Southern Pride.

I have a Floridian friend here whose ideas about the South (and those silly southerners) are always cracking me up. The following conversation took place with this friend while discussing how deceivingly small London is:  

 
So what's Little Rock's like? Is it all, like, suburbs?

I don’t know how to describe it. It's a city, and it's the capital, but it's not huge... it has a small town feel. But I mean, it's not tiny either, there’s always a lot going on there. It's like, a small city, I guess.

 (Very nice, Stephanie. Riveting description of the nature of Little Rock. Why can't I ever think of anything better than this when I try to describe my hometown?)     

Like Tallahassee?

Uh, maybe, I'm not sure, it's been awhile since I've been there. 

(As if I remember from when I was 8 passing through on the way to Disney World.) 

How about this: it's not as big as Nashville but parts of it have the same feel, does that help? 

No, it doesn't, I've never been to Nashville.

Memphis? Jackson, Mississippi? Baton Rouge, or anywhere at all in Louisiana?

No, I’ve been all over the country but I’ve never made it to the South. No offense but we kind of try to avoid that area, LOL!

Don’t worry, none taken. We feel the same way about most of Florida.

*ZING!*

She admits that she has been to Atlanta and was baffled because it's a big city, and yet people still had southern accents and drank sweet tea.  That's what made me realize where her odd notions about the south come from: she hears "southern," she thinks "country”.  She associates the entirety of the south with a backwards, small town, Bible-beater, sittin’ on the front porch, Huckleberry Finn kind of existence.  I'm aware that Little Rock is far from cosmopolitan, and while her notions of the south are in some cases terribly inaccurate, in others they are dead-on.  But it's an incomplete picture if we're talking about where I come from.

I’m very proud of my hometown. I’m proud to be an Arkansan. I’m proud to be a southerner. This is why I plan on moving back. My Southern Literature professor said that to really understand the south, you have to leave The South.  I took this suggestion a bit further and figured that if I wanted to understand the United States, maybe I should leave the United States. I'm not sure if I've come any closer to understanding either, but if nothing else, it’s been entertaining to learn about the misconceptions of both from the eyes of the rest of the world.