Why Blacks are returning to their southern roots; renowned author and poet finds peace and a new meaning in North Carolina

Ebony, April, 1990 by Maya Angelou

Why Blacks Are Returning To Their Southern Roots

STAMPS, Arkansas, is a little larger than the page upon which its name is printed, yet it looms in my thoughts wider than the Steppes of Russia or Africa's Sahara Desert. Why does a small town, a whistle stop, a red dirt burg of 5,000 souls, a hamlet I left forever over 40 years ago, weigh so heavily on my present-day 1990, big-city, internationally wise, sophisticated mind? The answer to that multi-phased question is because Stamps is located in the American South and I am an African-American. The answer to the question "Why are so many young Black people moving South today?" is that the American South sings a siren song to all Black Americans. The melody may be ignored, despised or ridiculed, but we all hear it.

After generations of separation and decades of forgetfulness, the very name brings back to our memories ancient years of pain and pleasure.

At the turn of the century many African-Americans left the South, left the Southern soul-crushing prejudice and prohibition and moved North to Chicago and New York City, West to Los Angeles and San Diego. They were drawn by the ready promise of better lives, equality, fair play and good old American four-star freedom. Their expectations were at once fulfilled and at the same time dashed to the ground and broken into shards of disappointment.

The sense of fulfillment arose from the fact that there were chances to exchange the dull drudgery of sharecrop farming for protected work under unionized agreements. Sadly, for the last 30 years those jobs have been decreasing as industry became increasingly computerized. And the atmosphere which the immigrants imagined as free of racial prejudice was found to be discriminatory in ways different from the Southern modes and possibly even more humiliating. The great writer, John Oliver Killens, has said, "Macon, Georgia, is down South. New York City is up South."

A small percentage of highly skilled and fully educated Blacks found and clung to rungs on the success ladder, but most unskilled and undereducated Black workers were spit out by the system like so many un-digestible watermelon seeds.

They began to find their lives minimalized and their selves as persons trivialized. Many members of that early band of 20th century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes; even if they were the targets of hatemongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern Whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.

They stayed, however, in big-city hovels, crowded into small tenements and flowing out to the mean and quickly criminal street. They bore and raised children who were sent South each summer to visit grandparents, third cousins, double-second cousins and extended families. Those children grew up mainly in the large Northern cities, with memories of now dead Southern summers and fish fry, Saturday barbecues and the gentle manners of Southern upbringing. These are the people who are coming to the South to live. They often find that their Southern relatives have died of have themselves been transplanted to Detroit or Cleveland, Ohio. Still they come to live in Atlanta ("Y'all like Hot Lanta?") and New Orleans, quickly learning to call the historic city by its rightful name of "N'Awlins." The returnees shop for churches with the same diligence they used to search for boutiques. What they find is the old-time religion made modern by young voices, young preachers and young music. Surrounded by the ancient healing, they find that they can come home again.

They return and find or make their places in the land of their foreparents. They find and make friends under the shade of trees their ancestors left decades earlier. Many find themselves happy, without being able to explain the emotion. I think it is simply that they feel generally important.

Southern themes will range from a generous and luscious love to a cruel and bitter hate, but no one can ever claim that the South is petty. Even in little Stamps, Arkansas, Black people walk with an air which implies, "When I walk in, they may like me or dislike me, but everybody knows I'm here."