26
2013
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 22
Reflections
of Accidental Citizenof the “ an
by Nicole Nolan Sidhu
New South”
w
hen I first moved to Greenville, North Carolina ten years ago after accepting a job as an English professor at East Carolina University, my direct experience of the Southern United States amounted to precisely nothing. I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada and although I had attended graduate school in New Jersey, I had never been south of Washington, DC (unless you count the winter trips to south Florida that are the hallmark of many a Canadian childhood). North Carolina was unfamiliar, but I didn’t care. I had a job in an academic market where only a third of PhDs find tenure-track work. Greenville was offering me a paycheck when no one else was. That seemed like a pretty likeable feature of the place. I packed my car and headed south on I-95.
Daily Reflector Image Collection (Collection 741), East Carolina Manuscript Collection, Special Collections Department, J.Y. Joyner Library, ECU, Greenville, NC
My friends from Canada and the American Northeast were horrified, regarding my southern migration with something akin to the feelings Jane Eyre had when St. John Rivers departed on his missionary journey to India. There was no doubt in their minds that I was going to a barbaric locale with mores alien to the civilized ways of Canada and the cities of the American Northeast. Like most Canadians – and, I would venture to say, many Americans – I derived my ideas of the American South primarily from books, television, and movies. A major source of ideas about small-town Southern life for Canadians is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel that I read in ninth grade in the 1980s and that is still widely taught in Canadian high schools. There was also The Andy Griffith Show, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Gone with the Wind, a work well known to Canadians in both book and movie form. Then there was the popular film Deliverance, with its unkempt, violent, inbred hillbillies. If pressed ten years ago to imagine life in a small town in North Carolina, I probably would have come up with a patchwork of notions pieced together from these works: warm weather, a slow
above Evans Street in downtown Greenville, July 1960 (left) and Feb. 1966 (right)
top right The original Hardee’s, located on 14th St. near Charles Blvd., in Greenville, NC, Sept. 1960
Nicole Nolan Sidhu is as Associate Professor in the English Department at ECU. She teaches Medieval Literature. Her current book project, “Indecent Exposure,” examines the function of obscene comedy in Middle English literature.