“Going South”

Home, once you find it, presents an inexhaustible set of wonders, a world that isn’t very wide but is endlessly deep.

— Ann Patchett

In the south, perhaps more than any other region, we go back to our home in dreams and memories, hoping it remains what it was on a lazy, still summer’s day twenty years ago.

— Willie Morris

5:23 and the 5:00 train was already late. Toes freezing, or at least nearing that, hands in the shape of a fist warming my parka’s pockets, I braced against the snow and the delay. I ached for home and in that instant the northern city to which I had given eight years of my professional and personal life felt like a stranger to me. I wanted to go home. Not the loft home of the factory floors or the city-view of an expressway or even the pipes that burst on those 20-below-zero days Chicago is so famous for. I wanted to go back home, to the place where I could still hear the faint echo of my grandmother’s voice above the rhythmic creaking of the makeshift rope swing we erected one summer near the creek; to the place where I could smell the mix of cedar and pine needle in the side-yard on Otis Street; to the gallery-like upstairs where as a child I would listen to my relatives talking and laughing well into the night from their beds across the hall.

Unlike many Americans who find themselves “going south” through job relocations or other tragedies, big and small, who like Quentin Compson discover that they, in fact, “don’t hate it,” my return to the south was purposeful. As a girl-child, I spent my summers with my grandmother in Durham, North Carolina and my winters in D.C.’s metropolis. My feeling of psychic homelessness pervaded my split time and only worsened when I went off to college, entered the profession and moved from the west coast and then to the Midwest. Months after cold contemplation, and serious trepidation about uprooting again, I did eventually make it home—alive, thankfully and not in the box Truman Capote once famously quipped about.

Whether coming or going, our feelings about home are always ambivalent. This idea of home can perhaps be even more fraught in southern life because living “it” means both to repudiate and to cling to tradition. How do we love Jackson, Mississippi or Selma, Alabama or Chapel Hill in 1963? And for that matter, how do we embrace Durham in the fall of 2013 or Sanford, Florida in the winter of 2012? At the same time that we look at what has traditionally been known as “home”—and I am thinking of the classic arrangement of Civil War Era southern states—our discourse about location has shifted. Even this issue of SLJ on “the Gulf” gestures toward a conceptualization of the “south” that might encompass both imagined space and hemispheric phenomenon.

  In the spirit of this brief meditation on “home” in the “southern” context, I am pleased to announce that SLJ will keep its home at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill as it passes from the capable hands of editors Minrose Gwin and Florence Dore into my own. This transition marks the movement of one of the most important and unique scholarly voices in the realm of southern studies, and I am honored to be on the masthead of a journal founded by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and C. Hugh Holman in 1968 with such a long history of academic excellence. SLJ continues to take its place among its counterparts in southern studies like Southern Humanities Review, our own Southern Cultures, and The Southern Quarterly. As we look toward its traditional home at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and prepare for its new location in the Department of American Studies, we envision an interdisciplinary Journal, capable of continuing its long service to the field of literary criticism while simultaneously encompassing work from scholars who focus upon oral histories, material cultures, folklore, geography, ethnography, and visual...