Increasingly fewer people have a sense of place, somewhere that they consider where they originated and have set down roots, a place to call their own and to which they owe loyalty and that embraces them.
A primary reason for this is the increasingly transient nature of our society. People seldom stay in one place long enough to belong to the place. Some are in military careers and are forced by orders to move to new duty stations and assignments. Job changes force others to move, or they choose to move to accept a different job. Not just once or twice but multiple times over a lifetime.
Children are born amidst these numerous "removes," and then, when the children are grown and marry, they, too, begin to roam their own journeys through a transient life.
But everyone needs a sense of place. We all need a spot on God's green earth to which we belong, a place of which we feel an integral part, a place where we put down roots so we can truly thrive. This is true of not only individuals but also, and especially, of families.
Andrew Lytle wrote, "A family ... thrives best on some fixed location, which holds the memories of past generations...."
The idea of a sense of place is biblical. Psalm 87:6 says, "The Lord shall count, when He writeth up the people, that this man was born there." The individual is identified with the place of his nativity, where he was rooted and reared.
This ideal is especially important during the developmental stages of children. Although all of our children were born in Pennsylvania, one even beginning school there, we moved when they were young. But then we remained in one place throughout their formative years. Two of them were out of college and two were just entering college when we next moved. Although born in Pennsylvania, they developed their sense of place in Tennessee. That's where their roots were.
They all married and moved to the states of their husbands, but they still consider themselves Tennesseans. Their children are developing a different sense of place in the states where they are growing up.
Not everyone's sense of place is the same, even among members of the same family. For example, Ben Robertson, in his book Red Hills and Cotton: An Upcountry Memory, described his place as "a land of smokehouses and sweet potato patches, of friend pies and dried fruit and of lazy bumblebees buzzing in the sun...."
Although I can relate to some of that, it's not my place. I know nothing of a life surrounded by cotton or sweet potato patches larger than a small backyard garden. Others' places feature vast tobacco fields. That's not my place either.
My place features the hills and valleys, ridges and hollows, and small family gardens of the larger region known collectively as Appalachia. It's the South, but it's not the South of the stereotype, of large plantations of cotton, tobacco, rice, or indigo. It's the small communities, small farms, small businesses of the Upper South along the base of the Appalachian chain and in the Great Valley before one comes to the Cumberland Plateau.
One's sense of place will necessarily color and influence his beliefs and actions, and, if he is a writer, his writings. To suppress this influence leads one into being a fraud, a fake, a pretender.
Appalachian author Jesse Stuart tried suppressing the influence of his place but found it didn't work well for him. A wise professor, Donald Davidson, leveled with him, "Go back to your people. Go back and write of them. Don't change and follow the moods of these times. Be your honest self. Go back and write of your country. Your country has your material."
Stuart followed that sage advice to capitalize on his sense of place. But he knew that "You've got to know Appalachia to write of it." You can't fake it. Natives will know, just as native Southerners can detect a fake Southern accent by Hollywood actors and others who would poke fun at the South and its people. (They will know, especially if the pretenders pronounce the name of the region as "AppalAsha," with a long A sound, instead of saying "AppaLATCHa.")
Pretenders will trot out a slew of stereotypes of Southerners. The lazy and ignorant Li'l Abners and Jed Clampetts; the lawless moonshiners; the twangy, nasally country musicians; the rednecks who haven't enough culture to remove their ball caps when they enter even a church building or sit down for a meal; and the NASCAR and SEC football fanatics. But these are just snippets of some Southerners, not a true generalization of all Southerners. Besides, one can find mirror images of such stereotypes in every state of the Union, not just the South.
Some people will decry the necessity for a sense of place as regressive, backward, even ignorant. They might even accuse those of us who have a Southern sense of place of living too much in the past and so not "progressing." Rick Bragg countered this accusation with these words: "They say we Southerners live in the past.... [F]or us memory is not an inventory, not a catalog of events, but a time machine. It lifts us off the dull treadmill of grown-up responsibilities to a time of adventure and wonder. The past is not dead, and so the dead are never really gone. We resurrect them, daily...."
No place is perfect or without its faults. Every place has its ignorant, its ne'er do wells, and its rednecks, just as every place has its snobs and pretenders. A sense of place doesn't preclude not liking certain things about that place, but neither should being from that place make one ashamed of it. Far from it.
Do you have a sense of place? If so, follow Jesse Stuart's advice:
By your own soul's law learn to live.
And if men thwart you, take no heed.
If men hate you, have no care.
Sing your song. Dream your dream.
Hope your hope. Pray your prayer.
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