North, South divide continues

The war between the states wasn't all that long ago for some folks.

It didn't occur to me until recently, when a string of Yankees vs. Rednecks incidents caught my attention.

The first involved a teen in Tarpon Springs, Fla., who was offended by the Confederate battle flags adorning fellow students' clothes and pickups. Krista Abram moved from up north and wasn't used to those kinds of displays, so she circulated a petition asking they be banned from school property. Instead, she was banned from school property after being suspended.

Vast media coverage got her back into school before the suspension was up, but the debate over symbols continues.

Then my in-laws arrived in Florida from the greater Blodgett, Mo., metropolitan region for what's becoming their bi-monthly visit. In conversation, my mother-in-law mentioned that she couldn't get her husband to vacation in Niagara Falls. "He's got a thing about Yankees," she said. "Sorry, Heidi."

Me? A Yankee? Egad! I thought moving to Southeast Missouri at the tender age of 10 and graduating from Sikeston High School formally revoked my Yankee status, but apparently not. My ancestors still hail from the Northeast, and their DNA flows through my veins.

I don't even like the Yankees baseball team, even though their spring training stadium is just a few miles from my office. I like grits.

On the other hand, my Yankee friends down here tease me about my Southern accent, so I really can't win.

The third incident: I was watching the HBO documentary "A Boy's Life" about a Mississippi youth poised between his grandmother's emotionally unstable household and foster care. Everyone in the documentary clearly hailed from the Deep South, but I understood the dialogue perfectly.

Then I glanced at the bottom of the screen and saw the subtitles. Subtitles! For people speaking English!

Clearly, the filmmakers were Yankees. I wondered if they had a Redneck-to-English dictionary with them.

When I was a kid, a story circulated in Sikeston that a local traveled to New York and a fellow subway passenger struck up a conversation with her. She couldn't understand a word he was saying.

"I'm sorry," she finally said. "But I only speak English."

A third person on the subway said, "Lady, he IS speaking English." Apparently, the chatty passenger just had a thick Northeastern accent.

I haven't spent a lot of time on the subways of New York City, but that story can't be true.

Still, the fact anyone would spread that story brings home that people from the North and South are very cognizant of their differences.

So the question is: What can we do to get along? I think we should focus on how we're the same instead of how we're different. For example, my grandfather was raised on the rough-and-tumble, Depression-era streets of Wilmington, Del. My husband's grandfather was raised in the rough-and-tumble woods of Tennessee.

At least one member of each generation of my ancestors was lost to tuberculosis. At least one generation of my husband's ancestors was lost to a tornado.

So let's put aside mean labels like "Yankee" and "Redneck" and divisive symbols, too. Let's all just get along.

But we still can make fun of each other's accents.

That's allowed.

Heidi Hall is a former managing editor of the Southeast Missourian who now lives in St. Petersburg, Fla.