, I once gave a tour to a family from Wisconsin, in which an interpreter might have been useful.  I’m sure they understood nothing I said and I, only vaguely, them. We smiled at the end and nodded.  Later yet, a gentleman from a chartered tour group said to me, “the minute you cross the Ohio, it’s like a different world.  People,” he said, “even use different words for things here.”  I could only smile.  I had been warned, after all. As it turns out, my father should have copyrighted the Yankee talk and developed its antithesis.  We might have toured a lot more battlefields with the royalties.

A part of being Southern for both my parents was a deep propensity toward manners, thus only a polite smile and nod to my ‘foreign’ friends from Wisconsin.  As today, manners were important and meant something. “Yes, ma’ams” and “no, sirs” were something of value. Holding doors and standing appropriately were deeply engrained expectations of any gentleman. As much as I have fought for it (and anachronist that I am, still happily live there), I question whether that world exists anymore, and it brings about a deep melancholy.  That was a happier world. Today, we live in a world of extremities.  Why, other than to liberally push boundaries, is anyone’s guess.  Whether we embrace on-coming fads deems us suitable in the eyes of the masses, and the world seems to have dispatched respect for a hotbed of victimhood and inconsistencies.  There are no longer expectations or uniformed codes of behavior. The world no longer allows for such differences, which, perhaps, defy any period of modern history.  Like many a Southern scion, “remember who you are” is advice I’ve been given.  It seems, suddenly, appropriate advice for us all.