![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/img-0333-2-6890dc7f70339.jpg\" "\\"a")
Courtesy of the author<\/p>\nIt depends on who is doing the looking. Since the cementing of the American union, the story of Alabama has lain in its being the most visible stage for the best and worst results of our democratic experiment. But while outsiders have often glanced at the state\u2014to draw a contrast, to make a point, to make an example of\u2014its true nature has rarely been understood. Alabama is too racist, too religious, too backward. It either needs outside intervention or is a lost cause. <\/p>\n
If the Deep South is the essence of the nation\u2014as Howard Zinn put it, a region that \u201cis a distillation of those traits which are the worst (and a few which are the best) in the national character\u201d\u2014that could be why, when I am outside the South, I can always predict the responses of people once I tell them I am from Alabama. <\/p>\n
I never really left the South until I graduated from high school; moving to college in New Jersey was the second time in my life I traveled by plane, the first being seven years earlier. Leaving hadn\u2019t been necessary. Every place that was important or desirable to me, from school to where we vacationed, was reachable by car, and everyone around me learned how to drive by, at the latest, the age of 15. My first car, which I raced from my high school parking lot to the mall to my house while blasting Three 6 Mafia, Trina, and OutKast on HOT 105.7, was my family\u2019s stop sign\u2013red Plymouth Voyager minivan. It was so uncool my friends found it endearing.
<\/p>\n
When I was growing up, my hometown of Montgomery was the source of what I knew about how people related to one another and what I could assume about a person from how they carried themselves, how they talked to me, and where they lived. The things I thought I knew\u2014that there was always a geographic direction in which to aspire to move, that talking to everyone regardless of their schooling or money was vital to both your spiritual and your social standing, that it mattered that you let others know your educational and material statuses with grace and that you let them know what those statuses were\u2014still felt essential when I looked back years later.<\/p>\n
Courtesy of the author<\/p>\n
Alexis Okeowo on her 4th birthday in Knoxville, Tennessee.<\/p>\n
As a child, most of my travel came about when my mom, my two younger brothers, and I followed my dad to academic conferences in cities around the region, like Baton Rouge and Biloxi and Raleigh, or when we went on weekend vacations to Atlanta, the Black southerner\u2019s version of New York City. We usually stayed in my parents\u2019 favorite hotel chain, Embassy Suites, on these trips; my parents rented a one-bedroom suite with two double beds and a pull-out couch, and we fell into a sleeping arrangement that allowed us all just enough space. Our tastes were modest, decent. We drove from Montgomery every trip, no matter how long it took.<\/p>\n
But I fantasized about indecency. After 18 years of imagining the world outside the South, I arrived on the baroquely lush campus of Princeton University in the fall of 2002. I remember walking over what felt like acres of clipped, vivid green with my family, looking up at Gothic arches. We were staying in an Embassy Suites\u2013like hotel not quite in the town of Princeton, and we had driven onto campus in our rental car to move me into my dorm. <\/p>\n
Later, I was standing in a crowd of people from my freshman class, waiting to leave a lecture hall after orientation, in front of a boy who would become my editor at the campus alternative weekly; he was talking with his friend, who would become known as the campus coke dealer, about a girl who had brought a DVR to install in her dorm room because she couldn\u2019t miss her favorite television shows while she was in class. The boys sounded amused and impressed. They mentioned the girl\u2019s skiing vacations and her boarding school, the name of which seemed to be shorthand for a good pedigree. Her name, which was Tobin, also seemed to be shorthand for the kind of taste that preferred wealth to style. I had had no idea there were even kids who wanted to venture beyond the driving radius around their homes and go to a place like boarding school. <\/p>\n
![\"alexis](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/maya-fuhr20-6890dd13b835a.jpg\" "\\"alexis")
Maya Fuhr<\/p>\n![\"Blessings](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/1754067467-9781250206220.jpg\" "\\"Blessings")
<\/a><\/p>\n