Rich Dirt
Sometimes, you think you’ve gotten above your raising, and then you discover you started out much higher than you thought.
I’m a high school English teacher, that idealistic career choice that leads some to assume my days are like Dead Poets Society or Finding Forrester. In reality, it’s like any other job: a lot of hard work, some long days, and occasionally a glimmer of fulfilled satisfaction.
Among the glimmers, I have the joy of teaching Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God to students who have a life of choices so different from her main character, Janie Mae Crawford. We plow slowly through the rich pages of that novel from 1937, tilling its language like fertile soil, so the students can hear its beautiful rhythm. How easily I understand its words written in dialect, how natural they feel on my tongue, shocks my students. Though you’d never know it by hearing me speak today, Hurston’s novel feels close to home: I even share a middle name with Janie. As the wise narrator says of her, “She had an inside and an outside, and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.”
Much like Janie, I have learned to split myself in two.
If you come home with me, you will not hear that lilting, melodic speech pattern of Julia Sugarbaker with her missing soft vowels and missing R’s. Where I grew up, we add R’s. To certain older people where I grew up, it was not an “idea” but an “idear,” not a pillow but a “piller.” We’ll put A’s before those present progressive -ing verbs. “That baby is a-cryin’,” or “I took off a-runnin.’” We aren’t about to do something; we are fixin’ to do it. My grandmother always said she knowed something, not she knew it. My older relatives will leave the possessives off when they tell you they “walked three mile to school ever’ day.” My great aunt, Collene, would say “hit” instead of “it.” Listening to her talk was one of my favorite sounds as a child. Maybe it wasn’t the melodious meter of old movies, but it was music all the same.
I’m sure, though it wasn’t conscious or deliberate, I absorbed the message along the way that smart people don’t talk like that. The wrong accent can give away your social class, just like bad teeth or table manners.
Most of those speech patterns have left me behind, and how that happened used to be one of the biggest mysteries of my life, but now I can trace the line. Watching videos of myself as a child, I hear it loud and clear, but only a few stubborn traces have survived. I’ll tell my kids to pick “ever which one you want” when they need to decide about something. Sometimes a “fer” will creep out instead of “for” when I’m mad or in a hurry. I do say “y’all,” of course, though that is so widespread it hardly feels Southern anymore.
The rest of my dialect appears to have floated out the window on a wind propelled by code switching, classism, higher education, and a host of other forces that were invisible to me as they shaped my language. When I was a child, our community changed so rapidly that I was surrounded by kids who didn’t speak at all like my relatives. I spent as much time reading as I did talking, so I didn’t use idioms anymore to communicate. And I’m sure, though it wasn’t conscious or deliberate, I absorbed the message along the way that smart people don’t talk like that. The wrong accent can give away your social class, just like bad teeth or table manners. Watch your mouth.
If I listen to the dominant cultural narratives, my native dialect is an obstacle to achieving respect and reaching my ambitions because it reveals a story about where I come from. And the truth is there are details of my life that would lead others outside this place to put plant me firmly in that circle of Southerners who didn’t exactly walk out of Deliverance but were a lot closer to the dirt than Scarlett O’Hara, with her dress made of draperies, ever was. I have relatives who have received government help, like WIC food vouchers and disability checks. They have stories of teenage pregnancies, arrests, and legal troubles. I’ve ridden down gravel roads in the bed of a pickup with a pile of cousins, our hair flapping in the wind, laughing with our mouths wide open and our heels stained with red clay. When I was born in Atlanta, my parents left the hospital to bring me home to their trailer. Years later, my mom had a hair shop in our basement, and I can remember when I was about thirteen, a boy at church found out and laughed so hard I thought he’d lose the Coke he was drinking.
Apparently, we were the punchline to one of Jeff Foxworthy’s “you know you’re a redneck if” jokes, and I hadn’t even known it. I never attended a wedding reception that was not in a church fellowship hall until I was nearly twenty years old. I respect people who work with their backs as much as I respect those who work with their brains because my family is full of hardworking lunch ladies, warehouse workers, and bus drivers. I was the first in my family to go to college, and, aside from scholarship money, I paid for every penny of it myself.
But no one’s history is a single story. My grandmother was the one to show me how to take care of something and tend it well. Her lessons echo with me still. All my life, my grandparents had a thriving greenhouse business, a small nursery that sold flowers and vegetables to old timers in our small community and, eventually as word spread, to Atlantans who would drive an hour north on a Saturday morning to buy what they grew.
They understood that two things could be true at once: they could love the life they’d made with what they had and love the new and different world that opened more doors to me.
I remember early spring afternoons with them, before they were busy with customers. It was still chilly outside, but the greenhouses felt warm and smelled like summer. I sat on a stool at the potting table, and my grandmother showed me how to transplant plugs to larger flats. My fingers were small enough to make the perfect sized hole in the dirt, and with her weathered and overworked hands, she’d hand me a newly germinated plant full of roots tight like a thimble to place in the center of the fresh dirt and pack the soil around it. I worked inch by inch, hardly helping at all as she hurriedly transplanted flat after flat of what would eventually become rainbows of flowers to sell. In her greenhouses, women from sprawling homes in metro Atlanta, with their Master Gardener certifications, would ask her questions from the other side of that social class barrier. Their privilege had no value in the face of dirt and water and sunshine and that nameless other skill it takes to grow something, the one some of us are lucky enough to inherit. Looking back, I see the purpose of my grandmother getting my help wasn’t to assist her, although she said that was why she’d slip a few dollar bills in my hand and say thank you. Instead, it was to teach me how things grow, how the whole world is made of what moves from seed to flower or seed to food.
As I grew, our rural community grew as well. My educational life differed greatly from the one-room schoolhouse my grandparents once attended. My elementary school sat atop a hillside where my great-grandparents’ cotton farm sat decades before, and that fact filled my grandparents with so much pride. They understood that two things could be true at once: they could love the life they’d made with what they had and love the new and different world that opened more doors to me. They wanted college for me as bad as I wanted college for myself.
As an undergrad, I made the decision to attend a private women’s college an hour from home, and there, I learned to use all the words and social cues of another tier of society, one I never learned about in my rural childhood. Like fertilizer on a flower, this new language expanded the reach of possibility for me. My childhood memories were full of climbing trees, helping my grandaddy shell peas, counting canning jars on basement shelves, and uncles with circles on their back pockets from the cans of dip they carried with them.
Many of the girls I met in college came from far different backgrounds. I had stories of pickup trucks and turnip greens, and they had tales of debutante balls and tutors. In college I received an academic education, of course, but I absorbed another kind of education as well. I learned how to hold a teacup and a conversation, how to polish silver, and how to appear as though you come from money even if you don’t. I came to understand that the value of education reaches far beyond what you learn. It’s also about what you can be and what others believe you are. When others underestimated me because of my gender, I learned to use the enormous potential and grit that lay behind my string of pearls. I had already learned that lesson because I’d been underestimated my whole life because of my social class and dialect.
My love of books became a lifeline, my love of language an engine of mobility. My childhood taught me how to mine the dirt for grit and the value of deep roots; my college years taught me how to hold my own in a room with others who didn’t share my native tongue so that finally my voice was heard for its substance and not just its cadence. And in that process, the last remaining pieces of my childhood dialect fell away. I climbed the ranks of academia, pursuing graduate school, eventually finding myself in a salaried position in a university classroom. I was a first-generation college student who ended up on an academic faculty by the time I was thirty-two, and the pace of that arc is even more dizzying when I trace the line before me. My grandfather did not receive a high school diploma because there wasn’t a high school within walking distance in his rural community, only one bus to circle the whole rural county, and he needed to work by the time he was seventeen. What were their options? My grandmother’s grandmother could read a little but not write, according to the 1910 census in her rural mountain community. The progression of my life would have been entirely unimaginable to her.
I surprised everyone, including myself, with the decision to hop off the ladder of academia and instead teach in a high school classroom where I could prioritize financial stability, stay close to home, and for once in my adult life, stop reaching endlessly for some external validation that despite being born to sleep in a trailer, I’d become something else.
But as I’ve aged, the vertical climb is less appealing. Perennials in the garden are sturdy. They weather storms and droughts because their roots stretch deep in the earth beneath them. Likewise, I’ve come to see that not all of me is visible to another’s eye. And perhaps it’s not about how high I can reach, but how I can mine the dirt under me for sustenance, reaching deeper instead of farther. Like Janie Mae Crawford, I used to feel split in two when I tried to discern where I belong, but I’ve realized this symbiosis between who I am now and where I come from is simply part of who I am. Just before I turned forty, I surprised everyone, including myself, with the decision to hop off the ladder of academia and instead teach in a high school classroom where I could prioritize financial stability, stay close to home, and for once in my adult life, stop reaching endlessly for some external validation that despite being born to sleep in a trailer, I’d become something else.
I know I’m something else, but I’m not sure what that is yet. An advanced degree, a few publications, a suburban house, and a childhood dialect long gone. But red clay runs in my blood all the same. The changes and contradictions in my life mirror the evolution of the region I love. The school I teach in today is home to over 2,200 students from too many nationalities and backgrounds to count. It is nationally recognized. Every year, I write recommendation letters to an impressive list of academic institutions and sometimes wave graduates off to Ivy League dreams. Yet I teach in a classroom that is only eleven miles from the one-room schoolhouse where my grandparents and their siblings sat in neat rows alongside a wood stove and learned to read and write.
Twenty years after my grandparents watched me graduate college, my grandmother has crossed the bridge to the other side, and my grandfather and I pore over seed catalogs together.
It’s a Sunday afternoon in January, and we flip through glossy pages showing countless varieties of squash, cucumbers, and tomatoes as we look for ginger. I ask him if he’d ever grown it before because I don’t remember it in his greenhouses or gardens, and he tells me, “No, but I reckon we can try if you have a mind to.” We finally find it at the bottom of a page, and he scrawls ginger on a yellow legal pad alongside other names. At eighty-eight years old, he still calls the supplier over the phone to order, the same way he has for decades.
We don’t share a dialect anymore, but gardening is the cornerstone of our language now, our mutual currency. Every year, he germinates seeds for me in his greenhouses and transplants them from tiny plugs to larger containers where eventually the plants’ roots will fill my palm. Then, when late spring comes, I fill my trunk with green things and drive the half hour home, where I’ll find small beds and pots in my backyard to plant them, every year carving a little more space here and there for something new to plant among my small patch of grass. His sprawling garden dwarfs my tiny effort, but the act of growing something is a ritual I never want to stop. My hands need dirt.
More than three decades after my grandmother taught me how to plant seeds and tend them, I am still learning. I will run into questions when we get buckets of rain one night and I wake to see a muddy mess or I’m worried if I added too much fertilizer. I’ll call my grandfather to ask for advice on what to do next when I find bright green cabbage worms have eaten holes in my kale leaves or I see an unexpected frost in the forecast and want to know if my lettuce is safe. And with every answer to every question, with each success and each unexpected failure in the dirt, I deposit another piece of knowledge like a coin in a piggy bank, knowing one day I will not be able to pick up the phone to call and ask him. I don’t have a trust fund, but I have this.
I have friends who have inherited tangible assets—diamond rings, river cabins, large sums of money. But my legacy lies in things I cannot count or quantify.
Inheritance, endowment, legacy. These are terms that mean something different to other people. I have friends who have inherited tangible assets—diamond rings, river cabins, large sums of money. But my legacy lies in things I cannot count or quantify. When I walk the dog along the sidewalks in my neighborhood, I glance at the flower beds around mailboxes and perched in velvet green lawns, and plant names come to me completely unbidden. I see deep orange petals surrounded by leaves that look like lily pads, and the name Nasturtium echoes in my head. The tall red blooms that reach a peak like a church steeple, Celosia. Clusters of tiny pink and yellow blooms that spread along the ground, Lantana. Deep purple globes bouncing on slender stems, Gomphrena. Names I didn’t even know I knew, but they are buried somewhere in my brain like a native tongue and erupt when my eyes land on their familiar forms.
I recognize herbs by the shape of their leaves before I am close enough to smell them. Last summer, I was hiking on a North Georgia trail and my eyes landed on wild dill along the trail’s edge. I ran my hand along its silky tendrils and held it to my nose to validate my recognition, keeping my hand there for a minute as I kept stepping over tree roots and rocks to reach the mountain’s summit. Knowing something by its name and familiar scent feels like a comfort in the wilderness, an internal compass that remains despite years or change of landscape. I cannot walk through the world without these things bubbling up from places I didn’t even know were inside me.
My inheritance is neither tangible nor quantifiable: it is, instead, infinite and eternal. Maybe I inherited my grandparents’ green thumbs like you can inherit eye color and height, or maybe a green thumb is simply passed-on knowledge. I know how to talk to plants, how to recognize their differences and their own clues about what they need.
I have lost so many markers of where I come from. My dialect, my tastes, my view of the world as something small and comfortable. But I can’t help but notice that the strongest plants in my small garden space are the native ones. They know the minerals beneath them. My Mountain Mint spreads wider every year, even when I clip it frequently to make tea. The Creeping Phlox erupts with purple flowers in April, each woven tightly like a carpet. Wild Indigo always recovers from the harshest conditions. Like me, they know the tight red clay not as an obstacle to overcome but as a place to call home.
About the author
Katie Mitchell is an English teacher who lives in suburban Atlanta with her two children. A seventh generation Southerner, she is currently at work on Homeplace, a memoir about how to find a home in yourself after people and places you love are long gone. Her essays have previously appeared in Braided Way Magazine, HerStry, Literary Mama, and Appalachian Review, among others.
Wonderful writing. You obviously have not ” left behind” that which is most important……your rearing. You should have kicked that church boy’s ass!