Homesick for Places We Have Never Known

Listening to: The Devil's Paintbrush Road

-The Wailin' Jennies

“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”

 -Carson McCullers.

My friend Scarlett and I were having breakfast at Kerbey Lane.
The waitress was a surly middle-aged woman wearing an overlarge hoodie with her hair roughly pulled back from her face. I've always found it humorous that waitstaff at local Austin joints like Kerbey, Veggie Heaven and Magnolia Cafe, though accommodating, make no effort to pretend that life is perfect or that they particularly give a damn if you find them pleasant or not. I was pondering this quirkiness and its separation from the concept of southern hospitality when Scarlett made the fateful comment.
"Your Southern American Lit class sounds awesome," she took a tiny bite of her pancake, "I want to read more books by southern authors this summer."
"I love it because the words are so beautifully written." I twirled my coffee cup in between my hands. "It's simple, but it's lovely. It makes life seem so much more mystical and interesting."
"I know." Scarlett sighed. "Regular life is..."
"So materialistic." I finished for her. We sat in silence for a moment, a communal unsaid thought hanging in the air. Scarlett wants to be an actress, maybe go into directing someday, and I've finally admitted to myself that the only career I've ever truly wanted to pursue in my life is that of a writer, so we both enjoy affording to go out for breakfast while we can. There is something else that bothers us, though. How are we supposed to create art that is in any way original, how are we supposed to present the world with new ideas or show it any kind of beauty when the modern world that we live in is already figured out for us?
"I guess you can make regular life look really beautiful though." Scarlett said after awhile. "At least, that's what I want to do."
So I begin to think about the South again. What defines the South? I'm from the northwest corner of Arkansas, so am I truly a southerner at all? If I'm not, am I a northerner? Is there a certain way to know what I am? Does it even matter? My dad once said that my intelligence belongs in the North, but my heart belongs in the South. To this day I'm not entirely certain what that means.

 I could go on and on about my personal goals for this journey, and don't get me wrong, I'll probably slip in a few more of my own musings here and there, but now I'll try to focus this ramble back to the South in relation to Carson McCullers and her brilliant quote above. The quote inevitably brings to mind The Ballad of the Sad Cafe for me. The townspeople prefer to interact only with people that are familiar to them, but are intrigued by Amelia and Cousin Lymon and jump at the chance to spend time with them. Likewise, Amelia abandons her safe, comfortable life of habit to take care of Lymon, who in return takes advantage of his comfortable life in the town, but ultimately pines for Marvin Macy who has been to Atlanta, a place that Lymon has never been. It is these isolated "freaks" of the story that both build a community out of a town full of other isolated people and destroy that community.

So is the heart of a southerner lonely? Was the old South, though more poetic, much more isolated than our world of communication? Is the isolation inescapable, though? Has everything we know now and the fact that almost every part of the United States is as, Everett McGill would put it "hooked up to a grid" only made people more introverted, less interested in what the world has to offer because it is all handed to us anyway? If the old South and its loneliness can't remain but the new South is losing its own identity, how can you build a community that is southern but yet not sell the southerner's soul?

These are questions I can't leave unanswered, at least not without trying to answer them, so I figure that traveling the South is the best way to find the state of the South's "heart", you could say.
I plan to journey from Austin, Texas to Columbus, Georgia and back, with stops in Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The journey is 2, 820 miles total and I'm hoping to complete it in a little less than a week. I'll keep to the idea of the community cafe by finding local hideouts to eat at along the way, and I hope to see places in all of these states that tell me about the city's culture and community, or perhaps lack thereof. That being said, I have compiled a list of elements from The Ballad of the Sad Cafe that I will be looking for in each place that I visit:

1.) Signs of the "old South"- Emphasis of preservation of historic sites, customs that have been around for ages, etc.

2.) Signs of modernization- Outside sources that either benefit a city (like Lymon) or are destructive to it (like Marvin Macy)

3.) Signs of isolation- A lack of community and/or people identifying strongly with their home.

4.) Signs of community- People who identify with each other for love of their home/culture.

5.) A local eatery- A unique restaurant where local people convene regularly

6.)* As an added challenge, I'd like to try and find a notable person in each city who, like Amelia, is part of the community but is known to be eccentric in some way. (Flannery O'Connor would call these people "freaks", but I'll be happy to find people who are only mildly strange)