Finding My Home in the South
In the vast diversity of all places "Southern," something about Louisiana sticks
Editor's Note: Country Roads is thrilled to announce Sydney Cheatham's essay "Finding My Home in the South" as a semifinalist in our 2019 All Roads Lead to Home Young Writers' Contest. Read the work of our winner and two other semifinalists at the link, here.
As someone who has lived in several different geographical locations around the South, I’ve come to identify strongly with the region, in all of its uncoordinated beauty, as a whole. My life in the Southern region has known a few different homes, but my move to Louisiana in August of 2016 broadened my perspective on how I understand the importance of a place.
There is certainly no one single “type” of Southern. The famous Atlanta-based chef Todd Richards put these Southern divides into terms we can all understand: food. When asked what Southern food is about from a non-Southerner perspective in an interview with the New York Times, he replied, “First of all, Southern food isn’t one thing. Louisiana isn’t Georgia isn’t the Carolinas”.
I first came to identify with cultures considered “Southern” at my grandparents’ white country house on a plot of acreage at the Arkansas-Louisiana border, a place so remote it barely has a zip code. Childhood summers and holidays spent there are where I learned things like how much sweet peach filling, (or fudge, your choice) to stuff in a hand pie in order for it to hold its shape after coming out of the fryer. It wasn’t until much later, when our new neighbors from Kansas moved in, that I learned a deep fryer was in fact, not a staple in every household kitchen. A note about deep frying ¾ we had great fun putting just about every food in the kitchen in the fryer. Heart health aside, I think everything tasted better that way. Marmie’s house was my retreat; I always felt like I was home as soon as I broke through the thick circle of pine that hid their white, open porch house shaded by the decades-old pecan trees, which supplied the ingredients for many Thanksgiving pies.
It is difficult to put a finger on exactly what part of my experience that first day in Baton Rouge so carved out a home for the city in my heart, but it was undoubtedly immediate.
I spent my older adolescent years up in Bentonville, Arkansas, the home of Walmart. The global company’s headquarters brought well over half of Bentonville’s modest population from all over the country, and even the world. This “Southern” small town is in a rocky, cold part of North Arkansas nestled above the Ozark Mountains. On one of my last mornings before my family sold my childhood home, I sat on the second floor balcony deck soaking in the last rays of fall. I would miss this house on the hill, with its dark hardwood floors, walls, and ceilings; its bookshelves filled with collections of Arkansas maps, leading the way to caches in caves and waterfall after waterfall. During my time there, I spent many hours running on the miles of bike trails around the renowned Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
When I embarked on my college search, my new home could have been anywhere. Anywhere in the SEC, that is—I was raised by a staunch Arkansas Razorback family; my dad was once a linebacker for the team. Needless to say, attending a college above the Mason-Dixie line was a laughable notion. Georgia was charming, Auburn had its own personality, and Ole Miss was a Southern emblem. Louisiana State University was the last stop on our college tour journey, and by the time I had spent fourteen hours in a car driving across the South with my mother, I was ready to go to college anywhere if it meant we could go home. When she drove us under a canopy of live oaks onto the LSU campus, I remember the way I sat up in my seat. She knew, and I knew. I would be spending the next four years in South Louisiana. I felt certain I had arrived there on account of some destiny or grand plan. It is difficult to put a finger on exactly what part of my experience that first day in Baton Rouge so carved out a home for the city in my heart, but it was undoubtedly immediate. And I have felt the same level of magical, love-for-Louisiana intoxication every day here since.
During my first year in Baton Rouge, I spent countless weekends with my freshman college roommate visiting her parents’ house in New Orleans. I quickly fell in love with the Crescent City—everything about it, even the parts that seemed mundane to friends who had grown up there. I adored the wrought-iron balconies in the French Quarter, the trees covered in beads. We spent six-hour nights at The Boot, a seedy Tulane bar filled with 18-year-olds and dragged ourselves out to brunch in the mornings afterward. Café Amelie is where I became acquainted with bananas foster waffles. My friend’s parents always had muffulettas in the refrigerator, and her mom served us bloody marys for breakfast like it was OJ. I thrust myself into life as a Southern Louisianan with all of the proper gusto I thought my new home—which sold liquor on Sundays!—deserved. Such commerce was unheard of in my dry-county home in the Northwest corner of Arkansas, which had begun to feel like a previous chapter in my life.
In mornings sitting in solitude with a cup of coffee, or on runs around the LSU lakes, I have spent time contemplating the meaning behind my love for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and this region as a whole. When I think of what makes it feel like home, it is the overwhelming sense that Louisiana offers me a place to belong, a heritage and culture to hold on to, families away from family, and a promise to always re-center my focus on the beauty of the mundane.