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I am a white Canadian heathen who ¤nds herself a tenured associate professor of English at a historically black university in the heart of the Bible Belt. I am often asked how I got here, and although I have both a long and short answer, in the end it seems I have ended up exactly where I belong. I never meant to move to Alabama. Originally from Ontario, I moved to Tuscaloosa in 1986 to spend a year in the University of Alabama’s MFA program in creative writing, before returning to Canada and PhD studies. But then I met my husband, who was teaching English part-time, and decided to stay in the program; in 1990 I graduated with the MFA and my husband with his JD. We then moved to the East Coast where I started a PhD program. The plan was for my husband to get his ¤rst post-law-school job. But it seemed that we arrived in New England the day the recession of 1990 began. After six months of fruitless job searching, my husband was offered a position as a law clerk in Montgomery, Alabama, which he reluctantly accepted. Two years later, having completed all of my degree requirements except the dissertation, I joined him in Alabama, and we found ourselves living in a city we had never planned to call home. Our ¤rst impressions of Montgomery were less than positive. Searching for housing, we encountered potential landlords who wanted to meet with us in person, and once ¤nding us desirable—i.e., white tenants—proceeded to make not-so-guarded comments about “the kind of people” moving into the neighborhood. 10 / “You’re Not White, You’re Canadian” Where I Belong Jennifer A. Fremlin We had been used to living in university environments, having met in Tuscaloosa in a liberal English Department; Montgomery, despite its several colleges and universities, seemed conservative, dominated by capitol politics and Maxwell Air Force Base. When I, a Canadian, opened my mouth in the Winn Dixie or in restaurants or at the Y, I was often asked if I was military, since it was obvious that I didn’t hail from these parts. Besides accent, my somewhat different aesthetic sense when it came to clothes, makeup, and hairstyle marked me as a non-southern white woman well before my feminist politics or my outsider’s view on southern race relations were voiced. I soon came to feel alienated from this town, and apart from a wonderful independent movie theatre, a couple of good bookstores and a Thai restaurant or two, had little contact with the place. I buckled down to write my dissertation (on race and the Hollywood star system), and within a year gave birth to our ¤rst child, a daughter. Our temporary detour through Montgomery en route to the rest of our lives was by now threatening to stretch out. We were becoming more¤rmly entrenched in the city’s infrastructure: we had doctors, a bank account , season’s tickets to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. I applied at area universities—Auburn University at Montgomery, Huntingdon College, Troy State University-Montgomery—for part-time teaching positions. Accordingly , I taught Freshman Composition for several quarters at Auburn University at Montgomery, an experience that did little to endear Montgomery living to me. The downfalls of being an adjunct are common: no of¤ce or telephone with which to stay in contact with students outside of class, low pay, and teaching at the whim of the Director of Composition. But more particularly, several incidents convinced me that I was not in the right place. One day in 1993, for example, I randomly assigned students to work in small groups; when a late student—a white girl from Wetumpka—arrived, I motioned that she join a group. She balked, then refused: the other members of the group were black, and she turned instead to a group that included white students. I was so taken aback at her blatant disregard for my authority that I handled it badly, registering my disapproval merely with a look instead of addressing the issue more directly. This was not the only time that race reared its head in an ugly way in those classrooms. Most of the time it was more subtle, as in classroom discussions of essays in which race was an issue. It was nearly impossible to discuss New York Times editor Brent Staples’s assertion, in his much antholo134 / Jennifer A. Fremlin [18...

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