The Search for Home in American Fiction

Recently, as Hurricane Matthew eyed the coast of Georgia, my beautiful new hometown of Savannah issued a mandatory evacuation. Hordes of residents, my small family included, took to their cars and slowly caravanned up I-I6 to shelter further inland.

Nothing brings strangers together like a crisis. Or, maybe it’s just that Southerners tend to be gregarious by nature. There, in the lobby bar of our Pricelined hotel, as The Weather Channel flashed on the TV, we spoke to other evacuees from other Southern cities, all extremely friendly folks who, despite worry over their own homes, asked us about ours.

A Southern transplant for six years now, I still struggle to answer the relatively simple question posed by strangers: Where are you from? I know they don’t mean to cause me consternation. Sure, I live in Savannah now, a gorgeous little town known for its Spanish moss and its neatly landscaped squares, a town that, though increasingly progressive, still features statues of Confederate soldiers in its parks. But I hail from a different place. Ohio. For most of my life I called the Midwest my home.

John Steinbeck once wrote that “places in America mark their natives… Each of us can detect a stranger.” I’m sure my Midwestern mark has revealed itself often in the South, a region so different from the place I was born. Any Southerner could spot my visceral surprise the first time I saw a Confederate flag hanging in public. I’ve sometimes spelled y’all incorrectly (ya’ll) and I always ask for unsweetened tea. It took a while to stop gleefully pronouncing “It’s sunny again today!” when I peeked out the window in the morning. And I’ve long since learned that the slow pace of the South requires a near-Herculean kind of patience. (A farmer once described it to me: “The South is a long wait.”)

Yet, as reports of Hurricane Matthew pummeling his way up the coast huddled a group of strangers together, and as I worried about Savannah, generally, and our house, specifically, I still didn’t know how to answer that question about home. Or, perhaps I was overthinking. Back in our room, as we readied our daughter for bed, I asked my husband, “Do you think we’re Southerners yet?”

Questions of identity have always brought people to literature. It’s why we read. A good book, at its basest level, allows readers to explore that age-old question: Where do I belong? The universal quality of a novel provides readers with a sense of community—or at least communion with characters who grapple with these same questions. In answering where do I belong, one answers the intimate and infinitely more important question: Who am I?

And, perhaps no topic has been explored in more depth in literature than that of home, of place. In a novel, of course, place orients a reader, puts a story in context, alerts one to language and dialect. But place does more than that; it conveys culture and cultural meaning—even the values and psychologies of those who have been formed there. In many books, geographies become characters—think Dickens’ London or Faulkner’s Mississippi. When an author casts an eye upon a particular place—a real place, even if fictional—the effect can transport and transform. Willa Cather’s Kansas or Eudora Welty’s Delta, or, even Fitzgerald’s East Egg are all places I can immediately conjure up in my mind, even if I’ve never stepped foot on the soil.

I can easily visualize Fitzgerald’s Midwest, too, a place much less sexy than East Egg. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald accurately captures the feeling that nearly all Midwesterners carry: angst. Jay Gatsby, a native Midwesterner like his creator, is referred to as “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere.” Still today, these words hit at the inferiority complex of Midwesterners, and they sting a little bit for this reader. As someone from a region sophisticates refer to as “flyover country” (except, of course, during election seasons), from a place where people are assumed to “cling to religion and guns,” from a place considered bland, provincial, perfect fodder for satire, I simultaneously feel like somebody and nobody. Both from there and nowhere.

The Midwest engenders a sense of placelessness unlike other regions of the country, the push and pull between a loyalty to region and the desire to experience elsewhere. It’s a feeling of wanting to belong. It’s a feeling of not knowing where that belonging might be. The literary tradition of the region reflects as much, lacking the cohesiveness of the literature of almost any other region. We don’t claim Fitzgerald (from St. Paul, Minnesota) or Hemingway (from St. Louis, Missouri) or Toni Morrison (from Lorain, Ohio), at least, not really. They seem too worldly—writers of a different kind.

If the Midwest engenders a sense of placelessness, the South is the perfect antidote. The region is firmly rooted in its sense of place, in its shared history, even if that history is a complicated one. The Civil War. The legacy of slavery. The region is also bound by “Southernisms” of various kinds: The Southern gothic. Southern cuisine. Colorful, non-linear story-telling. Phrases such as “bless your heart” (which I didn’t realize was an insult until well after I’d already been insulted). The South holds a varied identity, for sure, but a cohesive one, which lends to its rich literary canon and speaks to the way that identity is often forged from conflict.

When I taught English classes at a university in the Midwest, I often turned to William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! as a representative sample of a “Southern” book. In it, Shreve McCannon implores Quentin Compson, his Harvard roommate and Southern friend, “Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” These pointed commands prompt Quentin to relay the story of his family’s complex relation to the South. As he wrangles with the idea of home, family sagas are retold and reinterpreted; the line between identity and authenticity becomes blurred. At the heart of the novel stands a character who both transcends and is forever bound by his roots. The South, as represented in literature, is a bit like Hotel California: You can check out anytime you’d like, but you can never leave.

Interestingly, I have never taught Absalom! Absalom! in any Southern classroom. Perhaps this is due to my fear of being outed as an outsider myself, my fear of being seen as the dreaded Yankee stereotype who instructs Southerners on the ways of the world. Yet, as I was recently re-reading this great Southern novel, something struck me: My desires to belong to a new region—my anxieties of place, too—are all very Southern, at least in a literary sense. In my fear of not being Southern enough I was playing out the very themes of Southern fiction. Time and time again Southern writers confront the conflicting notions of what it means to live in the South, be of the South, find a home in a place with a complicated history. Time and time again Southern writers have reminded me that misfits and outsiders alike all have a shot at redemption. It is Flannery O’Connor herself who famously notes, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

Explorations of loneliness and anxiety are evident in many literary traditions, but particularly so in the writing of the South. The Southern literary imagination looks to defend, apologize for, and celebrate the region. We see this in the work of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Conner, Carson McCullers, and Harper Lee—and even in more contemporary writers such as Dorothy Allison, Padgett Powell, Percival Everett, or Harrison Scott Key. And this loneliness and desire to connect, this anxiety of place, all feel so familiar, at least to this writer from the Midwest. Maybe this is why so many Midwesterners find themselves moving South, seeking home.

Home. That’s a tough word for someone caught between regions. I’m taken by the South: the torpid spell of its hottest day or the moodiness Spanish moss can evoke on a fall evening. I’ve seen Georgia snow. It comes much earlier than the winters of the Midwest, around late August when cotton is in full bloom. The white fields, alighted by the moon, do not hold the same weighty quiet as a field of real snow at night, but the sight still takes my breath away. How could a writer not be drawn to that?

Maybe, like O’Conner suggests, I’m a freak, too, an outlier. My own writing reflects as much. My characters, outliers themselves, investigate questions of belonging, of home, of connection. Though I haven’t directly written about the South—at least not yet—this place I call home has deeply impacted my work

I can never be a Southerner, a friend once told me. She’s a good friend, and smart, and kind, and Southern, and so I’m inclined to believe her. However, my daughter was born here, a simple fact that makes her a Southerner by birthright. And one day in the not-too-far future she will ask questions—good questions—about where she’s from. We’ll visit the Midwest for family birthdays or weddings or holidays, and the location of these gatherings, in a region other than her own, will prompt further questions: Is she a Southerner? A Midwesterner? Where does she belong?

As a mother, I’m not yet sure how I’ll respond. As a writer, I’ll tell her to turn to fiction.

And, still, I’m reminded that while the word home is most commonly used as a noun, meaning, the dwelling where one lives or the family unit from which one derives, it’s also a verb: the ability to return, by instinct, to a destination after having traveled away from it, like the homing of birds. Perhaps home isn’t always a location, then, but an action. It’s a return to the places you love, to the people you love, to the books you love; it’s a search for some words of consolation, a resting place between two worn covers.