A Stranger Goes on a Journey
Coming from Louisiana and working in Germany, an anthropologist calls both places home—and so must reckon with two dark histories.
It is said the world has only two stories: a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
I first heard this at a storytelling workshop in Ireland. In a writing exercise during this retreat, I wrote the following: “I spent most of my life wanting to leave home, then became nervous when I realized I actually had.” The prompt for this exercise is lost to my memory, but I feel the truth in this sentence during my daily life in Berlin. My accent is now a strange hodgepodge, owing to a combination of losing my Southern accent over the course of my academic career (academic speak is a special kind of neutralized accent) and living in Ireland for ten years. Many people can’t even identify me as American, much less as Southern.
I’ve developed my own rituals to help me feel connected to my roots. One of them is remembering my grandfather every time I see Marlboro Reds at the supermarket. As I look at the cartons, I can hear him saying, “Will you join me on the verandah?” We’d then walk out to his concrete slab of a porch and sit in flimsy, plastic chairs while he smoked cigarette after cigarette in the sweltering Louisiana heat. He told stories as he smoked, weaving a tapestry of Louisiana for me that I’ve carried with me ever since.
But this remembering is a private act, doing nothing towards making my roots more visible to those in my current, very far away life in Europe. I’ve been away so long now that I don’t know how much of how I behave in this life is cultural influence from Louisiana or from the life I’ve led in Ireland and Germany over the last twelve years. This all makes me wonder if, in the story of my own life, I am the person on the journey or the stranger coming to town.
In my early twenties, I moved to Belfast and began my career as an academic. After nine years in Ireland, my research of mechanisms for “dealing with the past” in societies affected by conflict and division took me to Berlin. During what was meant to be a temporary exploration of Germany’s largest city, I met my now husband and made the permanent move. I have recently come to terms with the fact that I may never move back to Louisiana.
Recently, someone asked me if I was Louisiana’s envoy sent to explore the wider world. The assumption was clear: Louisiana is detached from civilization, backwards and “exotic.”
While there are many Americans living in Europe, I am, almost without exception, the only person from Louisiana in the proverbial room. Recently, someone asked me if I was Louisiana’s envoy sent to explore the wider world. The assumption was clear: Louisiana is detached from civilization, backwards and “exotic.” As a “good” Southerner (i.e., one who decided to leave—presumably, from the Europeans’ perspective—out of disgust), I am expected to take the jokes in stride and to even participate in them myself.
If I meet this expectation, the implication is that I have absolved myself from the bad elements of the South and its dark history via some alchemy of physical and cultural distance. In these exchanges, it is always another white person (just as often American as European) asking me to denounce my home. In this performative act, I somehow deem myself worthy of being put on an imaginary list of “good white people.”
Their criticisms of racism and prejudice in the South are fair: I am just tired of hearing them from other white people living in the heart of the old colonial world. This feels like displacement of blame; as if to say, Look at all the racism going on over there. The way I see it, there is plenty of blame to go around.
In her book Learning From the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil, Susan Neiman argues that the South, and the United States as whole, should look to Germany as an example of how reckoning with a difficult past at a societal level is possible. Perhaps the most famous visible example of this is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, a series of concrete blocks of varying heights, intentionally built on uneven ground, creating a labyrinth-like structure that disorients visitors as they weave through it.
The first time I walked through this memorial, I felt dizzy and nauseous. The narrowing paths between the blocks triggered my claustrophobia, and the combination of being able to clearly hear other people walking through the monument without being able to see where they were coming from created a sense of unease. I emerged from the monument struck by this profound effect. I thought, this is how dealing with a difficult past should feel. It should leave us disoriented and nauseated at the capacity for human evil.
In 2022, Clint Smith (another Louisiana writer) traveled to Berlin to examine how the Holocaust is remembered in Germany. In his article for The Atlantic describing this trip, “Monuments to the Unthinkable,” Smith asks: “Were these monuments built for Germans to collectively remember what had been done, or a performance of contrition for the rest of the world?”
The longer I spend in Germany, the more convinced I am that it is the latter. This has become particularly true in recent months as, ironically in the name of antisemitism, Germany has silenced Jewish voices that have stood against the actions of the current Israeli government. This silencing has taken various disturbing forms, including a German bank freezing the account of the organization Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East and demanding a list of the organization’s members and their addresses.
Germany’s rigid support of Israel and silencing of voices even slightly critical of the current Israeli government’s actions is particularly egregious when considering how the nation (and Europe as a whole) is turning to the far right. The AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), a political party all too comfortable directly using Nazi rhetoric and calling for sweeping deportations that would include even some German citizens, continues to experience electoral success. Perhaps not unrelated, rallies and marches with attachments to far-right groups in recent years have not experienced the sort of crackdown that pro-Palestinian organizing has, making the German state’s claim of protecting against antisemitism ring particularly hollow.
Over the years, the sense of cultural isolation I feel as the only Louisianian in sight solidified a sense of pride in both my home state and the Deep South in general.
Over the years, the sense of cultural isolation I feel as the only Louisianian in sight solidified a sense of pride in both my home state and the Deep South in general. I’m ashamed to say this sense of pride was strengthened by my ongoing criticism of the German memory landscape. In much the same way I criticized Europeans and other Americans for speaking of racism as a Southern-only problem, a part of me (consciously or not) found solace in the fact that we were all bad white people. At least I came from a place where the white people made good food.
Knowing I had Cajun roots used to bring me comfort. After all, we were also an oppressed people, exiled from a snowy homeland in Nova Scotia in 1755 after refusing to sign an oath of allegiance to Britain, then driven South to Louisiana’s swamps. Naively, I did not realize the extent to which Cajuns were perpetrators, as well as victims, in their own right. On a recent trip home, I visited museums and memorials in Breaux Bridge, a town in the heart of Cajun country, where I learned that an estimated half of Cajuns became slaveholders.
A Stranger Comes to Town
A trip home caused me to question this pride and wonder how to reconcile a sense of love I have for my home with an awareness that it must deal with a deeply dark history affecting its present. I traveled to Louisiana for the first time in four years, and for the first time ever with my Colombian husband and his parents, to spend this past Christmas and New Year’s with my family. After the holidays, we took a road trip to show my husband and my in-laws more of the South.
While taking a break at the Atchafalaya Basin rest stop on our way to New Orleans, I scanned the racks of tourism brochures. Many of these brochures advertised former plantation homes. With some notable exceptions (for example, the Whitney Plantation, which specifically focuses on the history of enslavement in the United States and its legacy), most plantations were presented simply as pretty old houses, without much reflection on the institution of slavery that allowed for such inequitable agricultural production and wealth. I texted a German friend later that day to say, as critical as I have been of German memory culture, at least they had acknowledged what happened in the past. In the context of what I was seeing in Louisiana, that felt like at least a fair start.
After spending a week in New Orleans, we visited St. Francisville, a small South Louisiana town located on land once dominated by plantations and the wealth they provided. Whereas New Orleans feels of its own time, or outside of time entirely, St. Francisville is presented as a preserved snippet of Louisiana’s past. Nearly every home on the main street bears a historic plaque explaining who built it, or who once owned it, fitting into a collective history of ownership and decadence that once populated this part of the state. Tucked behind these historic buildings sits the West Feliciana Parish Detention Center. As I walked past this prison, I turned to look at its small yard. An incarcerated Black man looked out at the street, so still he might have been a statue.
Later that night, we had a drink in the St. Francisville Inn, located in one of the town’s historic homes. While there, I overheard a conversation between a group that seemed to have just met at the bar. My mother suggested the locals probably came to the bar every night, appraising the different visitors. Two of the visitors talked about inheriting a big historic house, saying proudly they were the fourth generation of the family to live in the house, and their children would be the fifth. They talked about the difficulty of maintaining a historic home. In an area where many historic homes are former plantations, I wondered about the implications of this conversation. Was theirs the type of home that could only function easily with free labor?
St. Francisville is only about eighteen miles from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, more commonly known as Angola. In his book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, Clint Smith describes the connection between Angola and Louisiana’s history of plantations and enslavement in no uncertain terms. An entire chapter is dedicated to Angola, explaining it was once a plantation and still operates as a farm, with the labor supplied by the inmates. Smith goes on to describe how prison labor in the United States replaced the labor of enslaved people, in the sense that cheap (almost free) labor performed by incarcerated people in many ways economically replaced enslavement.
Whether or not we are directly responsible for creating and maintaining these structures, as white people who benefit from them, we are complicit in their existence, and our own humanity suffers for this complicity.
Smith himself visited Angola, accompanied by Norris Henderson, a political activist who spent almost thirty years incarcerated in the prison. Reading his descriptions of the prison compound make the connection between mass incarceration and enslavement viscerally and tragically obvious:
It had been one thing to see Black men laboring in the fields of Angola in photographs but it was quite different to see it in person. The parallel with chattel slavery made it feel as if time was bending in on itself. There was no need for metaphor, the land made it literal.
While this issue of prison labor is still not widely talked about in the United States, this point has been extensively discussed by other writers, historians, activists, and filmmakers, such as the prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore and by Ava DuVernay in her documentary 13th. The Equal Justice Initiative’s museum in Montgomery, Alabama, The Legacy Museum, also clearly makes this connection. This is all to say, the information is there for us to absorb and try to understand, and it is our responsibility to do so. Whether or not we are directly responsible for creating and maintaining these structures, as white people who benefit from them, we are complicit in their existence, and our own humanity suffers for this complicity. Our past informs not only who we are, but also who we will be.
Part of who we are is tied into the privilege to which we are born, and it is necessary, if we truly want to transform ourselves and our societies, to address the reality of this privilege and how it relates to place. In an essay by Mississippi writer Danielle Buckingham, she discusses her own complex relationship to the South as a Black person: “It is so hard to write about home without interrogating the shame and violence you experience in that home.” For me, a white Southerner, I wonder how to write about home without confronting my own complicity and inherited responsibility, as well as the joy and connection I feel to this place.
My grandfather lost all his teeth at a young age, long before he became a father or even a husband. Almost every time I am in a private bathroom (either in my own home or someone else’s), or embarrassingly sometimes even in public bathrooms, I bare my teeth in the mirror and obsessively check the status of my teeth and gums. Because my grandfather, someone whose genetics I share, lost all his teeth, I am paranoid I will meet the same fate. Perhaps this paranoia hides a deeper fear: what else did I inherit with my white privilege? What other rot might lie within my white complicity? If my humanity is tied to Louisiana, this must include the bad as well as the good.
After dedicating most of my working life, thus far, to the question of the past and its power, I am skeptical of the wisdom of assuming the past can be “dealt with” because this implies that the past can have a clean end, rather than continuing to shape our present and even future. There is also a question of authority in this idea of “dealing with the past”: who gets to decide that the past is over?
A Person Goes on a Journey
Our visit to Louisiana furthered my anxiety over identity and belonging connected to place. While walking out of a coffee shop, a group of locals stopped my husband and me to ask if we were tourists from Europe. Similarly, in Breaux Bridge, a local man spoke to us in French and said he had assumed we were French tourists. The distance and ambiguity that comes with being a stranger to a place and to the people does, in some ways, offer a sense of comfort.
In my professional life, I am an anthropologist, which the late professor Michael H. Agar described as a “professional stranger.” Historically, this comfortable distance created a problematic process of “othering” in anthropology. This is the classic idea of an anthropologist as explorer, a man (usually) on a journey to “discover” the strange ways of native peoples far from the colonial heartlands of Europe. The all-knowing anthropologist thus became an omniscient god. Whatever they observed and whatever they interpreted it to mean were taken as facts about “strange” and faraway societies.
I wonder how much I myself fall into the protective blanket of anthropologists as distant strangers. As is still common to anthropology, all of my research thus far has been conducted in cultural contexts not my own. During trips home to Louisiana, people often ask me if I would consider working in the South. After all, the American South, like Germany, is a society that needs to face (or “deal with”) past atrocities. I am always overcome by guilt and shame in these moments. Of course, I have practical answers to these questions: Europe is where I got funding to do my research; it’s hard to change your focus a few years into academic work; I don’t have American medical insurance; I feel like a stranger to the place now.
My recent trip home caused me to ask myself a new question about why I have stayed away so long and why I haven’t engaged with my work in the South: what if the reason I stayed away is precisely because I do not feel like a stranger? In Germany or Ireland, although both of these places have become homes to me, I can rest in the comfort of not having a past or a history in the place. Doing this work in the South would ask something harder of me: I would be forced to question my own complicity.
My grandfather died during one of my trips home from Ireland. Everyone from his neighborhood, from a variety of different races and backgrounds, knocked on his door to check if my parents and I were doing okay or if we needed any help. Most of them had never met me, only knew me through stories my grandfather would tell while he chainsmoked those Marlboro Reds on his concrete porch and waited for neighbors to come pass the time with him. When I think of Louisiana at its best, I remember this time surrounding my grandfather’s death.
My grandfather wished to become both a stranger to Louisiana and a young man on a journey. After he died, my mother and I unearthed an old passport buried among worn pairs of cowboy boots, Western belt buckles, and yellowing cardboard boxes full of old ammunition. I gingerly ran my hand along the small raised letters at the top of the passport spelling out “Marshall Glen Holt.” A broken rib and color-blindness prevented him from joining the U.S. Merchant Marines, his would-be ticket to exploring a wide world. Instead, he joined a tugboat crew in South Louisiana. A Marlboro Red sat on a table with an old rotary phone: his final cigarette left unsmoked. I picked it up and thought about the world he wanted to visit, all the places I had seen myself. I wish I could tell him there was no place like New Orleans, that he had seen enough.
I found myself grasping for the metaphorical card deck of my grandfather’s stories, only to find they were no longer as readily available. It was as if they hadn’t crossed the Atlantic with me, as if they couldn’t survive outside of their local context.
I heard my grandfather’s stories so many times I used to think I could shuffle them like cards, pulling one out at will. There’s the one about a relative shooting a Ku Klux Klan member through the top of their white hood. There were the countless descriptions of New Orleans, of voodoo practitioners who would curse you, then have a colleague come along to say that, for the right price, they could remove the curse. These stories made me think of my grandfather as a living archive of the Louisiana he knew, a colorful place of a very specific time.
The longer I live outside of Louisiana, outside of the American South, and outside of the United States altogether, the harder it is for me to remember his stories in all their detail. Now in my thirties and living in Berlin, this is the first time I have ever felt deeply homesick. In the last few months, I have fully felt the profound truth in the sentence I wrote as an exercise all those years ago at the storytelling workshop. This is partially due to my recent trip back to Louisiana. Upon returning to Berlin, I found myself grasping for the metaphorical card deck of my grandfather’s stories, only to find they were no longer as readily available. It was as if they hadn’t crossed the Atlantic with me, as if they couldn’t survive outside of their local context.
In trying to remember the details in my grandfather’s stories, I realized that I also have a duty to confront my home state’s past if I want to truly love and feel a part of it. Just as it is with loving people, loving a place means loving it in its entirety, with all its contradictions and complications. But this does not mean accepting it as unchanging or making excuses for its sins.
To say it plainly, I love Louisiana. I’ve lived in a few places outside of the South: Wyoming, Galway and Belfast in Ireland, Berlin. All these places have offered me wonderful opportunities and experiences. But Louisiana is the only place that lives in my bones. For me, the meaning of life itself lives in New Orleans, or in the swamps around where I grew up, or maybe in a bowl of my mother’s gumbo. It’s out of this love that I so desperately want us to do better.
I hoped writing this essay would help me grapple with the homesickness I’ve felt since returning to Berlin. I’ve sat with it for hours, trying to untangle its difficult subject matter while feeling as though I’m only making those knots of complexity tighter. This difficulty is largely rooted in shame. These moments bring me back to people’s reactions when I tell them that I’m from the South, and I become consumed with a desire to distance myself from my region’s (and my nation’s) racist history. In other words, I am afraid of getting something wrong and outing myself as a “bad” white person.
In March of 2016, I was living with my parents in Louisiana while preparing to move back to Ireland for graduate school. One morning, I woke up to find that heavy rains had caused the lake my parents live on to rise to the edge of the house. My mom tied a kayak to the side of the house in case the water rose more and we needed to escape. We moved important things to the attic. A neighbor, of whom I had never been particularly fond, asked if we could paddle out in our kayak to secure his boat, which had become loose in the rising water. I initially refused, saying I didn’t understand why we should go out in the flood waters to help someone like him. At that moment, my mom said something to me I have carried as a life lesson since: “You do things for people because of who you are, not because of who they are.”
The constant floods and ever-present danger they represent are regular reminders of Louisiana’s precarity regarding the climate. Living in Europe, I sometimes feel as though I’ve escaped to higher ground. In Germany, where natural disasters are rare, workers’ rights are very firm, and healthcare is relatively affordable, it can be easier to forget that both climate change and a dark history threatening to rear its ugly head once again are also real threats here.
I’ve seen too often, in both the South and Germany, how shame about the past can become silence.
This feeling of living on higher ground can be a type of salvation, but it is also isolation. Yes, I have left behind hurricanes, tornados, flash floods, and annoying people in the surrounding community. I now live in an apartment building with more neighbors than I could’ve imagined possible when I was growing up. But we only say hi to each other inside the building (never if we bump into one another on the street), and we never ask each other for help.
A combination of the effects of climate change and wetland destruction due to, in large part, the oil and gas industry means that Louisiana is slowly drowning. The classic boot shape still present on our maps is no longer a reality, as much of the bottom of the state is already underwater. Like many Louisianians with stories of Cajun roots and family members forced to lose their French, I feel a deep connection to this drowning land. If Louisiana were saved, I would feel saved along with it, because the very essence of my humanity is rooted in this place. But drowning is not the only existential threat Louisiana faces. Our past is a poison, choking out what is best about us.
Recently, my husband and I read Octavia Butler’s masterpiece Kindred for a book club hosted by an English-language bookstore in Berlin. Kindred is a work of speculative fiction in which the main character, a Black woman, time travels from 1970s California to a plantation in nineteenth century Maryland. During the club’s discussion, a white European person commented on their inability to read certain passages due to the brutality described. On our walk home, my husband said that white people always have the option to close the book, to ignore the brutality of the racist past as well as current racist structures that do not affect us.
Over the next few days, as I finished writing this essay, I wondered how often I have been guilty of “closing the book.” I journeyed to and made my home in a place where the anonymity of being a stranger granted me the freedom to look away from my nation’s, and the South’s, past. My Cajun ancestors made Louisiana into a new homeland, but who had they displaced and oppressed in doing so? My family’s survival depended on these ancestors finding a new home. In some ways, my existence depends on someone else’s displacement and oppression.
To be honest, I still don’t know what to do with this uneasy knowledge. But I’ve seen too often, in both the South and Germany, how shame about the past can become silence. As this silence grows, we let ourselves become complicit in inequitable systems, ironically for the supposed sake of not repeating the mistakes and crimes of our ancestors. Instead, I hope that, as white people, we can confront this past and help build the type of society that allows for equal human dignity.
About the author
Laney Lenox is an anthropologist, researcher and writer living in Berlin, Germany. Her writing has been featured in RTÉ Brainstorm, the Anarchist Studies blog, Burningwood Literary Journal, and elsewhere. Her work can also be found on Substack.