I’m a Jersey boy. I was born there, went to high school and college there, and assumed I’d spend the rest of my life there. But though I loved the people and food, the Jersey Shore summers, and short rides through the Lincoln Tunnel to Broadway shows and Madison Square Garden, I gave it all up and moved south. Very far south. I’m not alone.
According to the latest Census figures, and stories in USA Today, the Associated Press, and elsewhere, the South was the fastest growing region in America over the last decade, up 14 percent. “The center of population has moved south in the most extreme way we’ve even seen in history,” Robert Groves, director of the Census Bureau, said a few months ago.
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That migration wasn’t limited to white Yankees like me. The nation’s African American population grew 1.7 million over the last decade — and 75 percent of that growth occurred in the South, according to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. What those stories and studies failed to report were the reasons propelling that migration. The economic and cultural forces driving this migration south have been ignored by the press. And by the Obama administration
So I figured this Jersey boy who now calls Oxford, Mississippi, home could explain why. This Yankee turned good ol’ boy could explain the pull — no, the tug — of the South.
“Have you lost your mind?” is the refrain I heard over and over from friends up north when I told them the news. It was as if I’d just told them I was moving to Madagascar.
I then explained the move. I started with some humor. I explained that we have electricity in Mississippi. And indoor plumbing. We even have dentists. I told them we have the internet in Mississippi. And cable TV. I told them I travel a lot, and Memphis airport has planes, too.
I then told them about the quality of life in Oxford, and how far a dollar stretches. And the ease of doing business. When I show them pictures of my house, and get around to my property taxes, things get positively somber. On a home valued at $400,000, my tax tab is $2,000. My parents in New Jersey pay $12,000. And for a whole lot less house. On no land. When I remind friends about the pension liabilities they’ll be inheriting from the state unions, things get downright gloomy.
I then explain that my work is mostly done by the phone or internet. So where I live has little bearing on how much I earn. But it has a whole lot to do with how much I keep.
Having disposed of the economic arguments, I knew that one big question lurked: “Okay, Lee, but what’s it like living with a bunch of slow-talking, gun-toting, Bible-thumping racists?”
My friends didn’t use those exact words, but I knew it’s what they were thinking. I knew because I thought the same thing about the South before I moved here. Most of what we Yankees know about the South comes from TV and movies. Think Hee-Haw meets Mississippi Burning meets The Help and you get the picture.
But my own prejudices bore little resemblance to the reality I encountered when I moved south. I fell in love with the place. With the pace of life, for openers. Things got done, and done well, but it always seemed as if people had time for one another.
Though I’d never owned a firearm, I learned that the locals took personal protection into their own hands, knowing that a call to a county sheriff wasn’t a solid defense strategy. I also learned how much fun it was to shoot stuff, from targets to tin cans to turkeys.
The Bible thumpers proved to be more caricature than anything. The people I met didn’t impose their religion on me. They tried to live by the standards of their faith. Sometimes they did; sometimes they didn’t. But the pervasive pursuit of those standards made the South a better place to live.
This Cali boy now calls SC home. There is far more racial strife up North than there is here. People have manners. The cost of living is low. We don't have a "rush hour". It's more like a "rush half-hour."
I am a southerner from a long line of southerners and despite our good manners most of us don't want all of you Yankee and western transplants in the south. Your presence is destroying our culture, driving up the price of our real estate and proliferating the same liberal policies and attitudes that have made the north east a wasteland. The Californians fleeing the realization of their liberal fantasies have started to recreate the same destructive policies and egalitarian fantasy thinking in the states that they have sought refugee in thus recreating the fall of California across the west in states like Colorado, Arizona and Utah. You carry the disease, stay away.
I wish I thought this post was wrong because I live in the north, but I am sure it is not. The disease of liberalism is sadly contagious, and impervious to reason or historical reference. For example, why would the US want to emulate Western Europe? It defies all logic and reason. And yet we did it. And the same pattern will likely be repeated when northerners, with their enlightened views, emigrate south.
In the West we call it Californication. Lewis Grizzard, the bard of the New South, once replied to Yankees trying to turn Atlanta into whatever they left with Delta's slogan, "Delta is ready when you are."
We see so much of it here in Alaska, though not so much now that the CA economy is in the tank. You could by an island with a mansion on it in SE Alaska for the price of a forty year old thousand square foot ranch in the LA area, at least as long as it lasted. They sold out and ran from CA craziness and immediately began trying to institute the same craziness here while telling us what rubes we were for not embracing the craziness.
Amen to that. I've seen bumper stickers that read "Welcome to Nashville. Now ya'll go home." CA refugees should ponder why they left that state before they try to impose their "enlightened" policies on their new neighbors.
I am, as we say, "American by birth, Southerm by the grace of God," but I've traveled all over the country. I love visiting other places, but Im always glad to come home -- for many of the reasons listed above.
My best friend grew up in NJ too, and she has a plaque in her house that says, "I wasn't born in the South, but I got here as fast as I could!"
As a native born Southerner, may I ask one favor of our newly minted Southron neighbors? When you move down here please don't force us to adopt the same (expensive) level of county services, push for tax increases to pay for them, then complain about how it's not as cheap as it was when you got here.
Sing it brother! I have lived in the South since 1974, and also claim it as my culture! I was born in Chicago and spent my childhood there, my teenaged years were on Long Island, New York.
Long live Bible-based Christianity, Revivals, good ol' boys (Praise God I married one!), corn bread, fried chicken, grits, greens, and guns!
I grew up in and live in Chicago but spend a great deal of time in South Carolina. I am considering re-locating to SC or perhaps Texas for all of the reasons stated in this article and in CarolinaJumbo's comments. I don't even have the energy to respond to people, especially those from the northern suburbs of the most segregated city in the country, who tsk tsk the south, which they do constantly.
From Chicago too. Took the 55 south this summer so ran near the authors home and even East Alton. For me its not a matter of 'if' but when. I've been traveling the south for last decade and I'm tossed btw Savannah Ga and Natchez Ms- the latter has the edge for no other reason than Big Mama's Hot Tamales.
I was born in Nashville, TN and still live just south of Nashville in Franklin, TN where I was raised. I just have to laugh whenever I read an article like this, because I know so many transplants in our area with the same story. There are so many, that we are becoming decidedly less Southern in our culture. I even catch my own kids saying "you guys" instead of "y'all", and I have banned the phrase under penalty of 25 cents. About 18 years, I got to know a guy from Rochester, NY who moved here, and he told me about all the things in Rochester that were regulated by law - I was astounded, but have since heard similar stories from others. Since then, when Yankees and Kali-fornians move here, I greet them by saying "Welcome to America".
I was born and raised in middle Georgia and married into an Italian family from Bloomfield, NJ that moved here in 1976. While they visit their hometown at least once a year and love it as well I have come to love it, they will never go back. Their list is long as to why they love it in the South and they defend it as much as I when Yankees acost it. God blessed America, but doubly blessed us in the South.
My wife and I are Southerners. We're also Christians. We have never pushed our religion onto anyone because, as Southerners, we were raised to humbly display our Christianity through example. Failed? You betcha. We've failed and continue to have our failings, but I have always refrained from proselytizing and evangelicizing.
Despite the stereotypes portrayed in movies and television, that is how most Southerners live their lives. Yes, there are some in the South who wear their religion and devotion to Christ on their sleeves -- usually on the sleeves of their floor length dresses, but they are of the minority. A Southerner is neither afraid nor ashamed to share their belief and God and Jesus Christ, but it would be impolite to be pushy about it.
What Southerners resent are the liberals who insist on proselytizing us about the saving graces of the government. Without realizing it they are the evangelicals of oppression. This may come as a shock to many of the readers of NRO, but a lot of those people are from the north. Shocking, I know, but it is true. They often strike me as missionaries, hellbent to make the South over in their own image or the image of their one true master: centralized government.
I guess what I'm saying is that the north can send us their tired and their weary and their masses huddled under the weight of oppressive taxation and omniscient government, but check those principles that created them at the Ohio River.
Oh yeah, our stopgap for slow response time by the sheriff's department are the Browning brothers, who are only 9 and 12.
Imagine that? Northerners think that Southerners are "discriminating, Bible thumping, backwards, slow talking racists"! Puh-leesh, don't tell them differently....a whole lot of them might move to the South and change or at least impact the culture here. They also bring their pre-conceived prejudices of the South and how great it is in the North. Then, of course, why are they moving here? We have to keep reminding them that "we don't care how they do it up North".
However, they will be welcome here and soon their misgivings will be overwhelmed by the friendliness, manners and hospitality of the Southern citizens. If they should choose Texas, they will soon be as proud of this State as all the residents here.
The unfortunate truth of the matter is that most of the Yankees who move to the South bring the same political thinking that "soiled" the ground they left to their new home.
That's universal with blue state refugees who don't learn from their follies. In New Hamphire they cures the Massholes and Californicators are wrecking the rest of the west.
Great article. I moved from the Chicago area to Texas to go to college in 1977. Even that long ago, I soon realized all the stereotypes were largely incorrect. I still live in Texas, and have never looked back.
