Report from the Georgia Hills

My stepmother passed away last week, and I drove down to Georgia for the funeral and to spend some time with my father and siblings, some of whom were her children. I got caught in that snowstorm on my way home on Friday, and it took over four hours to get from Scranton to Stormville.

My visits to Georgia are so infrequent that I tend to forget just how southern fried my family is. Their accents are broad, and their tastes run to country and western music, car races, hunting and fishing, and ultimate fighting. They neglect their pets and indulge their children. They fry almost everything they eat, and they like their green beans cooked to a pulp with a slab of pork fat. It seemed to me that I was eating almost constantly. I had fried green tomatoes and butter beans for the first time in decades. Folks tend to be either obese or skinny as a rail, like one of those shirtless drunks getting arrested on “Cops”.

The funeral was in a tiny country Baptist church, and it featured shouting and old time preaching. I didn’t see anybody run the aisles, but I would not have been surprised by it. My stepmother loved that church, and the service was how she would have wanted it. She was laid to rest in a small cemetery across the road from a racetrack. The funeral goers ended up at the Western Sizzlin’ for supper.

My hometown has grown bigger and a whole lot seedier these last few years. Farms that used to raise corn now feature row upon row of manufactured homes. Housing is very affordable. It has to be since wages are so low. Some of the local carpet mills have recruited tens of thousands of Mexicans, many of them undocumented and in the country unlawfully, to work in the mills. This has the effect, desired by the mill owners, of suppressing wages and keeping the locals in their place.

My people are staunchly anti-immigrant and are looking to the federal government to control the border better. It’s not so much that they don’t like Mexicans; rather, they resent the suppression of wages and rising tax burdens. The Mexicans have relatively larger families and have filled up the public schools so that new schools must be built. They also use the public health facilities and other government services without a concomitant contribution to the tax base.

Dalton has a lot of pawnshops, check cashing businesses, and easy credit providers to cater for the working poor. Many folks have more than one job to make ends meet. My sister has three jobs. My mother bakes wedding cakes on the side. Nobody ever gets ahead or out of debt. They are always one illness or injury away from financial disaster.

My people are likely to vote for a Republican for president in 2008. They don’t care for Clinton, partly because she’s a woman, or for Obama, mainly because he’s black, and they reckon one of the other of those senators has a lock on the Democratic nomination. If a Republican candidate is “right” on immigration, they will vote for him despite his positions on anything else and despite the GOP’s platform being against their interests in almost every respect.

There are “more churches than people”, as the saying goes, and frequent schisms over minutiae have led to a proliferation of tiny churches, mostly Baptist. These feature rather lively services with much outpouring of emotion and demonstrations of religious ecstasy. Ecstasy is otherwise forbidden, so you have to have it in church. In principle, most forms of pleasure are sinful.

I am glad that I was able to visit, but I am equally glad to be back to my life as an expatriate here in New York. My accent will go away in a few weeks, and I will get all the gravy out of my system in a month or so.