The only internet rage bait I still fall for is when someone asks “Is Virginia the South?”
As a Virginia native with the Great Dismal Swamp in my backyard, it runs my blood pressure up to see sloppily done maps where folks have colored in “The South” to go all the way to Arkansas and leave Virginia untouched. More practically, I sigh when I see yet another Southern artist/writing grant I can’t apply for because Virginia isn’t an eligible state.
Even so, when people ask me about it in real life, I never explain myself.
In August, I met a Black comic book artist in town for Atlantic Comic Con who’d been conducting an informal survey by asking everyone he encountered if Virginia was the South. He might’ve been from somewhere in the Midwest.
I said “Yes,” with enough force that he stopped drawing and looked up at me.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
The thing is: I don’t feel the need to explain to anyone that my people don’t necessarily have Southern accents, but everyone talks real slow, like their words got caught in molasses. That some of the brightest lights in my memory are from lightning bugs in my Grandma’s backyard at twilight when the heat of the summer day finally broke into something a little less smothering. That we ate sometimes ate fried catfish at my dad’s mom’s house, but only croaker and spot at my maternal grandparents’. That you would be late to school if you got caught behind a tractor and I was the queen of a city harvest festival when I was a senior.
I don’t feel the need to explain. It just is. But if you’re kind about it, I’m happy to tell you about a south—my South.
In all honesty, I didn’t think too terribly much about all this until I was in college. I was Southern, I knew it, but I didn’t question it until I met kids from Alabama and Mississippi who scoffed at my assertions. Or until I met Black kids from Richmond whose eyebrows rose up to their hairlines when I used being the Peanut Festival Queen of 2011 as my fun fact during introductions. Or kids from NoVA (Northern Virginia) who’d never heard of Suffolk before.
I often just clocked the reactions, pocketed them to interrogate at a later date.
I was a Black kid from a suburban part of a growing city who spent a lot of time in a rural area off 460 because that’s where all my family was. You could get to the North Carolina line faster than parts of Virginia Beach from where I lived.
Sure, I wanted to get out. But it was home.
And nobody talked about home except us.
Maybe that’s not right.
Maybe I didn’t start to think hard about home and South until I started really work with Toni Morrison. Seems odd that a lady from Ohio could teach me about the South, but what she really did was teach me about what it meant to be rooted.
Lorain, Ohio was a specter in all her early work. And as I read through Toni Morrison’s novels, thought about who she became, I figured only a place like Lorain could build a person like Toni Morrison.
The places you come from were important. It makes you tough in particular ways.
And so I started to spend a lot of time think about where I was rooted. How home didn’t always have to be a pleasant thing, but it was a true thing. Home is a truth about you, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, it’s also a place that nourishes you.
I can’t get everything I need at home, but I also can’t get what I have here out there. An endless supply of unconditional love. People who care more about whether I’ve eaten than when my next book is coming out. A soft place to land. I can always go out to find books or cultural outings or art, or whatever it is I want; it’s nice to know that I have a home to come back to when I’m done.
I did the best with what Virginia gave me. In education, I did the best of what Suffolk Public Schools had to offer. Got all three degrees after that from two of Virginia’s best public universities. In places where Thomas Jefferson’s spirit lingered with those of the enslaved who built those schools, I did the kind of thinking and creating Jefferson did not think Black people were capable of. Jefferson probably rolled in his grave in the Mays of 2016, 2018 and 2022 when I walked the Lawn and through the Sunken Garden, clad in Kente stoles.
Or maybe I didn’t start thinking about home and South until strangers started to tell me I didn’t belong here.
Late last fall, I finished up a book talk at Resist Booksellers in Petersburg, VA and drove a couple streets over to Demolition Coffee to have a latte with friends. The young barista smiled at me.
“Wow, you look like a rock star,” he said. “Who are you?”
He meant it genuinely. He meant I was beautiful. He meant I looked like I was somebody. And if I was somebody, why was I here?
Even though for most of my teenaged and young adult life I’d wanted nothing more than to leave Virginia, I didn’t feel seen, acknowledged, in that moment, as I might’ve five years ago.
I wondered why he didn’t think I could be somebody and belong to Virginia.
Echoes of that conversation reverberated into my present last week in Jacksonville, Florida when I ended up in the Lyft of a driver who happened to be originally from Virginia Beach. We chatted as he took me to my uncle’s house after a long day of conferencing at Black Book Bash.
“So do you think you’ll leave Virginia?” he asked, peering at me every so often in the rear view mirror.
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” I replied. True and false. I just hadn’t thought much about leaving in the last five years.
“You don’t look like you belong in Virginia, though,” he continued. “I’ve only talked to you for ten minutes. You belong in some big city somewhere.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But Virginia’s home.”
For all of its heartbreaks and lacks, my people’s legacy and loves are woven into this land that they worked and built homes on.
That is my heritage. If nothing else, that is mine.
I got to ride the Jamestown Ferry a few weeks ago when I was coming from William & Mary to head into Petersburg for the Petersburg Book Festival the next day.
The ferry was a treat from childhood. I have many memories of riding it with my parents, my grandparents, my great aunt, my uncle, whoever happened to be with us, on our way to Williamsburg for a day of shopping at the Outlets or for a rare trip to Busch Gardens. Before I was even thought of, my parents rode in daily in the summer, to and from their shifts working at the Williamsburg amusement park. They often went with friends and family members who also had jobs there, but always, as ever, at least the two of them together.
The ferry has typically been a family affair, so I felt unsure of myself as I drove my car onto the boat by myself, following the instructions of the workers.
As soon as we pulled away from the dock, I got out of the car and made my way to the side to watch the seagulls circle over head and dive into the waves in the ship’s wake for fish.
I was alone, doing an activity that had always been communal, but being on the water—this water—steadied me. I thought, I’ve never believed in God more than when I’m on the water: the James River, the Atlantic Ocean… These were my family’s water ways. My family had traveled these paths for generations.
I would never feel so close to them anywhere else.
I can always go out.
But no where else will be home.
Just saw your books displayed front and center at Swem Library, hopefully helping speak of possibilities to the next generation.