Gritted Teeth Optimism
I have to believe that this place can be better.
Please note that today’s newsletter discusses in-depth gun violence and school shootings, both personal and in the news and media. Take care of yourself if you’re not in the headspace to read about these topics.
The first time I shot a gun I was eleven years old, in riflery class at summer camp deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In my minds eye the trees loom out past the clearing and girls crowd the wooden deck, our ears plugged with foam, firing. The rifle is nearly as large as I am and I balance its weight on my shoulder, feeling the smooth wood against the crook of my neck. There is a target in front of me, paper pinned to board pinned to tree. I close one eye to focus on it and press my finger to the trigger, feeling the way the gun rocks back, jerking my body with it. It leaves me breathless, gasping for air, the noise ringing in my ears as it ricochets around me as collectively all of us—children, teenagers at best—aim, fire, and repeat.
Over the course of that summer, I collected my paper targets in the crevice next to my bunk, mailing them home to show my family. How proud of me, they say they are. What good aim I have, my eye attuned to the target.
The targets are gone now, folded or thrown away in one of the many moves I’ve made since then. But the guns are not; in this place, the guns are everywhere. Hidden in drawers at my grandparents’ house, wrapped in an old t-shirt. Attached to the hips of police officers looming outside doors. In photos of boys I’ve kissed on Facebook, dressed in camouflage and crouched down in the dirt, surrounded by the heads of deer, the bodies of pigs, smiling.
Gun culture in the South is something else. When I was younger, it made more sense, or, at least, it wasn’t something I stopped to consider. Most people I knew had guns; it was, like many other things, simply a part of life here. We didn’t think about it back then. But I find myself thinking about it all the time now, the ease and casualty with which guns infiltrated my life playing on a horrific loop, asking on repeat why why why.
I am fourteen when the woman in the pink puffer coat approaches my high school carpool line, where I stand on the street with friends, waiting for our ride. It takes us a few moments to notice her. We are standing along the outside gates of our high school and it is the first warm day in March, the sunlight beating down on us, bright and blinding. My friend leans her head back to laugh, snapping a photograph of herself. She wears sunglasses, new, taking up half her face and cut in the shape of daisies. This is the kind of happiness that feels fleeting, as if it will slip out of reach at any moment.
To this day, I don’t know if I can get the memory right. I faltered when I was asked the details by my family; I faltered when I was asked the details by federal agents; I faltered when I was asked the details by my sophomore year nonfiction writing class, where I first drafted some form of this essay, long before I knew how these stories would continue to grow and build and intertwine. It just all happened so fast.
What I remember were voices raised. Someone shouting. A glint of silver in the light. Looking up and looking over and looking down a barrel, the woman pointing the gun down at our feet, her smile crooked. Bang, I remember her whispering. Bang bang. For a moment, time stills; I am not where I am. Only moments ago we were laughing, raising up our hands to catch the sunlight.
And then, suddenly, everyone running, everyone yelling. A sea of bodies pushing over one another to enclose ourselves inside the gates. I must have been among them. I remember heavy breathing, the rush of adrenaline, and her voice inside my head, a constant humming even as I crouched behind the stairs and closed my eyes, repeating it over and over again as if doing so would take the words back: bang bang bang.
There is a photo of me as a child standing on the main road in Tweetsie Railroad, a Wild West theme park in Western North Carolina that we used to visit every summer. In the photo, I am small, standing between a plastic horse and a giant fake cannon, outfitted in a pink cowboy suit with a matching pink hat and pink cowboy boots. I am smiling, a white pleather holster attached to my waist, one hand on my hip, the other raised in the air, finger on the trigger of my fake silver gun. My mom calls out to me for the photo and I turn to her, pointing the gun. I am confident, I am untouchable. I am like the women I have seen in Southern media before: not a belle or a beauty, but another kind of power, one that makes and remakes me in the image of something that seems essential to this place. Even still, even now, I have never been able to reconcile the things I know to be true with the associations I grew up around. I understood that to be a woman in the South was to also subvert—to look meek but hold edges, to let toughness grow beneath the surface. Men knew guns, and I never wanted to find myself in a situation with one used against me. I believed that power as a woman was in doing everything the men around me did but better. I wanted to be the woman in red lipstick, a leather jacket, cowboy boots, outdrinking, outgunning, outdoing everyone I anticipated as a threat to me.
Just yesterday, I was attending my Monday afternoon class here on campus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when an alarm began sounding outside. It was a cooler day than we’ve had recently, overcast and humid, and the windows were cracked open to the green grass of the quad below. I didn’t recognize the alarm—I thought it might be something in town. We were right off Franklin Street, the north side of campus. No one said anything about the alarm, and we kept discussing the readings for the week—readings which, incidentally, were about situating our role of humans as prey in the natural world order. The fact that we are not outside a system of nature but an intrinsic part of it, a food chain that circles around and around. We eat animals; animals eat us. Death does not live in the background, but is a threat that hangs constantly in the air.
A few moments later, we all received a text, informing us that the sirens were due to an armed and dangerous person on or near campus. We shrugged and kept going with class; nearly all of us have been in this situation before. It wasn’t until later that we learned the armed and dangerous person was in fact a gunman on the campus and that shots had been fired. Nearly four hours later, and with few updates during that time, we were released from lockdown onto a campus full of police cars, helicopters, and students wandering around, unsure where to go and unsure of how this changes things. The story is still ongoing, but we know that one UNC faculty member was killed and that the suspect is in custody. No weapon has been recovered as of the time I write this.
I am so tired of writing this. I have so many stories I could offer in this narrative, so many other times I’ve come close to the devastating violence of a gun. My mother down the road from Mother Emanuel Church in my hometown of Charleston on the night Dylann Roof prayed with nine people and then shot them to death. Violent robberies near Columbia University, where I was an undergraduate, and where a student was stabbed to death my senior year of college. Gun scares as a middle school teacher in rural North Carolina, where lockdown procedures are becoming as secondhand to students as morning announcements. Shots fired in the cafeteria at the mall, where I hid in an H&M with a friend after people came running into the store, searching for safety. Just this week, three people killed in a racist hate crime in Jacksonville, Florida. It is August of the year, and we have already had over 400 mass shootings in America. It is exhausting to live this way, in constant fear.
I have spent the last ten years of my life looking for exits everywhere I go. I am on constant alert for stairwells, for windows, for ways to run. I do not know how much resiliency we all have left. I want to lock everyone I love up in the golden room where nothing can hurt them. I want to protect them from the things they use to protect themselves. I want to feel safe again in classrooms, in movie theaters, at concerts. I want to stop looking, always, for places to hide.
It is a problem across all of America, but it is a particularly rife problem in the South, which faces the highest rate of gun deaths among major regions, both rural and urban. According to the above report, “someone living in the most rural counties of South Carolina is more than three times as likely to be killed by a gunshot than someone living in the equally rural counties of New York’s Adirondacks or the impoverished rural counties facing Mexico across the lower reaches of the Rio Grande.”
The Deep South is the most deadly of large regions in America, at a rate of 15.6 gun deaths per 100,000 residents. It’s followed by Greater Appalachia, at a rate of 13.5. For context, the nationwide average is 11.4 gun deaths per 100,000 people. The numbers in the South are triple and quadruple the rate of “New Netherland", which the study defines as the greater New York region and the most densely populated part of the country, ranking in at a rate of 3.8 deaths per 100,000 residents.
These are sobering facts, though perhaps not shocking to anyone who is from here. Guns are everywhere. They haunt my memories and my dreams, my waking existence and the fears—once seemingly irrational—that now surface in every room I walk into. I cannot separate this place and its people from their existence. It seems like an uphill battle that we might never win. But by god, we have to try.
Often now, I find myself asking the same questions. Does the Southern association with guns connect to the strange South/Western influence we see on regions such as Southern Appalachia? How do we separate the need for survival and sustenance from the need to own and shoot rifles? When did we get here, and how did it get this bad? What will safety look like as we move forward in the world?
There are answers to some of these questions, but they are, of course, complicated. I fear there is no hope in this place of collective agreement, that we will never come to terms with legislation and policy, with what is best for all of us. I might be an optimist, but I am struggling to be optimistic about this.
But I refuse to lose all hope. This newsletter is founded on the principal that there is something collective and good in all of us if we are willing to meet it—and each other—where we are. My generation, who have grown up largely in the wake of 9/11 and who came of age amongst Sandy Hook and Parkland, are no strangers to violence. It has permeated our entire experience of young adulthood in America; for many of us, relation to structural violence has come to define much of our existence.
It would be impossible to separate the South from violence; this is a region marked by bloodshed and injustice. But it is also a region marked by activism and organizing, by protest and resistance.
It is not easy to change a place, but the South has long been fighting for the rights to its own story—and for the chance to change that story. I still believe in this place, and in its ability to change. I still believe that it will. I am an optimist gritting my teeth; I am a believer who knows that belief is nothing without action behind it. Without that action, the hope of change is as hollow as the thoughts and prayers offered whenever a tragedy like this occurs: useless and far too late.
For resources on the fight against gun violence, I turn to North Carolinians Against Gun Violence, Everytown, and March for Our Lives. If anyone knows of any further, Southern-specific resources, please feel free to share them below in the comments.
This is so beautifully written, thank you for everything you shared.