Photo: Protesting the Zimmerman verdict outside CNN Center, July 14, 2013 (John Ruch/copyright 2013)
When I told people I was moving in August from Boston to Atlanta, I often got looks of admiring pity of the sort once reserved for spies going deep behind the Iron Curtain. From the body language of my friends, you would have thought I was moving next door to a Klan costume factory run by snake-handlers with guns falling out of every pocket. A bold move, but insane.
“You’re going to have culture shock,” was the most frequent piece of advice. Always said without explanation or elaboration, “culture shock” was code for straight-up Southern-phobia that pervades the Northeast. Just as conservative Southerners tend to stereotype Boston as the devil’s Swiss Army pitchfork city of Sodom, Gomorrah, Amsterdam and Soviet Moscow combined, liberal Bostonians tend to stereotype the entire South as a special anti-evolution episode of “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
Truth be told, I was pretty nervous myself. Ever since the UHaul crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, I’ve kept my eyes open for rebel flags. Total count as of today: zero. I have, however, seen three gay rights bumper stickers and a dude with interlocked male-gender symbols tattooed on his calf. Hell, I even found a freakin’ Euro laying on the sidewalk. So much for ye olde “Deliverance” jokes.
The only thing about Atlanta that strikes me as obviously retrograde is the paranoid love affair with the gated community, as if the city were on the verge of a zombie invasion or, more to the point, a slave rebellion. So it is with supreme irony that, after a bizarre housing nightmare, I have ended up living in one in the northern suburbs. Hilariously, my gated community has had a broken gate most of the time I’ve been here, and no crime wave yet.
I was pushed out of Boston by housing costs so morbidly obese that $1,700 a month for a one-bedroom is the new normal. For roughly the same price as living here behind my gate, with little swimming pools and fitness centers, I was living there like a college kid, squirreled away in a single room in a pad I shared with two other guys. The trade-off was that I got to live in a left-wing utopia of same-sex marriage and legalized pot, a thriving cultural scene, and a neighborhood that prided itself on its supposed diversity. But the diversity was going away rapidly as yuppies and neo-liberal alterna-folk who could afford those prices swarmed the place. Fact is, despite my assumptions about the purpose of those iron bars, my gated community is far more racially diverse than the hipster enclave I just abandoned. And, unlike on the universally mean streets of Boston, folks here will actually smile back and even chat a bit.
That’s been my real culture shock: Southern friendliness. The first time the guy behind the counter at the Grant Park CVS waved and shouted hello, I thought he had profiled me as a potential shoplifter and was fucking with me. But I’m not just talking about the classic Dixie mask of politeness. I mean real helpfulness. When I stopped in the downtown Holiday Inn to ask directions to the library, a young woman behind the counter not only told me—she personally walked me the full two blocks, chatting with me about western Atlanta hood life along the way. In Boston, the only way someone’s coming out from behind a counter is to toss your drunk ass into the street.
I’ve certainly encountered weirdness in Atlanta, but of the Southern Gothic rather than redneck variety. On that same library trip—and right after randomly perusing a book about Victorian madhouses—I was accosted by a woman with a British accent and crazy eyes who demanded to know why “they” had sent me to follow her.
Then there was the aforementioned housing nightmare that launched me spinning out over the Perimeter. I had what looked like a great roommate situation in East Atlanta. Only after plunking down a hefty deposit did I learn that the roomie is a registered sex offender whose place gets searched by a parole officer once a month and/or whenever he feels like it. I guess I wouldn’t mind living like a felon if I actually got to commit the felony first. Naturally, I bowed out—minus all my money.
While that disaster wreaked havoc on already fixed move plans, put my fate into the hands of an apartment broker, and left my finances in scary shape, I still feel for the guy. Why? Because his “sex offense” was consensual gay sex, or what most of the sane world calls “none of the government’s business.” In fact, the law he was convicted under was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Georgia just a year after he went to prison. The whole raw deal tells me a lot about Georgia’s propensity for borrowing laws from medieval witch-hunting handbooks, as well as how it has become a less bigoted place over the years.
Bad as that was, I made it here and I’m enjoying myself—but I know I’m in the honeymoon/adventure/"ooh-look-at-that!" phase. I’m under no illusions about Atlanta’s faults. I was walking downtown the day after the Zimmerman verdict and I watched the protest outside CNN. I talked with black folks on the street about it, from homeless guys to cops, and I get the anger and dismay. (I would have talked to white folks, too, but they were all in a hurry, presumably to get back behind some gates.) I can see the broad racial divide and severe income inequalities that are so obvious they should be boundaries on the official city map. And yet, I was able to have those conversations on the street without the inherent hostility and mistrust that pervades Boston.
I also see a city, especially in East Atlanta, doing a slower-motion version of the gentrification that has eaten up Boston like mold on a loaf of bread. I just came from a place where people will cross town to buy supposed “Fair Trade” coffee beans, but will happily kick lower-income residents of their own neighborhood to the curb if it means pumping up their own property values to ever more obscene highs. In a city that celebrates Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his dreams of racial harmony and class equality, that should be viewed as a horror story.
But I sense that politicians and the people alike here don’t automatically think that the answer to everything is making it as expensive as possible. Up here on the absurd Top End Perimeter, where blondes in Lexuses tailgate me and the mall has skyscrapers, there’s still a Walmart. Not to uphold Walmart as a shining beacon of humanity, but my grocery bill is half what it was in Boston. At my level, that’s life-altering.
Then again, I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I can’t believe Atlanta is falling for the corporate version of “pull my finger” by dumping public funds into a football stadium, and I just read that suburban Dunwoody is getting sued for allegedly trying to wipe out its lower-income minority renters.
And I have had a sense of unease—a disorientation at my lack of disorientation. It finally hit me—it’s how damn Yankee this town is, from the familiar chain stores to the accents I hear downtown and on the radio. Yeah, I had my eyes peeled for creepy Confederate nostalgia, but I was also wistfully looking for some local culture. I’m kinda disappointed that the South isn’t more, well, Southern. What the heck happened down here?
I know, I know—I’m like the guy who sits in a traffic jam wondering where all these bastards are going when the answer obviously is: the same place he is. I’m hardly the first Yankee to realize the South has better weather, a lower cost of living, and store workers who treat you like an old friend for buying toilet paper. I’m just part of the 21st century’s great southward immigration, and lower-income “creative types” like me are always the bellwethers. That means a lot of the Boston gentry will be following my tracks sooner or later.
I come from an exotic land of $3,000-a-month lofts, $300,000 parking spaces, and a shiny new Whole Foods. Its people would think old-fashioned segregation and redlining are evil, but achieve the same results even more efficiently by just pricing out the riffraff and calling that progress instead of the uglier things it also is—all while priding themselves on the ghosts of diversity in the names of streets and neighborhoods. If you think East Atlanta Village and Cabbagetown are already gentrified, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
I’m gonna have Atlanta culture shock? No, dude—I’m pretty sure I am the culture shock.