I come from a line of restless people. That’s not unusual in America, but it took a little while for me to figure it out.
My family is from the United Kingdom – mostly English, some Scots, some Irish. We arrived in the first century or so after Jamestown’s founding, and we didn’t stop for long anywhere. We mostly landed in Virginia and Maryland, then moved on to the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Mississippi; our sons and daughters pushed on to Arkansas, Texas, and New Mexico. If you plot their path on a map, it looks like a long, horizontal, backwards S. And that’s all before the Civil War. Since then, we’ve continued to spread out, and it would be extremely difficult to map now.
All the states I’ve mentioned are Southern. There are Northern Whartons (yep, that business school) and Southern Whartons, and I don’t think they connect much, not that I’ve seen. I am a Southerner, descended from farmers and railroad men. There’s some baggage which comes with that; I’ll get back to that another time. (How many Virginians does it take to change a lightbulb? Three – one to change the bulb, and two to talk about how fine the old bulb was.)
But for now I want to return to that matter of restlessness.
First, it’s an ugly fact that when these settlers moved, more often than not they were moving onto land recently taken from Native Americans. The Cherokee, Creek and Choctaw peoples, among others, all were steadily forced from their lands across the South, sometimes by violence, sometimes by treaties signed under pressure, often simply by the inexorable push of European settlers looking for new land. That dawned on me slowly as I looked into my family history. We forget that, long before the wars fought with Native Americans over Western lands, there were people living coast to coast on this continent (for a good read on the subject, try “The First Frontier” by Scott Weidensaul). I don’t believe I still bear responsibility, as a descendant of those who did the evicting – but I do want to acknowledge it.
The funny thing about those restless settlers is that I feel as if there’s something in the blood. When I look at my own parents, and the family I’ve made, for that matter, I see the same urge, to leave home, push on, find somewhere new. It’s not so much frontiers anymore, it’s just a willingness to go, to find a place to make your own. I don’t know why that is, but it’s there.
And yet – look at me. I came back to Virginia, without ever realizing I was completing a circle.