At home, I picked up a copy of Soiree, a local society rag that wasn’t around when I lived there. Willie Oats was on the cover. She was the first woman elected to the Arkansas legislature and has spent most of her life working for one good cause or another. As the proper wife of a successful doctor, she donated her money as well as her time. Now 80ish, she won a special award awhile back for 50 years as a Razorback cheerleader; she was a squad member in her college days and led one annual cheer from the field after that. But what she’s best known for is her extensive collection of outlandish hats, and her portrait features her resplendent in one of them, complete with a huge pair of rhinestone glasses. She appears as a charicature of Rich Old Southern Lady. Dowager. Wealthy Elvis Fan. I snatched up that copy with the intention of blogging it, along with the ad in the back pages for a confederate flag bikini.

***
Somewhere in the middle of the summer, a friend and I were emailing about cultural stereotypes surrounding Romania and the American South. She is particularly interested in and annoyed by vampire myths attached to Romania. In one exchange, I wrote:

It’s sort of like all those movies about the South that assume that every neighborhood has a resident voodoo queen/conjure woman/roots woman and a resident southern belle, and that all southern women are in fact belles or possibly steel magnolias, and all southerners are pleasingly eccentric, and there’s lots of spanish moss everywhere, and all Southern Baptist churches are full of good-natured fire and brimstone and hymn singing. And everybody eats a lot of gumbo and barbeque. All of these things are occasionally true but more generally not. The South is full of a bunch of mostly normal and/or boring people living normal and/or boring lives in a place that is generally hotter and more humid and poorer than the rest of the country. Sometimes we talk funny. That’s about all.

***
When I was assembling my Ph.D. applications in fall of 2003, I wrote about my teaching background and how it informed my teaching philosophy. I wrote about my students, who were mostly working and lower class, mostly nontraditional, mostly raising families, mostly first-generation students. I worked with many women who had been forced to drop out of school as pregnant teenagers and who were now coming back to get their educations while juggling babies and dealing with daddies who were or weren’t there. I held a lot of student conferences while children waited outside the door or sat under the conference table. I read essays written by a lot of fathers who came back not just for their educations, but to show their children how to be.
I wrote about what all of those students taught me, and how they changed my opinions about what first-year composition courses should do. Then I sent the essay to a colleague in Mississippi for review, and his response suggested that I was doing the South and all Southerners a disservice by portraying us as poor, as pregnant, as trying to do better. As an educated Southerner, it was my job to portray the South in the best light possible.
I rewrote the essay. When it went out the door in my app packet, it talked a bit about teaching in an urban university and social class. But not really, not much at all.
I wish now I hadn’t changed it. It — and all the people that made it — deserved for it to stand as it was.
***
Still, when I packed up everything of ours at my parents’ house, I threw away the copy of Soiree.
***
All through the twelve days of our trip, we photographed along the highway and in the little towns. Oddities and wierdities, plains storms, and each other. Many, many signs. In a little town outside Omaha, we found an Oddfellows Lodge with a wonderful, weatherbeaten sign. It was Americana, and it was picturesque, but for me it was mostly funny. And it reminded me of Oddbodkins Liquor in Edinburg, which I also found hilarious.
While I was waiting for Mister Husband to finish shooting, an older gentleman stood in the road and asked a question, and was nice enough to repeat himself and repeat himself until I could understand him. Were we lodge members? he wanted to know. “No,” I told him.
“Nobody is anymore,” he said, waving his hands. “There used to be 180 lodges around Omaha, and now there aren’t even 30. None of the young people are interested.” He was right; I’ve never been interested in a lodge, and I didn’t know what to say to him.
Finally, I said “Oh, I guess I always thought I was too young to join.“
“We have youth groups,“ he said hopefully. Then he wished us a good day and walked off down the street.
I wondered, then, if perhaps I ought not to find the lodge sign so amusing.
***
Somewhere in South Dakota, I began to wonder aloud about where the line is. When are we documenting the little things about America? When are we making a family record of the things we saw, and when we saw them? When are we making fun of them? When are we just wanting to show things to our friends? When are we being ironic, and what is the function of irony anymore? When should we talk about southern women in feathery hats and rhinestone glasses, and beef-fed Nebraskan lodge men?
In response, the husband reminded me of something Roy Harper said on a bootleg, that one day he would be good enough to write a song that meant six different things at once. And then he reminded me of something else an artist we both like told him, and which is also my own opinion about such things: it means whatever it means to you. And it means whatever it means to that person over there. You cannot limit meaning.
***
There is a strand of ethics and morality woven through this, but I have difficulty tracing it these days. Often, I can’t even find the thread.