People | Places | Legacies

Searching for Home in the South with Carson McCullers

Quietly, I clung to what I knew: how to be an outsider in the South.

Y’all was easier to type than to say aloud. “I’ll meet y’all there in 20,” I texted my college friends as we made plans for dinner. It was easier to feign a casual fluency with that word over text, as if my fingers just glided over the letters on my keyboard and elided the transitive letters out of habit, as if I spoke this word every day, as if I’d said this word my whole life. I was twenty-two and living in Washington, DC, which is technically south of the Mason-Dixon, but Southern In Name Only; order a sweet tea within the district and you’ll get an iced tea with a pack of sugar on the side. Not that I ever ordered sweet tea.

Nearly twenty years earlier, the Army had brought my family to Georgia. My mother had married my stepfather, a second lieutenant stationed at Fort Benning, an Army base outside of Columbus, Georgia, along the Alabama border. I joined them shortly after their marriage, and we lived there for a few years before moving to Hawaii, and then Kansas, then to Washington State, and eventually back to Columbus. My paternal family was from the Midwest and my mother was a Korean immigrant, and I felt as entitled to their ancestral homelands as wherever we were stationed at the moment, which is to say, not at all.

It wasn’t until I moved to DC, this not-Southern Southern city, that I started saying y’all. Growing up, I’d refused on principle, unwilling to bend to the dominant culture of the South any more than I already had. I was like those trees grown into the sides of cliffs, crooked from a lifetime of conscious resistance but still trying to grow tall. Rather than cultivate a sense of self, I defined myself in opposition to the world around me.

A self defined by opposition works perfectly well for a high schooler, but then I graduated and went to college, also in Georgia. I got older and imagined living simply as I was, without feeling like I constantly pushed against what it meant to be “Southern.” But then, a few months before I graduated, a white man at a dry cleaner smiled generously as he handed me my plastic-wrapped silk shirt and asked, “Do you speak English, darlin’?” It was the second time that year a stranger had asked if I spoke English. I’d lived in Georgia for seven years—longer than I’d lived anywhere else—but it wasn’t long enough for a stranger to see me as anything other than an outsider.

*

I first heard of Carson McCullers, the Southern writer, while eating a convenience store egg sandwich during a break in my lifeguard training in 2007. I was fifteen, and my family had just moved back to Georgia from Washington State. I was horrified at the heat and humidity, which created heat indexes I didn’t know were possible. I had been accepted to Columbus High School, which I would be entering as a sophomore, but because of the differences in curriculum standards, I would be taking freshman biology and the mysteriously titled Foundations of Knowledge, a required freshman course. Luckily, my lifeguard training had one other student: a freckled boy who was also a rising sophomore at CHS. Between bites of sandwich in the blinding sun, he filled me in.

Rather than cultivate a sense of self, I defined myself in opposition to the world around me. 

“Columbus High School is the oldest public high school in Georgia,” he said. One wing was rebuilt in the 1980s after a fire burned it to the ground, but the original 1920s facade remained intact.

He told me about Chicken Day, the Thursday lunch tradition where boys (and a couple brave girls) ran from their classes to the cafeteria for fried-chicken lunches, and Hunt-A-Hawk Day, when everyone dressed in photorealistic camouflage to cheer on the football team ahead of its game with our rivals, the Hardaway Hawks. Dressing up was optional, but not really. I’d have to find some camo.

“And Foundations of Knowledge, that’s the freshman class where you’ll have to learn all of this. You’ll probably have to read The Member of the Wedding,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “It’s this book by this writer who went to CHS, and they make us all read her books. They’re so boring.”

I chewed my egg and thought about how I’d never gone to a school with any kind of notable alumni, let alone a school with an entire class dedicated to teaching that school’s history.

I struggled to make friends that first year at CHS, and lunch was the most painful half hour of the day. Students were allowed to take their lunches to the various courtyards in the school, which contained shady, solitary nooks filled with quiet people. I wished I had the courage to be one of them, to happily eat alone, maybe with a book on my lap. My one lunch companion, a freshman acquaintance from the cross-country team, saved me from the indignity of public solitude. On the days when she was out, I had to make other plans—hiding my turkey sandwich in my pocket as I made my way to the library, sneaking bites when no one was looking.

Just inside the library doors was a glass case that housed a collection of Carson’s work, her doleful eyes staring out from the covers of her books. Regardless of what individual sophomore boys thought of her, Columbus High loved Carson. My teachers talked about her like she was a beloved cousin, an odd bird who had grown up only a few blocks away, a daughter of the city who was beloved despite her strangeness and maybe even because of it.

I carried my copy of Carson’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter with me on these lonely walks around Columbus High’s campus and imagined Carson walking the same routes. Conjuring her ghost to walk beside me in those courtyards was a small comfort when I felt like I had spectacularly failed at being a normal teenager; I was too afraid to make small talk, but maybe I could follow Carson out of this town and write books that would be displayed in the school library too.

I started reading biographies of Carson, and one line from her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare, made it into every one I read: “I yearned for one particular thing: to get away from Columbus and make my mark on the world.” She dictated the book from her bed in Nyack, New York, where she lived the latter part of her life before dying there in 1967.

When I read Caron’s work, I loved her odd characters and misfits, little girls who wanted to be seen and accepted but who were ultimately left on their front porches, yearning. I think that before I even knew the facts about her life, I understood that she was someone who felt trapped in that town, and she was someone who got out, and after she got out, her hometown came to love her even more.

*

At twenty-two, I imagined my arrival in DC would be a homecoming, that I would quickly nestle in among the NPR-listening liberals and Ann Taylor–clad women and be recognized as one of their own. I would sip wine at Capitol Hill parties and mingle with the most powerful people in the country—or at least their assistants. I started a job at a political magazine with an office at the Watergate.

I realized many of my coworkers had never been to the South; they had grown up on the coasts and graduated from private schools. Between their polite nods and questions, I realized how I looked to them: a lucky expat from a land of backwardness and provincialism. I played up my Georgia horror stories: the Confederate-themed bar downtown, the roommate’s parents who called me a Chinaman, the covert and overt ways I learned to hate myself. My stories were a fascinating glimpse into another world, but that didn’t mean I was welcome in theirs.

Outside of work, I began hanging out with a group of Southern journalism grads from my university. My friends’ southerness offered a form of comfort I was hesitant to accept at first. I had never felt like I belonged to the South. I had always been an asterisk, an outlier, an inconvenience to the narrative. But suddenly what felt familiar to me—what felt like home—was this group of friends from a place that I never had. I found comfort in it all, in being surrounded by warm, slow accents in the cold and unfamiliar city.

I first started saying y’all over text to them. The ease of the word—the way it glides across the tongue on its lazy path out of the mouth—was uncomfortable for me, even as I mouthed it quietly, alone. I found myself wanting to overemphasize the double l’s or to just go ahead and elongate it into “you all.” I envied the easy way it flowed off my friends’ lips. Now that we weren’t in the South, y’all somehow felt subversive—a way of indicating pride in where we came from in the face of derisive glances and mocking half smiles. This was before good liberal northerners had adopted the word as a gender-neutral second-person plural alternative to “you guys.” It was a conscious choice.

I had made it to the rooms full of liberal arts grads from fancy boarding schools, and, rather than welcoming me as one of their own, they looked at me in a way I recognized—the slight pity, the reflection of myself in their eyes as an outsider, a foreigner. Quietly, I clung to what I knew: how to be an outsider in the South. When strangers asked where I was from, rather than recite the long list of places my family had been stationed, I just said, “Georgia.”

*

In 2016, Jenn Shapland spent a month living in Carson’s childhood home as she drafted what would become the 2020 My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, part memoir, part biography of Carson through the lens of excavating her queerness in her archives. Even as a child, Carson didn’t fit into Columbus; she preferred pants instead of skirts and dresses and kept her hair cut short, eschewing her birthright as a Southern belle to play piano and write plays that she and her brother performed in the living room. Because she was often sick with pneumonia, she missed a lot of school, and, according to Shapland, the closest relationships in her early life were with adults—aunts, grandparents, nannies and maids, and eventually her piano teacher, Mary Tucker. In other official accounts of Carson’s life and work, she was characterized as a funny girl with a complicated marriage and a tendency to develop deep, obsessive friendships with women. It never occurred to me that these friendships might be euphemistic obfuscations of what was really happening. Reading Shapland reintroduced me to the woman I thought I knew—and made me reevaluate the city of Columbus’s relationship with her.

I read Shapland’s book as I planned my first trip back to Columbus in five years—a weekend trip to do research for a novel I’d been thinking of writing. The novel was set in Columbus, or a version of it, and I thought of it as a quiet homage to Carson and this town I’d begun to feel affection for. In the weeks ahead of my trip, I gushed to friends about how excited I was to get back to the place that had come to fill the shape of “hometown” in my imagination. Privately, I fantasized about the sun-kissed drives I’d take in my rental car through the tree-lined country roads leading to the Army base, the sunsets on the Chattahoochee River that would welcome me home. I made a list of places to visit and scheduled a tour of the museum in Carson’s childhood home, which I’d never been inside. When I landed in Atlanta, I beamed as I rode the escalator. I loaded up my rental car and pulled onto the highway without a GPS. I didn’t need one; I was home.

I was home.

It was dark by the time I got to my Airbnb, a guesthouse converted into a studio apartment a few blocks from Columbus High. I snuggled into the couch with wet hair and a bottle of wine while I flipped through Shapland’s book. I thought about the chasm between truth and narrative, the ways we amend the past to make the present more tolerable. I thought of how easily I adopted Georgia as “home” once I left the South, despite feeling unwanted and displaced the entire time I lived there. I thought of Shapland sitting on the porch of the Smith-McCullers House in 2016, Trump signs dotting the lawns to the left and right of her in quiet condemnation of a queer woman telling queer love stories about a writer some people wanted so badly to keep straight.

My appointment at Carson’s home was the next morning. After groggy toast and instant coffee, I drove over to the small blue house on Stark Avenue. On the front porch Reeves, her husband, had once asked her if she was a lesbian.

“Carson answered with a swift denial, wished aloud that she wasn’t one, then expressed plain uncertainty,” Shapland wrote. Then Reeves proposed. Then they married shortly after.

I knocked and almost expected Carson to answer, but when the heavy blue door opened with a gust of air conditioning, it was a volunteer who greeted me with a shy smile. I told her I was a writer from New York but that I had graduated from Columbus High. She thanked me for coming back and started her tour. She showed me Carson’s legendary silk kimono and told the story of the time Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe came to dinner at the Nyack house and ate at that exact marble table with the giant crack down the middle.

I took photos of Caron’s typewriter and record player, both behind glass and poised for use, as if she had just put them down and would be coming back for them any moment. A television replayed short, silent videos from Reeves and Carson’s wedding day in 1937. Carson looked goofy and thrilled to be marrying Reeves, an ex-soldier with writing aspirations of his own. The volunteer didn’t mention that they were unhappy together, that Reeves was famously resentful of Carson’s success, that he never ended up writing anything, and that their relationship ultimately ended after he tried to persuade her into a suicide pact. I thought of this polite version of her life story that made no mention of suicide, of her queerness, of her own bouts of self-harm and depression, and wondered who gained from this simple version of the story. It was a story without culpability, proud facts with the more complicated, ugly versions swept aside.

“Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them,” Carson wrote in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. The Carson I thought I knew—the one beloved by Columbus not despite her quirks, but because of them—didn’t exist. But still, I’d clung to that version of her because I believed she’d carved a path for me to follow: If I could get away from here and make something of myself, I might be welcomed back one day too. Now that I knew how different the truth was from the story I’d believed, I wasn’t sure if that was possible anymore.

The tour took twenty minutes, and then I was back in my rental car with an empty weekend ahead of me. I decided to try my luck getting onto Fort Benning. My family had lived there three times, but I had lost my privileges to access military bases when I turned twenty-one, so I pulled into the main gate and hoped I could sweet-talk the soldier checking IDs. I rolled down my window.

Now that I knew how different the truth was from the story I’d believed, I wasn’t sure if that was possible anymore.

“ID please,” he said. I couldn’t see his eyes through his sunglasses, but I hoped I could access some pathos. I handed my driver’s license over.

“Ooh, New York! You’ve come a long way!” He had a southern accent.

“I live in New York now,” I said laughing. “But I’m actually from here!”

“You are not,” he said, teasing me. His voice was light, but I hardened at the challenge.

“I am! I went to E. A. White and I graduated from Columbus High!” My voice got higher as I said this; I realized that I didn’t have any way to prove what I was saying.

He waved me through.

“Have a wonderful day, ma’am.”

I thanked him and drove toward my old neighborhood, the location inspiration for Carson’s novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, which scandalized Fort Benning when it was published with its depictions of sexual voyeurism, infidelity, and homosexuality. It’s a work dedicated to Annemarie Schwarzenbach, another supposed lover of Carson’s. When I reread it though, I was most struck by Carson’s description of the officers’ quarters, which was a perfect re-creation of the house I’d lived in with my family: “an eight-room two-story building of stucco” with a study that was “a small room planned originally as a sun porch and leading from the dining-room,” and a lawn that “adjoined the forest of the reservation.” Carson knew the layouts of the officers’ quarters intimately because she had taken piano lessons with Mary Tucker, an Army wife (who is also considered one of Carson’s first platonic obsessions or lesbian crushes, depending on which history you read).

I drove toward my elementary school, E. A. White. I’d only gone to pre-K there, but it was special to me because it was the only school both my sister and I had ever attended.

But when I got there, the building was gone. I parked and got out. The land where the school had been was empty and bald and filled in with hay. I stood in the hot sun and remembered a time my mother had taken me to the playground when I was small. How I climbed the exposed roots of the trees that still stood over the yellow emptiness. How I wandered into the tall grass and cut my finger on a blade and the blood that gushed from the cut felt like the greatest tragedy I’d ever experienced, and how my mother soothed it with a Band-Aid and by blowing on it. Even this was gone.

That night, I ate pizza on a brick wall downtown and tried to journal. A band was performing rock covers and families had brought lawn chairs out to watch. A red-faced woman with box-blonde hair and a MAGA hat passed me and I felt that I could have been anywhere. I stopped wondering if I’d recognize anyone. I knew I wouldn’t. The next morning I booked a hotel room in Atlanta and left town a day early. There was nothing left to see here.

In a 1951 television interview with Jack Mangan, Carson said her motivation for writing had always been to seek fellowship: “I always think about it more in terms of human beings . . . and the basic theme is you need to belong . . . to belong to something, to feel oneself a part of life.”

After my trip to Columbus, I stopped telling people I was from Georgia. It didn’t feel true anymore. I reinstituted the rigamarole of reciting all the places I’d lived, or I settled with wherever I’d lived most recently. In Connecticut, I was from New York. In New York, I was from DC. In DC, I had graduated from Georgia but I wasn’t from Georgia—it’s complicated, you see, my dad is in the Army and I have moved a lot. And then a laugh, and then a shrug, and then we move on.

*

Recently I drove to New Jersey from Connecticut to visit my college friends (the ones from Georgia) for the weekend. My map app routed me through Nyack. The place holds a mystical aura for me as Carson’s eventual haven, the place where she might have found some peace, some rest, at the end of her life. It was early summer, and I crossed the Tappan Zee bridge under the blue sky. The road twisted and I slowed my car, imagining Carson here, wondering how close I was to her home. I also had to slow for another reason: Hoards of cyclists had overtaken the street and were climbing the rolling hills in packs of fifteen, twenty, fifty. The spindly metal structures seemed so delicate, so fallible, but when moving together, the collective resembled its own organism. They moved like a school of fish; the individuals could be picked out, but they were lost in the mass of shiny scales, the flick of a fin disappearing into the collective.

In professional cycling, there are two groups: the peloton and the breakaway. The peloton comprises most of the cyclists in a race. They ride in a mass together, with a handful of riders jockeying for the front.

But the breakaway is what I find most interesting; they’re the leaders of the pack who have literally broken away from the peloton, charging ahead faster than everyone else. And in the breakaway, the leaders take turns riding at the front, bearing the force of the oncoming wind for the rest of the riders. This is true even in competition. Before the finish line is in sight, the cyclists rotate who rides in the front of the pack—not to share the spotlight of being first, but to share the burden of it. The force of the oncoming wind is like a solid wall that requires extra strength to break through, and they take turns doing the work. They also take turns drafting off each other, riding in a cone of ease behind their competitors, their fellow riders.

As I crept alongside them in my car, I watched the cyclists take turns breaking the wind for their fellow riders in fraternal generosity. I thought of the cone of shelter Carson had created for me, how her life created a shape for me to follow from Columbus to New York and beyond. How I’d tried to grasp at communion with her through superficial means of claiming a southern identity I didn’t actually want or need.

Carson died in 1967, so there’s no way for me to take my turn at the front of the pack and share the burden with her. But maybe taking my turn looks like creating that shelter for others: bearing the brunt of loneliness in the name of honesty, in the name of taking up space where it might be uncomfortable or inconvenient because that space you take creates room for the rest of them—of us.

After a few miles, the road cleared up. I accelerated, alone.