Growing up in rural Guilford County, North Carolina, poet and essayist Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers dreamed of escaping, of one day leaving behind the “cow-dotted” fields of her hometown and arriving somewhere “more enlightened.” At her high school, kids get in trouble for wearing Confederate-flag belt buckles and participate in the school’s annual, old-fashioned beauty pageant. Her grandparents, devout Southern Baptists and conservatives, own a livestock farm where the cows regularly get out and wander to neighboring properties. She admits early on, “Sometimes I get the feeling that North Carolina is entirely about the past, as if there’s nothing there that’s even real.” But what she finds once she does make her way out is that although the embarrassing cultural qualities and social mores she desperately wanted to run away from are more pronounced in the South, she’s never fully able to outrun the realities of her upbringing, the difficulties of her adolescence, the inequity of our society, or her accent.
In the 12 essays that comprise her new collection, Miss Southeast, Rogers explores the various aspects of her youth that made her feel the push to leave North Carolina in the first place and then takes us with her to the places she lands after she graduates high school: undergraduate studies at Oberlin College; graduate studies at Cornell University; teaching English at an agricultural college in Shanxi Province, China; navigating the first year of marriage with her wife, Sarah, in New Orleans; learning how to balance parenthood and a creative life in Washington, D.C. during the COVID-19 pandemic; and the highlights and challenges of living both a somewhat closeted and openly queer life in between all of it. With an extraordinary amount of sensory detail and depth woven into every single essay, Rogers’ lyric prose illuminates the ways in which her initial freedom from the “suffocating” culture of Guilford County would only be the first in a long series of battles against the often oppressive and exhausting natures of the systems and institutions that govern our lives.
While each piece creates better and more complete whole, the best essays in the collection — “Shame,” “One Person Means Alone,” “Public Swim,” “Wound Care,” “Encumber: A Brief History,” and “Ear Training” — truly showcase Rogers’ ability to weave multiple chronologies, dominating emotions, and historical and geographical information together seamlessly and effectively. One of the earlier essays in the collection and one that is mostly grounded in Guilford County before taking off to Oberlin, “Shame,” maneuvers between the story of her paternal grandparent’s lives on their farm, the sacrifices her grandmother made over and over again for her grandfather, her trying to adapt to her new life in college, and how shame is often a thing we inherit from the circumstances that surround us. She writes, “Compared to other kids at Oberlin, I often felt like a hick. I’d never bought a train ticket or eaten food cooked in a wok. […] There were fewer kids from the South at Oberlin than any other region in the United States, and from people’s reaction to my accent, it sometimes felt like I was the only one. […] At worst, my Southerness became a mark of bumpkin shame; at best, it was a quirky novelty for which I was teased.”
“One Person Means Alone” takes us along with Rogers as adjusts to life in Taigu, Shanxi Province, China — an assignment she was given because the American council who decided where to send her thought being from the South might give her some common ground with the people in this extremely rural part of northern China. Predictably, in Taigu, all of Rogers’ cultural understandings and expectations are completely upended: not only is she forced to hide her queerness for the first time in years, but she also has to learn how to be part of deeply intertwined community of people who take care of each other and are privy to witnessing some of each other’s most intimate acts of self-care, like using the bathroom or taking a shower. As she’s tested over and over again, we accompany Rogers as she fights to finally make herself comfortable enough to use the communal shower at the public pool of the university where she worked. In “Public Swim,” Rogers connects her experiences using the Stallings Gentilly public pool in New Orleans, lifeguarding at YMCA pool in North Carolina, and finding a new public pool to swim in when her and her wife move to Washington D.C. with the racist history of public pools across the U.S. and the history of codified racial segregation in the South. Rogers braids her experiences alongside academic and historical research on the topic that helps build to some of the final remarks of the essay. As she is discussing the history of the pool she finds in D.C., Rogers writes, “I want to say that the pool is for anyone; that it must be for everyone for the sake of the public. I wonder whether it’s even possible to say this without ignoring the confines of our bodies and the histories they evoke.”
“Wound Care” and “Encumber: A Brief History” are two of the shorter essays in the collection and two of the most direct meditations on the impacts of motherhood for both mothers, caretakers, and the children in their charge. “Wound Care” merges Rogers’ memories of learning about wound care from her mother, a rural nurse who had to make home visits to all of the patients in her care, with the experience of trying to take care of young girl who hurt herself in front of Rogers and her partner on her bike in Taigu. “Encumber: A Brief History” is an experimental essay that examines the etymology of the word “encumber” but is also full of brief admissions about Rogers’ feelings regarding her own parenthood. In it, she writes, “I’m pushing the stroller when a stranger calls me a mother. A word that has never felt right, maybe because I’m not the one who carried him. Or because he has no father. Or because part of me doesn’t feel female to begin with. Recently, anything feminine feels too ethereal” before confessing, “Perhaps I resist the term mother only because it admits that I’m burdened by responsibility.”
In a lot of ways, “Ear Training” feels like the natural progression from the two essays — “Wound Care” and “Encumber: A Brief History” — that precede it. Where both of those present us with a more zoomed out and opaque view of the joys and struggles of parenthood, “Ear Training” brings us right into Rogers’ unmediated experiences being the primary caregiver for her toddler son. After learning that “cheesy” curriculum of the community music class she signed her and her son up for was designed using Dalcroze Eurhythmics — “a music theory approach that involves movement, listening, and vocalization to strengthen ‘intuitive’ musicality” — she’s launched into an examination of her first experiences with this approach as a student at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. As she sails through her memories and bridges the space between them and what she’s getting out of bringing her son to the music class, the words of a former teacher help her realize that creating art free of distractions is an impossibility. “Reality” will always “bump up against the work,” she explains, and that if she got herself “into the Meredith Monk mindset, the divisions between what is art and what isn’t began to seem more artificial — maybe even antithetical — to creating.”
The collection ends with “Some Mothers,” another experimental prose piece similar to “Encumber: A Brief History.” Although many of the essays conclude on hopeful notes or in places that are moving towards hope, the collection ends showing us a different aspect of the resistance Rogers’ chronicles throughout the collection. All of her experiences, including the pains and triumphs of her childhood in Guilford County and all the pains and triumphs that succeeded it, have brought her to a new understanding of herself, her work, and her roles as a writer, daughter, partner, and parent. Now, she doesn’t worry about who she’ll be on the other side of the fight or how she’ll survive through them. Throughout her work here, she consistently proves that looking back — embracing shame and then destroying it — won’t weaken us. It’ll only make us more able to move forward and take on whatever new challenges await us as we do.
Miss Southeast by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers is out now.
NC is weird cause it really can be the worst retrograde insular stereotype of the South like Guilford, and then only two counties over is the most culturally diverse, arty, queer-friendly place. HBCUs host name change clinics, scientists run for town council, dating apps are only disappointing for queer women cause everyone’s poly, neighborhoods are dotted with Diwali and Chinese New Year decorations. I did the leave NC walkabout too and boomeranged right back, no more worldly city I’ve lived in compares to the best parts of NC.