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Envoy: Southbound
In Atlanta , there are streets named Peachtree everywhere, but there isn't an actual peach in sight. The streets downtown are wide, but not wide enough to accommodate the traffic, and the hotels are huge. The Peachtree Plaza Westin is the tallest in the western hemisphere, and when I went up its glass elevator, I rushed past the floors of three surrounding skyscrapers equally as tall. Looking at the windows shuffle down as I shot up, I felt the kind of nausea one feels when trying to focus on a road from inside a moving car, or when one watches the striations of escalator stairs collapse into the floor. Some say the South is cheaper, but at $1.75 a ride, Atlanta 's public transit costs fifty cents more than the SF Muni and only a quarter less than the New York Metro. The bars in Atlanta are just as trendy as the ones in San Francisco , maybe even a little trendier because the waitresses all have Southern accents. The neighborhood, Little Five Points, with its hand-painted signage full of swirling skulls and graffiti lettering, is Atlanta 's equivalent of San Francisco 's Haight Street . But now that Haight Street , America 's former hippie headquarters, has been invaded by the Gap and peppered with souvenir shops, Little Five Points actually looks more like the Haight depicted on souvenirs than Haight Street itself. Atlanta 's alternative stores even sell the same alternative things; candles, incense and spike-belts are in overabundance. When the beige Mercury first whipped around the corner to pick me up, the car windows were down, the music was up, and the seats were full. One of my host's best friends jumped out to help us load. Jake Ye wore faded Diesel jeans and a green vintage sweater with several deliberate slashes across the chest and down the left arm. Lifting my blue backpack from my shoulders, he paused to note my full name embroidered in white cursive across the front pouch. I cringed and ducked into the backseat. Jake sat up front with his legs propped on the dashboard, smoking a cigarette out the front window. I swore at myself for having thought my grey jeans dangerously cool that is, too cool for Atlanta to pack. In my anticipatory attempt to blend in, I ended up sticking out like a sore thumb or, quite literally, like a preppy in a pink polo. I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting my expectations were founded on assumptions so deeply rooted that I never stopped to wonder about them, never even articulated them to myself but Atlanta is a real city, a city as urban as any other. Not only as urban as any northern or coastal counterpart, it's a city recognized worldwide. Home of the 1996 Summer Olympics, Atlanta takes rank alongside London , Rome and Paris . In terms of American Olympic sites, Atlanta is on par with L.A. The one key difference: its centrality. Atlanta is the site of America 's largest airport hub; eighty-five percent of the US population lives within a two-hour flight. L.A. , a man-made oasis in the middle of the dry west, certainly can't boast the same thing. This centrality I found shocking mostly because I had decided to go to a southern city on account of its foreignness. I had never been to the South and its practices were entirely unknown to me. The South sounded more foreign than Europe , and it happened to be a much shorter flight. I was not entirely disappointed. I'm from California , a state constitutionally opposed to fast food. When people come to visit me, I take them to my old high school hangouts, usually a couple of hole-in-the-wall taquerias and an old Italian café where the cappuccinos are good and the burgundy paint is peeling off the walls. When I visited the South, my host brought me to his old high school hangouts too: five fast food chains I had never heard of. I ended up eating at Waffle House, Checkers, Krystal, Arby's, and Viking, and, to my horror, liked every single one. More startling yet: I found I liked the South. A couple days ago a friend from New York asked about my summer plans. Fishing for a reaction, I replied, All I know is that I want to live in a southern town. I don't know what the hell I want to do, but I love it down there. She smiled, nostalgia welling in her eyes. Me and my boyfriend did that two summers ago, she said. I worked in a bar, and it was the best summer I ever had. Instantly I realized the compulsion to go south wasn't unique to me. The South, with its lulling afternoons and sticky ribs, has a certain appeal to San Franciscans and New Yorkers alike. It is enticingly beautiful in Savannah , lichen hangs from the live oaks like rusted tinsel and the pace of life is something to be envied. But the Southern allure is clearly more complex. I was looking for authenticity anywhere it could be found. I wanted to see southern belles, Gullah ghosts, and, for better or worse, the specter of slavery. I'm not a political person, but in the divided political climate of our time, the desire to understand the South carried a sense of urgency, even to me. But for every stereotype confirmed there was one broken. There were Baptist churches, yes, but there were also the synagogues down the street. Although every good Charleston boy wore a button-down shirt, khaki shorts and blue Costa sunglasses like a uniform, the colleges couldn't help but draw in the Urban Outfitters and the hipsters that followed. In the South, the cultural codes for cool, if not the same, were, among the college-set, surprisingly similar. There were indie concerts and American Apparels. The Savannah College of Art and Design was producing new art to add to the pristinely preserved historical collections. Swanky, new microbreweries were edging out the local bars. But we sought out the local bars anyways, and in them found a show was still running. At the Savannah Bar and Grill, we were the only customers two San Franciscans and a New Yorker dragging our forks through gumbo when the lights were dimmed and the place took on the reddish glow of the neon Budweiser signs. A black man carried in speakers and an amp, wired them up front on the dirt floor, and then went to the bathroom. Twenty minutes later, a fat, white guitarist started strumming a Beatles cover, and a black man sitting at the picnic table beside us began drunkenly swaying from side to side. Was this the same man who had carried in the equipment? He cheered loudly when the song ended, then requested Ozzie Osborne. Ozzie Osborne! HA! I'll give you Osborne, the guitarist said, and then let his face fall slack while he spewed out some drunken drivel of a melody. The black man bowed his head and laughed reverentially. He waived a dollar bill slowly over his head throughout the next Beatle's cover, and, at the song's end, looked at the dollar remorsefully before releasing it into the tip jar. The three of us exchanged uncomfortable glances. Was this man a plant? That was the question, and as soon as we left, we got into an argument about it. The New Yorker saw a black guy willingly lampooning his race in order to get a share of the profits. He saw a man playing a twenty-first century Sambo doll. The San Franciscan, on the other hand, refused to believe that something like that could happen. As for me, the second San Franciscan, imagine a kid on a seesaw clutching a sharp stick; I, of course, oscillated wildly from side to side, clumsily stabbing in both directions. The three of us were all on edge, all afraid of being racist, or maybe more notably, of being called racist. In minutes, we were walking in silence. We all resented one another, feeling guilty, suspecting ourselves secretly accused. But does it make a difference whether it was an act? Did it not appeal to the same people either way? Down South, I felt something through the foreignness: an unsettling, psychological familiarity. Facing the question of southern prejudice would require me to confront my own northern prejudices first. The white guy was an asshole, but was it wrong to think that the black guy was a bit ridiculous, too? I don't know, and I feel uncomfortable even asking.
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