Do I Live in the South?

The debate always seems to rise again: Is Washington, D.C., in the South?

After the last couple Bible-belt-strangled presidential elections, which gave us Bush, I said, quote, “F**k the South” — therefore I don’t want D.C. to be in the South, because I live here now. It makes me look foolish. Did I get bamboozled? Let’s look at some disturbing facts.

Fact: It’s below the Mason-Dixon line. No one has ever questioned Mason and Dixon and their line.

Fact: There was once a slave market in Alexandria, VA, right across the Potomac.

Fact: “Tobacco is forever” in Maryland and Virginny: In Md. elevators, a sign says the penalty is not to exceed $25 for smoking or carrying a lighted tobacco product.

Fact: We’ve got palm trees and bamboo growing over here.

Fact: Pansies (the flower) can survive the whole winter here. They plant them in October!

Another suspicious sign that we might be in the South is the way a lot of people talk. So many people here in the Nation’s Seat of Power are from other places that it’s easy to forget that Southern accents are endemic once you go about 30 minutes west into Ole Virginny.

Lord knows I meet enough people even here in the District who are what I call “casually Southern.” They’re not super-into being Southern, like, there are no rebel-yell outbursts, no stars and bars. And it takes me a minute to hear their accent. Their sneaky Confederate accent.

The lovely concierge in my office building here in Georgetown, Miss Gloria, is definitely Southern. She manages to call everyone (and she knows everyone’s name) honey, darling, sweetheart, AND baby in the space of the 3-second mini-conversation she has with them as they walk by. Then the other day she added a tell-tale “y’hear?” to her have-a-good-day greeting to me. You don’t get that up north.

The sandwich of the day one day at Booeymonger (a Georgetown deli) was The DelMarVa, named for a place that straddles those three states/commonwealths (Delaware, Maryland, Virginny). I think it’s out by Chesapeake Bay. As mid-Atlantic as it gets: DelMarVa even sounds like the name of a typical woman from Baltimore.

In a crabcake version of Proust’s madeleine, a sandwich made me remember driving through DelMarVa with KP and Stinky one summer maybe 10 years ago with the windows down, playing our highway time-killing game: Whoever saw the first billboard or sign with a pun based on the supposed homonyms “sure/shore” got to hit everyone else in the car really hard.

That SHORE was fun… I “shore” can’t wait to go to the “sure” again this summer.

So, with those fond memories swirling in my head, I think I’ll go with “mid-Atlantic” over “South” as a description of where D.C. is. My affinity is with the ocean.

This debate will never end, just like the Civil War never ended for some people. I’ve seen bitter arguments among people about whether this is the South. Let’s just compromise and say D.C.’s the ambivalently Southern city, kind of a Gateway to the South. Like Tijuana is to Mexico.

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Read more SM SHRAKE at You Wanna Know What? and The Shrake-tionary.

TAGS: Booeymonger • DelMarVa • Georgetown • Marcel Proust • Ultimate Washington Insider