Don't Forget A Winter Coat

One of the things I liked to do during the first few weeks of my freshman year was ask people where they thought I was from, because they would never guess right. I found that I could make people believe I was exactly like them--I adopted their mannerisms and even their way of speaking, so that people would swear to me that I was surely from White Plains, or Berkeley, or Washington, or Vermont.

In fact I am from New Orleans, La., in particular, and the South in general. I don't have a southern accent. I don't wear overalls. I'm not a conservative. The Confederate flag doesn't mean much to me. But I still feel like a Southerner, and it began to bother me that I was willing to let the people around me see me not as I saw myself, but only as reflections of themselves. Perhaps that's all that's left of the old, supposedly gracious and civilized South--an ability to sense people and adapt to them--but I wanted a stronger identification than that.

I began to see myself as a Southerner. That's a vague way to put it, but more specifically, being a Southerner at Harvard means more than anything else feeling like an outsider. There are more than 1700 people in the Class of '78, and probably only 150 or so of your are reading this in places like Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama or Virginia. You are likely to be one of only a very few people from your high school or hometown who is going to college in the North, let alone at Harvard. One of the first things you'll feel here is different.

Harvard seemed to me at first to be an extension of New York City. I had never seen New York but in my mind it was the center of a worldwide spiritual sickness that emanated in waves from the top of the Empire State Building. It was me against the Harvard/New York conspiracy, and I was always dealing with people who walked and talked faster than I, who had loads of concrete goals in life where I had none.

I remember countless conversations in which people would ramble for hours about how they had gotten in to Harvard, sounding as if they had spent the last seven or eight years of their lives orchestrating their admission.

Looking back I think I was forced into thinking of myself as a Southerner more than coming around to that feeling naturally. Anyway, I began to read about the South a great deal and to talk to people about it constantly. I sought out the company of other Southerners, most of whom felt the same was as I did about Harvard. I thought of the South then as being the land of Faulkner--old, subtle, deep, more concerned with ways of living than with achievement. It seemed to me a region haunted by failure and fading beauty--and Harvard, the center of success, was completely alien.

This may very well be the way it looked to me and the way it will look to you if you're from the South, but in many ways it's a self-serving image of Harvard. Everybody who comes to Harvard was Somebody the year before and each was probably used to thinking of themselves as being something special.

Then, in the first few months here, everybody comes perilously close to being a Nobody, and problems develop. Nobody here is impressed by the fact that they go to Harvard. Having gotten accustomed to dealing with life from the standpoint of being The Best, a lot of Harvard freshmen immediately lose their focus when they come here. They no longer have any distinguishing characterisitcs.

Except for one: everyone has his own background. People from the South, especially, because they are so few and far between here, are unique. So as long as they remain Southerners, whatever that means, and make sure people see them as Southerners, they're Somebody again.

So it's easy to use the South as a shield against Harvard, an excuse for failures. It's easy, at first, to go back home and feel comfortable and successful there, and to dismiss as ignorant people from the North who will tell you how backward and racist the South is.

I cruised along in that state of mind for most of my freshman year, and I might still feel the way I did then if it hadn't been for the vacations. The first was great--it had just started to snow in Cambridge, and I had never seen snow before and felt the differentness more than ever. Later, though, during the spring and summer, I began to notice something curious: I had changed somehow, I was different from the people I had gone to high school with in New Orleans.

I remember one party during the early summer after my freshman year where all my old classmates sat around talking endlessly about whose fraternity had the most rigorous initiation procedure and what was the best way to drive from Washington and Lee to Sweetbriar, and feeling for the first time that I wasn't like them any more. These people, it struck me, were perhaps the real Southerners, and they were neither poetic nor haunted by the past; they were clean-cut, well-fed young future businessmen and housewives, conservative and full of good cheer. I, on other other hand, was a little scrawny and scraggly-haired by their standards, my clothes a little too old and loose-fitting, my conversations tending toward the morose and reflective where my old friends were at complete peace with the world. They seemed to look at me with a good-natured tolerance; I had shown hints of this in high school, and I was up there at Harvard.

I was in a bind, caught in the middle: a Southerner at Harvard, and a Harvard student in the South. But I was at least forced out of my blind exclusion of Harvard and acceptance of everything I thought the South had, and I began the process of trying to figure out some way to combine the two. I began to see that people from New York weren't all alike--they became, in fact, my best friends--and that a lot of what they criticized about the South was true, and bad.

That process is still going on for me, so it's hard to say exactly where I stand now as a Harvard Southerner. I'm still trying to decide what parts of me are Southern and what parts are Harvard, and to find out what the South really is and what parts of it are worth preserving. I spend a lot of time wondering whether I'll go back there after I graduate.

Much of what the South is now was born out of two things, one evil--slavery and aristocracy--and one tragic--a war. Somehow, over the last hundred years, the evil and the tragedy have become transmuted into a society that appeals to me because of its lack of illusions about success and failure and its emphasis on personal relationships and the manner in which people conduct their lives. The South is also a distinct place still, full of the past, and the North is not.

I wonder, though, whether the appeal is inextricably tied to the evil--whether, for instance, the stability and sense of permanence I get from the South only grows out of its rigid racism and resistance to change. I suppose that to live there I will have to be able at least to maintain the illusion that the South can retain the appeal while the evil fades away.