I’ve heard that to understand the South, you must be born there. But that logic doesn’t help me much. I grew up there just as my mother and her mother did. I perfected my inflection for y’all and ain’t on sticky evenings thick with the smells of summer. I learned that Jesus is King and that this place East of the Mississippi and South of the Mason-Dixon line is, in fact, the promised land. I learned to marry young and marry well. I will defend the South and curse her. In no other place do I feel as at home or as displaced. I was born in the South but I don’t understand her and maybe never will.

I come from a place of catfish and grits, and bourbon-soft nights. A place where mama-and-them live down the road, dinner at grandma’s is at two o’clock every Sunday and most summer Saturdays are filled with event-of-the-year weddings that I am just beginning to understand. And it’s coming around that time of year again. Magnolias are blooming, sap is rising and wedding invitations are surely in the mail. But, this summer, for the first time in years, I won’t be a member of any wedding party. I have offered my last toast, hung up my die-to-match shoes and officially retired from the bridesmaid circuit. After all, a bridesmaid does have a shelf life and I, frankly, have expired.

Though I haven’t taken that final stroll out of singledom, I have taken the aisle walk five times in two years to watch my friends join in holy matrimony. There have been times I thought these unions were good and right, and times I prayed for God to give me the strength to “forever hold my peace.”

From my perch as a bridesmaid I have watched as strong Southern women left their beliefs at the church door in the name of tradition. I stood beside my college roommate as she promised to love, honor and obey in the shortest ceremony I have ever witnessed. A welcome, a song, a promise and it was over in ten minutes flat. Before the ceremony, in the church parking lot, the rest of the wedding party and I swilled moonshine out of a Mason jar because it promised to be a long day, dry reception and all. Everybody knows that in order to have a dry wedding in the South you better have a good excuse like an alcoholic father or a devout grandmother. My former roommate had neither and no one has stopped talking about it since.

That day another friend ate wedding cake off oa napkin with her fingers and promised me that at her wedding I would get a plate. And six months later, I did and all the wine I could drink at the reception. It was the hottest day on record that summer and the periwinkle floor-length gowns she had chosen for us did little to offer much relief from the heat. Makeup melted, hair wilted and the duct tape another bridesmaid used to position her size “DD” breasts into her dress lost its ability to stick. In the vestibule of the Presbyterian church Pachelbel’s Cannon in D began to play and this dear friend began to fret about her uneven breasts. I tossed my $75 “wildflower” bouquet to a groomsman and reached inside her dress to bring her breasts level to each other. She walked down the aisle two minutes later poised, adjusted and balanced. I followed, smiling, knowing some ladies sitting in the crowd would be horrified if they knew I had just felt up another woman in the house of the Lord.

I couldn’t summon any tears when the bride walked down the aisle that day. I just kept thinking that she was going to pick her new husband’s XXXL boxers off the floor for the rest of her life.

A few months later, this bride and I stood at the altar again, this time with our friend who dressed us, and eight of her other closest friends, in“sage” chiffon. We all agreed we looked like high-waisted lima beans. At the end of the night, when the bride tossed the bouquet, chiffon flew, single women scrambled and in the end someone came out with a tattered wad of flowers and a hollow wish, that she, too, could find a man.

I have been paired with escorts with names like Bubba and Moo. I have danced with bride’s fathers to “You don’t have to call me Darlin” when they’ve had too much to drink. I even had one tell me he liked my hair short because, “with hair like that, I could take you from the bath to the bed and never even get the pillow wet.”

Comments like his forced me into retirement. No more drunk fathers, no more wretched dresses, no more friends transforming themselves into different people because our culture dictated it.

Sometimes I think I have unfairly accused these women of giving in, being dependent. But then again, I’ve seen brides bend themselves in keeping with tradition. Their actions border on the ridiculous.

I know a strong, smart woman who became a born-again virgin when she got engaged. I know another who blushed at lingerie and thong underwear in front of her soon to be mother-in-law, pretending she had never danced on a bar with a bottle of Southern Comfort in her hand and a frat boy attached to her lips. I know some women who started to whisper the word f--- after having used the word for years in regular conversation. They replaced “what the f---,” “f---ing A” and “f--- me” with “my word,” “oh my,” and “please.” I know others who extended their short, short skirts past their knees and started saying things like “it’s a man’s world” as if there was nothing they could do about it. I know even more who lost the ability to talk about anything other than flatware patterns, guest lists and their new last names. Me me, me-me, went the wedding march. Ding dong went the Southern Belle.

But over the years I’ve softened a little and think maybe I should have been happier for them. Maybe, in a place where appearance is everything, they were showing respect to the place we come from and hold dear the only way they knew.

I have done the same thing in smaller ways all my life. So has every other women, Southern or not. We have all found exile where women come together in a space that’s ours like a grandmother’s kitchen or the all-girl dressing room of a church before one of our own walks down the aisle.

There aren’t many places like this left. With all that we as women have gained in our quest to be equal, maybe we’ve lost some things too. Like stories, or women-only birthings or weddings with pomp and flair. Maybe these weddings were not so much about obeying and new last names but more about girls playing dress up one last time together. Maybe they were a tribute to our home and our place. Maybe. But I never stopped to ask.

(Jennifer Savage formerly worked at newspapers in Asheville and Waynesville. She now attends graduate school in Oregon and will graduate in June. The urge to move back to the South, she says, is strong.)

 

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