Growing up, my parents lamented the coming of the Yankee. In the city where I grew up, the capital of South Carolina, the Yankee had never really penetrated, so the Yankee was never discussed. It was only when we moved to a suburb just outside of Raleigh, where the New Jersey and Rochester and Poughkeepsie people had flooded in to work in the Research Triangle Park, for IBM and GlaxoWellcome, that I began to hear them talk. About how the Yankees were coming, ruining everything, raising the cost of living, driving like maniacs. I learned by osmosis that they made everything expensive, crowded, and horrible—like the disastrous places they had come from. Then, to add insult to injury, they had the gall to go around proclaiming how much they loved the South and how great and cheap it was, encouraging all their relatives to move down.
They so filled up our town that the locals gave it a new acronym, C.A.R.Y—Containment Area for Relocated Yankees.
The place was not theirs, but neither was it exactly Southern anymore—a sprawling, suburban melting pot was forming, where all sorts of people from different backgrounds and walks of life were colliding to make something entirely new.
I went to public school. My classmates were Northern, Southern, Latino, black, Indian, Asian, African, Russian and Finnish. There was even a Yugoslavian girl, her cheeks scarred by the Sarajevo bombing. Everything was great and I was very happy. We swished pink fluoride together in the hallways. We wrote letters to the troops fighting the Gulf War and the troops wrote back.
In South Carolina, no one had ever bothered me about the way I spoke, about my accent, because pretty much everyone had the same lilting drawl.
But in North Carolina, at the nice little school in the suburban new south, the speech therapist taught me (not learned me) how to speak properly. I lost my accent.
Visitors to North Carolina might notice that many people have an accent. But then in the Triangle, Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, not so much accent. Do they ever wonder why that is?
My parents were both from more backwater places that had never really been penetrated, so it must have been confusing and paradoxical for them—because alongside the Northerners came good white collar jobs, quality public schools, excellent hospitals, shiny new grocery stores and Blockbusters, shiny big new malls, new places to eat like Chile’s and Red, Hot, and Blue. All of which was good. Piggly Wiggly in Columbia this was not.
My parents wanted us to be more worldly than they were and we became worldly and modern in the 90s way. I loved the soaring, futuristic 90s architecture of the indoor and outdoor malls, all white and Roman and curved and with big skylights and big potted plants and neon pinks and blues.
My neighborhood friends were relocated Yankees. I hung out at their houses with their families and found their lives foreign and repellant. It was more normal and homey to hang out with any other person from any other background than the Northern families. Their houses were always freezing cold. Their accents were annoying. They spoke to each other so harshly, so ironically. The movies they watched were exceedingly violent or ironic. The things they found funny were not funny to me. It was completely unlike the way other families related to each other.
I didn’t really understand “rich” until I came to New York as a proper adult, where I met and saw people whose economic capital was so stable and generational that it could seamlessly bleed over into cultural capital—their kids could be writers and playwrights and have a beautiful loft somewhere in Manhattan.
The first time I realized the Northerners were different, that their wealth was different from Southern wealth was at a dinner held for us by a writer I was helping out with research work. He and his wife lived up in the old suburbs north of the city, around the corner from the Colgate mansion. Their house was amazing and almost Satanic in that Eyes Wide Shut way—dark and gorgeous, filled with artifacts and baubles and elephant-spiking doors. Dinner was served on a long wooden table in front of a roaring fireplace, some delicious homemade Indian cuisine (they were both white).
The conversation was interesting and witty. I was grateful. I had a great time but the whole experience left me ambivalent, both repulsed and tantalized, but most of all wanting to see more. And I saw a bit more.
I didn’t know any Southern rich either, no one from Nashville or Charleston proper, no one with brown hunting dogs and Fedora hats and big white-teethed smiles like the people photographed for Garden and Gun, none of the showy Southern cultural capital or serious economic capital. My friends were either the same class as me (middle class) or poorer than me, and the closest thing to rich that we knew was a nearby neighborhood of new McMansions about four miles away called Preston—the houses were airy white and bright and gigantic, with swimming pools and no old trees. These people were definitely not poor or lower-middle-class, but you couldn’t call them exactly rich rich—my parents ranch house had been bought for $100,000, maybe these folks houses at the time went for $250,000 or $300,000—maybe they made a bit more money than my folks, or maybe they just didn’t mind paying a bigger mortgage, but these people were not “rich” as I now understand rich.
My parents were solid Reagan Republicans who made their way into the middle class. Both worked full time in sales their whole lives, one for a printer company and one for a fax company—good middle-class jobs. My grandmother on my dad’s side was illiterate. My dad got his accounting degree from a mountain state school and longed to invest in property, but was too indecisive. We vacationed near Wilmington and Myrtle Beach, sometimes Charleston, we went to Gulf Shores, Alabama, and once we went as far north as Baltimore to see the Aquarium. My family would not go to the North. Why would they want to vacation up there, in those horrible places? It became an outsized void in my understanding of the world. If I wanted to find out, I had to find out for myself.
I got into two good colleges with scholarships, one in DC and one in New York. DC at that time was still coming out of the Marion Barry years, and the media I had grown up consuming—especially the musical Rent—had taught me that New York was the center of the world, that was where the real life was. I badly wanted to belong.
Three weeks after I arrived to start college, 9/11 happened. Then I found out my father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I hated my professors, but to be fair to them, they were probably in shock and phoning it in because 9/11 rocked their worlds. I also got into some trouble with the university for breaking into abandoned buildings. It could have just been the 9/11 happening, I had no idea how New York or New Yorkers “usually” were, but I also did not like it—it was cold and vast and unfriendly and trash swirled about in the icy wind. I biked into the city and tried to find my place at CBGB’s and ABC No Rio and Wetlands, but it was such a different vibe than our cozy little half-suburban life of our Southern mid-sized towns, where we could park a car out in the forest and blast music or go downtown and see a show at the little dingy smoky shit club. The punks in New York were either old squatters or young suburban kids from Long Island and Jersey, they seemed kind of shy and suspicious, even of each other, let alone outsiders. Creepy old men who looked like William Burroughs tried to pick me up in the subway and bullets flew when I went over to McCarran Park.
After one semester in 2001, I quit school and went home and got a scholarship to UNC-Greensboro, which suited me better. It was nice to be an hour drive from my family. Greensboro was boring and familiar, but at least it was the heart of this rising anarchist publishing thing called Crimethinc. I made real friends, friends for life. In the stultifying boredom of Greensboro on a Sunday afternoon, we were forced to generate our own light and heat—to make chemistry from common life. This was the Crimethinc thesis and, you know what, it was true. Yeah, life was so much more full and alive for me (for us?).
But I just couldn’t let the sleeping dog lie. Feeling like I had been beaten by New York the first time around, I had to roll up my sleeves up and charge back in to show New York what’s what. I got a cool place to live and a magazine internship, and made another go of it. It was better the second time around—kind of.
To Carthage I came and lost myself in dissipation, drunkenness, ambition and culture. I read all the magazines and journals and websites religiously. I followed the latest literary hype and literary drama and had a dour opinion on everything and everyone, and stayed up long and late at bars and on long walks talking and smoking with others in this same little substrata.
I embraced it wholeheartedly. Before properly moving back to New York, my subculture had been punk—I had spent a decade bathed in the secret language of bands, zines, the vital sacred books. Now, my set became the literary people—it was strange and retrograde, because in many ways they were behind the punks. But they thought more highly of themselves than the punks did. This must have been class and status at work. They would only later discover things the punks knew and loved—like “intersectionality” and David Wojnarowicz and Chris Kraus and Valerie Solanas—six or eight years later.
Ironically, at the same time the Northern punks were having their own little exodus—big packs of DIY punks moved down to Chattanooga and Asheville, and took up fiddling and “region rock” (a kind of sub-sub-strata of DIY punk that you might call a modern Smithsonian Folkways of forgotten outsider punk, where it’s basically trying to get back to the shitty street punk roots). I can’t say I blame them for wanting to live cheap and free with dogs and front porches, but they thought it out too much, they couldn’t help consciously choosing what was natural and good.
H. P. Lovecraft didn’t like New York City because he found the racial and ethnic diversity and the buildings stacked upon buildings unsanitary and disgusting. This is the lowest, most base and pathetic reason to dislike the North.
There is a better reason not to like it—and it is the entrenched naivety and the dislocation from others that the beneficiaries of cultural and economic power there have.
I am not talking about a family with a Sopranos-house in New Jersey. I am not even talking about the many hard-working people with jobs in Manhattan who make high five or low six figures and can barely keep their heads above the cost of living.
I am talking about the entrenched money-power, the 1%.
The Confederate leadership were largely educated in the North. West Point or Harvard, then back home. This is a strange paradox, but not unheard of—those who would lead Britain’s postcolonial uprisings were reared and educated either in Britain itself or in the imperial system in the colonies or concessions.
The South was a feudal economy rich in economic capital yes, but education and industry and the cultural capital remained in the North and the North was where you needed to go if you wanted them.
Something of the reverse movement has also been happening, of Northerners escaping South, to breathe a bit more air. UNC and Duke, while great schools, seemed to appeal to two or three main types of students:
1) The most dominant group would be the children of the true Southern bloodlines, where their daddy and daddy’s daddy and daddy’s daddy daddy went to UNC and Duke. You can spot these people a mile away by their wholesome look with their Golden retrievers and L.L. Bean clothes…like the Kennedys, but Southern.
2) Yankees and foreigners, many of them rich, who for whatever reason want a more laid back way of life and know that they can have it and still acquire the appropriate Ivy status and cache by going to Duke or UNC.
3) Actual normal Southern people from North Carolina without privilege who work hard and study hard and get scholarships know that the two best schools you can get into in-state are UNC or Duke, with a scholarship.
Now, it doesn’t matter. Raleigh is basically the same rent as Brooklyn. And has the same type of foodie food courts and a million brewpubs and sourdough pizza places and pseudo-dive bars. The traffic is really bad because people kept coming from the North and West especially during the pandemic and ten years ago the good old boys didn’t see the point to spending money on mass-transit when everything was slow and syrupy outside of commuting hours. It’s the same story for every hybridized Southern city. And I still, beyond reason and natural human compassion for desiring a good life, resent the Northerner. But I know I’ve half become the Northerner, I can’t go back, and it’s become a part of me, even if I don’t understand it.