I’ve been meaning to write a blog post for a year and never got around to taking the picture that “says it all”. So today I Googled for it. I found the picture. It was on Flickr and the photographer had written about it. So, without further a due, consider this a guest blog post by angela/a.

This sign is at the MD/VA border on the Eastern Shore. I was shocked when I first saw it; I’ve lived in VA most of my life, but had never seen such a large public display of the flag. Guess what the opposite side of the sign says? You guessed it: The South ends here. It’s fascinating to me, b/c of my thoughts about this MidAtlantic area being an “in-between” space, and my interest in where the South begins and ends, culturally. These signs are one state down from the Mason Dixon line, but represent what many people, particularly those who live in MD & VA, think of as the dividing line. VA is “the South,” MD is not. So there is a cultural line that is different from the geographical one. When I moved to MD, I, and many people from home, thought of it as moving “up North.” Once there, I realized that many of the NYC transplants considered themselves as living “down south.” I later learned that some Northerners consider Baltimore the South and became familiar with JFK’s quote: “Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm,” which effectively captures the truth of the area’s position at a crossroads. I guess JFK thought that instead of the best of both worlds, Washington, as a Northern/Southern hybrid, did neither well. I learned that many Southern MD towns share more regional/cultural similarities with Hampton Roads than with the cities and counties closer in to the DC metro area, something I was reminded of on my recent trip to Solomons. It’s so interesting to me that MD has distanced itself so much in cultural thought and imagery from its original stance as a “southern” state, to the point where there are no markers, visual or otherwise, to remind us that the border of MD/DE and PA is what was originally defined as north and south. Yet there are (in my estimate) probably as many people who are individually wedded to the idea of the old south and its images, including this flag, in some parts of MD as in some parts of VA. Why does MD distance itself from these markers and images, while VA clings to them? Does the difference have anything to do with geography? Certainly VA’s relationship to and display of these markers is different from the Deep South’s: Though there is one business in HR that displays it, and individuals with stickers on home and cars, I have yet to see this flag fly from a government building in VA, but I saw one bigger than this fly from a state bldg. in ATL in 1994. This Mid Atlantic area is fascinating to me. Maybe that’s why I came home instead of moving farther and farther away.

- by angela/a

There was a humorous quote in the Flickr comments to Angela’s picture and words. Big Mike 42 wrote:

As my very Southern (Tennessee) nephew explained to me about the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where I live not thirty miles north of this sign: “They’re not Southern, but they are a different kind of Yankees.”

I don’t aspire to the connotation this sign [may] imply. What I do find interesting is the opinions and beliefs that get stirred up by it. Fortunately, (based on comments that Angela received) there are a lot of open, honest, inclusive, diverse people in the United States. For a lot of us, the images of “the Southern states” is a look at history and how much things have changed, as well as how much further we still have to go.

Related tangests ...   Ripe figs don't like water   Staying safe in an unsafe world   Early season figs - not as good as those in October

Posted in Eastern Shore, Virgina | Print

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Print