My Southern Journey by Rick Bragg

Author:Rick Bragg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays
Publisher: Liberty Street
Published: 2015-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

THE YANKEE MYSTIQUE

The cold had teeth in it, in ’93. I walked from the old house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I felt it bite me through my clothes, before I had taken a second step. There was snow on the ground but it was old snow, weeks old, glittering, frozen hard as marble. By my third step my legs were already going numb. It was dark, just a few steps from Harvard Yard, from those great halls of enlightenment, but the Southern gothic in me could not help but wonder if I might just freeze stuck to the ground in this foreign place, freeze into a statue that the students would gaze upon with great curiosity in the morning light. I turned around and almost leapt back onto the porch, snatching at the door, almost clawing for the warmth inside. Say what you want to about these Northerners, but don’t call them weak-willed, don’t call them soft. A creature that can live in this, live like this, deserves our respect, even our admiration. But I could not help but wonder if maybe my kinfolks had been right, when I was a child. Maybe the Northerners are an altogether different people, maybe even a different species. “They ain’t like us,” my kin used to say. Well at least, I thought as the door closed behind me and the feeling came back in my legs, they have much finer long underwear.

The next winter, a record one for nasty cold on the island of Manhattan, I stood at the doors to my apartment building in Midtown as the doorman looked at me with something close to pity. He was a nice man, a New Yorker to his bones, and was especially kind to me after he heard my hillbilly accent. He told me everything twice, to make sure I understood. I steeled myself for the bite, that cold, cold bite, and stepped boldly onto a sidewalk crowded with Northerners who thought this was just brisk. I hit a patch of hard snow before I made it a block and a half, to slide and stumble spectacularly onto iconic Broadway itself, where a sea of dirty yellow taxis flowed around me as if I was Moses. No one even blew a horn. And again, I had to give them respect. Say what you want to about these Northerners, I thought, but these people do know how to drive in the snow.

I lived two winters up there, among them. I learned a lot.

I learned that, if you are a Southern boy, keep your behind at home.

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