Susie Paine - Selected Writings

     They disgusted me, these Northerners in their beautiful dresses and handsome tuxedos, dancing the night away on the rubble of the best civilization in the world, barring Rome, of course: the South. I could feel the loss and pain of this place deep in my throat, and I knew that these Northerners were trying to erase the death that took place on this site with their pretty parties, their colored lights, their badly made punch, and their half-revealed smiles. They smiled and chattered as if they would break down if they stopped. I was disgusted by them, and I would never forgive what they had done to my country. They weren't my country, and I refused to respect the North. I could feel my lips curl and my hands clench. I almost retched, remembering my father's body in its pine box, coming home the day my mother died.

     I closed my eyes and imagined what this building had been like before the War, the single most important event of my life, and I hadn't even been alive at the time. The warehouse seemed to seep sorrow, and the once proud stone walls were nicked and gashed in places. The paint had worn off the walls in most places, leaving strange pinkish patches. The walls were also partially encrusted with mold nearer to the ceiling. The Yankees had through this would be a good place for an All Hallows' Ball, but the mold would probably kill them. Good riddance. The floor had many depressions in it, at least around the edges, where soldiers had lain to die. The ceiling was drooping dangerously and it seemed like it would collapse any minute, a circumstance I would gladly accept if it killed these Yankees, and the Negros they had elevated to their level. The building seemed to seep guilt, pain, suffering, sorrow, and hatred.

     Along the pink-paint-spotted, mold-stained walls were the noble people who lived here, the Southerners, the only redeeming grace of America, the only reason this country was not an anarchy. The Yankees had managed to exclude the hosts form their own party. My countrymen stood in clusters near the walls, very visually different from the Yanks. I could see what the Yanks saw from this angle, the visual deformities of each person, the protruding foreheads, hunched backs, crooked noses, half-closed eyes, and gaping mouths. I could see why the Yanks were disgusted, but I knew why God had cursed the Southerners with those deformities. It was because God would not want anyone to be perfect. These people were kind, generous, politically-minded, and just generally upstanding citizens. They each did what their country asked of them without any complaint.

     The stark contrast between the Southerners and Yankees was evident as I turned back to the center of the room. The Yanks were all glamorous people who did not have a kind bone in their bodies. Their beautiful outsides hid ugly insides and horrible manners. They were mean, nasty, bad to the bone, and freedom-stealing heathens. I was ashamed to say that I looked like one of them. I was the only beautiful Southerner, but I knew that I was an ugly person inside. I knew that I needed to let the South take back their land, and end the horror of Northern oppression. I could fight with my people and make their lives the way they ought to be, the way they used to. I was not afraid of the consequences, but I was not sure how to accomplish my plan.

     Well, it was my parents' plan. I was just the last one alive. My parents had died, years ago, in the riots after the war. I had been there when my mother fell, her scarlet blood spreading across her mint green dress, her voice dying for the last time. Her shouts and screams of pain were drowned out by the crowd. Only I truly witnessed her death. My father had died two days earlier, impaled on the bayonets of the Yankees; his body came home in a box, broken beyond repair the very day my mother died. I had to drag her body home through streets already filled with blood. That was the day I found my parents' plan to kill the Yankees. The papers torn and tattered, spotted with blood, they held my future. The only one I could have. Since then, I have done nothing that has not been for the plan. My parents are still living through me, though they are dead. I know that only too well.

     "Hello, pretty girl," a voice from behind me said. I whirled, moving quickly, whacking the Yank with my skirt. "You look beautiful. Care to dance?"

     "Not with a Yankee, I despise you. All you have is blackened souls and a misplaced confidence that the Negros will treat you well when you elevate them to your level. When you let dogs rule you, you will become a dog. I will not bow to you, or any other Yankee." My resolve was strengthened by the memory of my mother's open, blank eyes as I dragged her over blood-stained cobblestones.

     "How can your people still despise half of their country? The War was forty years ago."

     "America is not my country." And it never will be.

     "It is, even if you don't like it. There's nothing you can do about that."

     "I can move to England. I don't have to put up with presumptuous self=obsessed dogs like you Yankees. This world was not meant for you to change. That right is reserved only for God. You are all ugly inside. Have you ever asked why you look so different from Southerners? It's because you have ugly insides and they have beautiful insides. Do you not understand how God decides these things?"

     "Why do you hate the North?"

     "Because you eliminated the only way of life I believe in. Because you killed everything I've ever loved. Because you took everything my father owned, including his life. Because you made my mother a widow, a broken widow. Because you made me an orphan, a broken orphan who had nothing, except an aunt who hated me. Because I remember my mother's blood on the cobblestones and the stench of my father's rotting body in a pine box my aunt refused to bury because she had loved him when they were children, but her sister married him instead. Because you drove my aunt insane, more insane than she already was. Because you made sure that the only feelings she had for me were hate. Because you made me fight to be where I am. Because you made so many people fight for what they are, what they believe in, what they have, and what they want. Because the South used to be so amazing and has been crushed in the dust. Because I am standing her in this room, surrounded with the memory of the country this used to be, as well as the reality of what it is now. You reduced half of 'your' country to a mess in the dirt and you didn't even have the common decency to admit your mistake. I hate the North because it made sure I would never know love. All I know is bitterness and hatred, and you are why. I cannot accept you because you could not accept that not all the people in the world agreed with you."

     I stormed off then, walking through the warm, humid, black air. I just wanted to run away from the too-bright lights of the warehouse, the overly loud band, the hot atmosphere, the beautifully ugly Yankees, with their too bright dresses and their too presumptuous attitudes. I wanted to run away from the crumbling walls, the dead soldier floor, the caving roof, the sad mold stains, the ugly beauty of the Southerners with their sad looks, their drawn faces, and their silent disapproval. I wanted to run away from the memories, the memories of the world that had been destroyed, of the beautiful fairs and the amazing balls, of happy people dancing the night away and weddings held in opalescent splendor, of the smiles, the laughter and the conversations of the people who had stayed here, who had lived here, who had lost all they had with the war. I needed to run away from the collision of two separate worlds, a delayed collision that would tear apart all caught between. I knew that there was no way the party could end well, and I would only end up being hurt if I stayed.

     I ended up in my mother's garden, or what used to be her garden. It was still beautiful, still perfectly cultured, still growing the way she would have wanted it to, but it was owned by a Yankee now. I knew that there was not a way I could relive my childhood here, but I had to try. I missed my mother, even though I barely knew. I felt that I had romanticized here because I had so hated living with my brother. I wanted a mother. That was why I hated Yankees: they had deprived me of having a mother. I found the old stone bench in the middle of the clump of trees near the back of the garden. I lay down on the lonely bench, abandoned in a field of weeds, and stared at the black sky, wishing for God to send me a sign of why he had seen fit to give me this horrible life. I was ashamed of myself because I was beginning to lose faith in God. Why would he make me go through such punishment? I was thinking that he had abandoned me.

     Then, he did send me a sign. He sent me a sign in this dark garden, full of dying plants, finally becoming part of the dirt my mother had pried them from years before I was born. He had meant for me to have a better life, but all these other people were changing His plan. Humans were all base and needy. No human was perfect, in fact, no human was good. All we were was an accident. He had never meant for such bloodthirsty and horrible beings to be created, but once we were, he still had to care for us. He still cared even though we were awful. I was upset that He had not struck every human from the Earth, but I accepted what he had done. I closed my eyes and felt the cold seep into my bones.