Free How I Shed My Skin by Jim Grimsley

out of centuries of stubbornness, a rural life interrupted only occasionally by the events of the greater world.
    There were good people in that town, and I grew up there with a feeling that a community surrounded me, that I was known and recognized wherever I went. Perhaps that would have been enough if my eyes had never opened, if the world had never changed. There was peace and safety in that town, and probably for most people in the county, as long as we each knew our place and kept to it.
    TH E SOUTHERNER WHO feels a rich connection to a place is mostly likely nostalgic for that place the way it used to be. Place is history, not because the connection between the two is inevitable, but rather because the past has become idealized, covered with the gauze of memory, softened and obscured. The Southern dream of place is choked with longing. For the white Southerner, the past was a better time than the present, even though it was tragic and painful. For all this supposed link between the Southerner and history, the obsession with the past, the South is not inhabited by students of history. People were more inclined to repeat truisms about the past than they were to read the documents and learn the facts. The Southerner is comfortable with oral history, with tales spoken from mouth to mouth, and suspicious of the rest. The Southerner is comfortable with a view of the past that is inherited without much question. Stories change in the telling, and even more in the repeating. The past is bendable and adaptable. We see in it what we will.
    Place is hierarchy, above all. This sense of Southern place, and of any Southerner’s given place, is entwined with that other notion of attachment to the land. The Southerner was indeed expected to know his place, not simply in a geographical or mythological sense, and to accept this place and adhere to it. The Southerner had a position in the social order: white trash, slave, merchant, overseer, paddyroller, artisan, master. This functioned as a kind of temperature, which moved up or down with one’s fortunes or behavior. Knowing your place in the world and accepting it, paying respect to your betters and giving a good kick to those beneath you, these were and are part of the Southern order.
    A Southerner accepted his station in life but tried to find the means to rise above it. That same Southerner accepted the station of others in life and tried with all his might to keep them in it. The Southern world spent much of its energy deciding who was entitled to advantages and who was not, and most especially who was better than whom. The social hierarchy was complicated and endless, Southern memory long and vengeful. Violations of the social order, lack of respect for one’s betters and their relations, brought quick retribution along with slow and thorough revenge.
    God never put us equal onto the earth. The very notion was absurd. God put us in a hierarchy, some better and many worse, and He gave us life so that we could discover who was the better and who was the worse. Southerners have never believed in equality, even when they have believed in some kind of democracy. The two ideas have never had much association with each other.
    In this, I am mostly speaking of the white Southerner, though I don’t doubt that black and brown Southerners share some of the same traits. The history I mean to trace here is my own white history, in which I grew up with an assigned place, one low in the Southern social order. I was raised to be a believer in the United States as a white nation, in the South as a white paradise, and in the superiority of my European-descended race over all the other races of the earth. No one ever said these words to me in such clear terms, but, nevertheless, I learned the ideas behind these beliefs. In particular, I was raised to keep black people in their place, and to see to it that they stayed there. My purpose here and now is to examine how good people