The Queer Silences of Jim Grimsley’s Winter Birds

Those with sufficient memories of childhood have no trouble recognizing that it is a queer time: being a child entails existing as an individual whose identity is defined by multiple competing structures of value, each with their own intrinsic—and often contradictory—hierarchies; children experience simultaneous wonder and terror at the burgeoning mysteries of the physical world in relation to a deeper, confounding, and often inchoate series of hidden spiritual systems, whose meanings are diffi-cult, if not impossible, to decipher without translation; furthermore, the disconnection, rootlessness, and hypocrisies of adults threaten any sense of intellectual and individualized moral character for a child’s nascent emotional stability. In short, childhood’s queerness is bound up in a child’s literal existence: a physical body in a world entirely adjudicated, defined, and policed by someone else.

The child’s always-contested relationship between autonomy over her body and the disciplinary forces of parental and institutional authority move us from meditating on childhood’s queerness solely as a marker of time (how “strange” it is to be this body at this moment) and into something more fitting Sedgwick’s definition of “queer” as she posits it in Tendencies (1993): “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender or sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (8). The dissonances between a child’s understanding of her constantly evolving body in relation to its monolithic representation by authority figures already queers any understanding of a fixed identity based on a static symbol (such as a physical body).

To sum up, being a child means occupying a queer space of time when everything feels confusing, mysterious, and strange, including, as a matter of course, your own body and those authorities who police your body’s behavior. To be a child is to be at once a small figure in a space controlled entirely by those whose physical presence dwarfs your own, to understand your place in the hierarchy of that world as continuously shifting—of being both of primary importance and also of contested, negligible value—to be aware of your inability to know anything for certain, while also yearning for the firm foundation of conviction you see mirrored around you; to understand your difference in relation to both the adult world and also the archetype of the child you find narrated back to yourself through stories and your parents’ disciplinary scolding: beyond a strangeness of time and body, I think it’s safe to claim that being a child is the queerest of all identities.¹

Little wonder, then, that many literary texts use the child narrator to great effect, either to invoke the queerness of entering into and breaking free from the contradictions imposed by “civilized,” adult perspectives (Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) or to suggest the importance of a child’s queer epiphanies in reframing the familiar terrain of the physical into a deeper spiritual meditation (Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Yet just as “sexuality” and “gender” are not monolithic integers in understanding the complicated notion of identity, childhood, too, stands as a marker whose very definition depends on understanding its position within competing histories—with the subsequent and competing markers that also entails: culture, history, region, and period. To talk about the queerness of “childhood,” we must ask ourselves some fundamental questions: What childhood are we talking about? And when? How does that iteration of childhood dialogue with region and culture? For the field of southern studies, we have many examples of “queer” southern child narrators and major characters in literary texts from the nineteenth century into our contemporary moment. The grouping is so dynamic that we might even posit that, the southern child (especially as she is presented in literary texts of the twentieth century) might be one of the queerest emblems of all.²

If we are to explore the figure of the queer southern child, though, we must recognize first that the trope of...