after Willie Morris *

Tell what it’s like to become an expatriate in your own country. Why

did you move north and thrive by looking homeward? Like the South was

consuming its offspring, Saturn Devouring His Son, and you who escaped it

were the strongest of your litter, your breed flourishing at safe distance from us in

some New York borough as Wolfe, Toomer, Williams, McCullers did, with such

nostalgia sweating out of your words like sour-mash from barrel staves, all those moments

down here triple-distilled by time, bottled up and aged by decades, sliding back smooth before

the warmth rises up from our entrails. It is possible to remain and flourish too, you know. I

learned of a behavior called matriphagy in one species of scorpion, whereby mothers leave

the nest after their brood hatches and then wait just outside to be consumed. The

progeny dig into their mother and feed, ensuring their survival. Maybe the South

is sacrificial like that for some of her children; maybe she doesn’t always just eat her own. Did

you enjoy your membership in the southern diaspora? Reconcile to your estrangement? I

imagine you felt strange becoming a literary paradigm, our native but prodigal son, always

apart from but part of your homeland’s discriminating society. You had to know we would feel

proprietary toward you, champion your words as noble truths, eventually claim some

form of kinship—fourth cousin thrice removed. We have our time-honored way of easing

backward into a different yesteryear, rife with lost causes whitewashed and statuesque, born of

our desire for more culture than cotton, klansmen, and kudzu created. In every state a

nod to classicism: an Athens, Troy, Rome, Corinth, Sparta, Carthage, Thebes...Regard so great

for unburnished history, that it wouldn’t fit your overhead bin. Did you check such a burden?

* a Golden Shovel poem using a line from the conclusion of Willie Morris’s North Toward Home: “Why was it, in

such moments before I leave the South, did I always feel some easing of a great burden?” The last words from each

line of the poem comprise this line from his book.