This year I’ll have lived in Western North Carolina as long as I lived in the San Fernando Valley, whose area code I have tattooed in Old English on my right forearm. Whose smell of car exhaust, orange blossoms, and salt water was what I imagined would flood my system when I took my last breath. Now I don’t know. Maybe it will be the cherry-cola bubblegum of Eastern sweetshrub, and the lemon-pine of the magnolia seed pods that drop in September, and the wet, red clay that seeps through the pores of my lover’s skin.

I showed up to the South in September with the knapsack of prejudice toward it and moral superiority over it that they give you when you’re born somewhere progressive and coastal. For a while it was comforting to tell myself that the South was racist and backward, but that Los Angeles was not. That the people who lived in the South were the problem, but that I was not. But being The Arbiter on the Outside is a lonely job that sickens your soul (and turns off your boyfriend, who you’re trying to impress), and eventually I needed new work to orient me to this new place. I took to the kitchen, like my mama had taught me, and opened a book on Alex’s shelf called The Taste of Country Cooking by Miss Edna Lewis, which celebrates its 50th birthday this year. Slow down, she said. Pay attention. Make people something good to eat.

And so by springtime, with Miss Lewis’ voice in my head I laid an acre of cabbage and cucumbers, corn and squash, tomatoes, strawberries, watermelons, sunflowers, and more in a field that had seen nothing but tobacco for a hundred years. I learned to forage ramps and slather sorghum butter on biscuits, and about hot vinegar dressings and red-eye gravy, and put up pickles and blackberry jam the way she said to.

We had these rowdy neighbors that would pull up on four-by-fours where Alex was building the workshop by ten in the morning with a 12-pack of Miller Lite, to shoot shit; when I heard those engines gurgling I’d run down to hide out in the farmhouse like a bitter, jealous, little curmudgeon, peering through the window, until finally I tried bringing up a platter of tomato sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off instead. In a cooler strapped down to their four-by-four, turned out, was an ice cold mason jar of homemade tomato juice with hot peppers and garlic and onion, put up last summer and kept in their apocalypse cellar, and it tasted good on top a cold beer on a hot July morning.

By my second September, those neighbors were feeding us deer burgers and kilt salad and teaching me about chow-chow—a relish made from whatever’s left standing in the field before the first frost. Not long after that I was trading a claw foot bathtub to Jamie and Amy Ager for a pork leg to make Virginia-style country ham. And then raising chickens and ducks and pigs myself, so I could cure pork jowls in the rafters and put enough meat in the freezer to have everyone in the holler over for barbecue.

Miss Lewis’ book starts like this: “I grew up in Freetown, Virginia, a community of farming people.” “It wasn’t really a town,” she says. “The name was adopted because the first residents had all been freed from chattel slavery and they wanted to be known as a town of Free People.” Those free people included her own grandparents, who had been enslaved and made to form and lay the bricks for another man’s houses before emancipation.

The land under Freetown was first stewarded by Manahoac and Monacan peoples, who were killed, driven off, and dispossessed as English settlement spread west. Tobacco was then grown there under a system that sucked the life from Black bodies and the land they were forced to overwork. From that spoiled ground, under the same watchful sky, Freetown’s farmers planted pear trees, grew corn and strawberries, made cakes, gathered wild greens, raised their children, and buried their dead. Labor, necessity, attention, and love, turning piles of shit into fertile soil.

By the time Miss Lewis wrote The Taste of Country Cooking, she was already a successful chef in New York City, entertaining artists, actors, writers, and the sort of sophisticated city people who decide for the country what’s good, what’s bad, what’s culturally valuable. People who keep their hands clean. That’s the sort of set that I, for a long time, aspired to be welcomed by. Their impulse was then as it still is now: to reduce the South to its most repulsive caricature, flatten it out in the national imagination, judge it, blame it, condemn it, leave it behind. Instead, Miss Lewis said: Slow down. Come closer. Let me show you what I saw.

Longhand on yellow legal pads, she wrote of wild strawberries, hams smoking over hickory, sheep-shearing, fruit coming into season, and meals shared among people who depended on one another. She made visible the knowledge of Black farmers, cooks, hunters, foragers, elders, and children. What I love about this book is that she doesn’t make Freetown stand for every Black community or every Southern town. She just zooms in and renders one place with a fine enough brush so that its details come into clear focus. Attention makes distance harder to maintain. 

About three years into living with Alex in the rat-infested farmhouse on Ras Grooms Road, I had a test of faith. Was I really setting roots in the South? Had my grandparents spent their lives working assembly lines and digging sewers in Los Angeles County so that I could live in this backwards, left-behind, shameful place with such an ugly history? I put our relationship on ice and moved to New York, where I imagined the country’s ugliness might be less on display. Six months later, I came back.

Inconveniently, I love the South. I’ve set my roots here. They’re tangled underground with the poison ivy and hemlock, the black-eyed Susans and dogwoods, all the people who lived here before me and their right and wrong actions and all that rot being turned into soil. I used to get drunk on the power of pointing at the rot from a distance, as proof of my own clean hands. But the closer I get to its suffering and shame, the more clearly I see it and the more fiercely I love it and want to grow new things from it. Here, the compost pile sits out in the open sun and begs to be turned.

In the seventeen years since I moved here, I’ve learned that love and care cannot be reserved only for innocent places or innocent people. To love a place, I think, is to see it whole, tell the truth about it, and accept some responsibility for what happens next. When I first came here, I thought I had something to teach the South—lessons from the Big City, judgments to bestow. Then I opened The Taste of Country Cooking, and saw Miss Lewis standing there, holding the front door for me. In the kitchen behind her was a pile of potatoes on the counter that needed washing and peeling. Come on in, she said. Like this. I’ll show you.