When, in high school, I decided
to attend the University of Scranton, most everyone shook their
head. Most everyone still shakes their head when they hear I am
from the South; it seems I never make choices the majority find
sensible, but this doesn’t bother me because the university is my
home now. The first time I visited, however, I thought the
science building (where I, as a biology major, would spend most of my
time) looked stale and forgotten by technology. Loyola was built
in 1956 and renovated in 1986, so everything about it is
brown—the floors are a multi-tinted mosaic of flat brown stones,
the walls are a creamy brown, even the exterior is a yellow-brown
brick. But now I don’t even notice what Loyola looks like;
I spend so much time there that it has become my “second
home.” Instead, I take note of the professors’
intense voices as they discuss some aspect of their research in the
hallways, the small smile my chemistry lab teaching assistant gets when
he explains how an experiment works to us, and the rambling excitement
of my biology lab professor as she explains why the anatomy of a squid
is so fascinating to her. What is most noticeable to me, though,
is how I feel in Loyola. I love the ecstasy rush I get when I
suddenly, finally understand some life function or process.
Because of my
own enthusiasm and that of everyone else around me, I did not think
twice about the celebration being held in Loyola on February 12.
February 12, 2009 was Darwin’s two-hundredth birthday, and Dr.
Voltzow, one of the biology professors, hosted a small party to
celebrate the occasion. A grinning pastel chalk dinosaur
exclaimed, “Mmm… cake!” on the sidewalk outside
Loyola and bright paper footprints led the way to the second floor
biology stockroom. On the dull, pitch-black counter of the
stockroom was a lottery for a free hardback copy of
The Origin of Species.
Next to the counter was a table with the cake; it showed the slow
unfurling of the human species from the hunched ape to the modern Man.
My friends and
I scribbled our names and cell numbers on folded colored paper for the
lottery and then helped ourselves to a slice of cake. It was
heavily-iced and left a distinct sugary coat on my tongue.
Sufficiently sugared up, we decided to leave Loyola for our last
classes of the day. As we walked down the stairs, we glanced at
the posters Dr. Voltzow had tacked on the walls between the lecture
halls and the stairwells; each one had a picture of Darwin and an
announcement of the celebration. On the ground floor we saw
something different; a little slip of paper was tacked over
Darwin’s face. In tiny font, as if the perpetrator was
afraid of his own crime, was Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God
created the Heavens and the earth.”
“Hey! What idiot put this here?” demanded Abbe, one
of my louder friends. “Think we should throw it away or
just move it over?”
Her hand wavered over the tack as she looked to each of us, finally
settling on me. I knew she wanted my opinion, knew she would take
my opinion more seriously than anyone else’s, but I was too
shocked. I had not expected such an oppressive gesture in my
beloved second home, and I was angry and hurt by it. But
something held me back from telling her to rip the strip of paper off
the wall. I was thinking back, remembering my childhood in the
South where the same sentiment—if not as rudely blunt—was
prevalent.
* * *
I spent my
childhood in the
tractor-pulling-fried-food-eating-BBQ-competing-Civil-War-
reminiscing small Southern town of Shelby, North Carolina. Shelby
is one of those towns that out-of-towners don’t understand
because even those, such as my family, who have put roots there for
some years have a hard time fathoming the logic of the locals.
Like many Southern towns and cities, Shelby has not changed much beyond
the exterior since the Civil War. The famed Southern hospitality
is very real, but the outsider-resenting sentiment concentrated in
Southerners since the glory days of the carpetbagger has thinned in
their veins as slowly as the summer humidity finally turns to winter
cool.
Southern charm
is beguiling to those on the outside; it can easily evoke visions of
flippantly flirting ladies and chivalrous gentlemen, but there is a
strong spine running throughout the South. This spine is the
Bible Belt, and North Carolina is nestled comfortably in it.
Shelby’s population is predominately Southern Baptist, a religion
where alcohol is still frequently viewed as a forbidden fruit of
Satan. In fact, in elementary school I was once accused of having
alcoholic parents because I brought my lunch one day in a paper bag
with the name of a winery on it. Even today, you would have to
look to the youngest, most urban generation for any public acceptance
of alcohol. Shelby’s young hide their beer breath behind
frequently popped mints and nervous giggles.
Growing up in
this ultra-conservative environment, I knew there were some subjects
better left unmentioned. One such subject was Darwin’s
theory of evolution, for if anything could stir Southern evangelical
blood, it was evolution. This quality of Shelby’s made it
difficult for me to openly question religion because, even though I am
politically conservative, I am also very science-minded and
logical. Afraid to ask the questions I wanted to an adult who I
feared would be angry with my doubt, I relied on someone who I thought
was a more understanding and patient source. All of my questions
went to my best friend, Rebecca.
Rebecca has
one of those faces that echo the sweetness of childhood. She
listens mostly to Christian rock, feels most comfortable when she is
with children, and studies music and education at Gardner-Webb, a small
Southern Baptist university in Shelby. We became good friends
when, after my family moved to Shelby from New Jersey, we happened to
attend the same daycare. Our daycare assistants always placed us
together during playtime and our parents, realizing how well we got
along, kept us together even when we had to switch daycares a few years
later (due to a tornado, which blew the roof off the building).
As we grew older we became even closer friends partly because I was too
shy and weird to make very many other friends and she, as an only
child, got constant attention from me. Mostly, however, we became
closer because we inherently understood each other’s
quirks. For example, she knew that by persistently tickling me I
could be angered out of one of my shy, quiet spells, and I knew to pay
extra attention to everything because Rebecca was so scatterbrained she
would forget things almost immediately after being told about
them. Even after I moved from Shelby to Salisbury, North Carolina
in eighth grade, we stayed constant and close friends.
It was to
Rebecca that, as a young girl, I voiced my thoughts on the Bible and
evolution, she held the Good Book and I the vocal chords of every
dissenter in history. It was to her that I first argued the
legitimacy of evolution, albeit in very childish words. We hashed
our opinions back and forth, each of us trying to convince the other
who was right. One such conversation arose after I posed the
question of dinosaurs to her. My question, complete with an
ah-ha-see-if-you-can-answer-this-one tone of voice, went something like
this,
“If God
created people on the sixth day, how come we have dinosaur
fossils? They’re not in the Bible!”
Like any good
Southern Baptist, Rebecca knew every Bible story almost since birth, as
if the knowledge somehow passed from mother to child after
conception. Determined to answer me, she hunted down her
children’s Bible (she was always misplacing things), and we swung
in the summer heat on her front porch swing, pouring over Revelation
trying to find the passage she was looking for. Confused bumble
bees flew around our heads and tickled the backs of our knees as they
mistook the sweat in the folds of our skin as their precious
nectar. As Rebecca talked, I gently shooed a fuzzy bee away; it
buzzed angrily around my ear before finally flying away for good.
“… see? They talk about dragons in the Bible.
Dragons are like dinosaurs.”
“Uh, so?”
“So,
don’t people imagine things from what they already know? I
bet when dinosaurs were around we were scared of them, so we made them
into dragons for our stories!”
Rebecca was proud of her logic, so I didn’t inquire
further. I just could not believe that humans and dinosaurs
existed at the same time; dinosaurs were huge and powerful and would
have easily eaten all the rock-throwing humans.
“Well…” I said, the indecision obvious in my
tone. But I shrugged my shoulders, letting her win the
argument. “I guess you’re right. I’ll
race you to that fence there!”
Another such
conversation took place in the spring of the following year. By
that time I had grown a bit brazen in my questioning of the Bible; I
had left ancient history behind and was questioning the
here-and-now. This particular day we sat in the screened-in porch
of my house, eating an after school snack of Trix yogurt. This
was my favorite snack because each container had two different colors
of yogurt in it. I liked to make believe that I was a great
artist, and would mix the two colors in varying amounts in the quest
for the perfect shade of purple or green or orange; the resulting
color, I imagined, would be inspiration for every painter who just
couldn’t make their sunsets and pastures look perfect. And
I, of course, would be the famous creator.
Rebecca had
already finished her snack and was now humming to herself and tapping
her foot in time on the cement floor. There was a small, clean
circle where her foot would hit the ground; everywhere else was coated
in a layer of yellow pollen. Each time she struck the floor
pollen dust would swirl in the air and settle again. The toe of
her once-white Keds was now the palest yellow. I was still
playing creator in the yogurt with the tip of my spoon when a thought
came to me.
“I have a question,” I announced.
Rebecca stopped humming and tapping, and—straightening out of her
slouch—focused on my face with interest like she already knew we
were going to be having a discussion about something.
“What’s the question?”
“How do
we have white people and black people and Asian people and… you
know, how is everyone different?”
“Well,
the Bible says that Adam and Eve only have sons,
so…” Rebecca paused, thinking. “I think
that Adam and Eve are in the Bible because they were first, but God
probably created other people all over the earth.”
“I
don’t get it. Why would he make them different colors from
us?”
“I
dunno. But Africa is really hot, so God probably made their skin
dark so they wouldn’t get sunburned. We don’t need
dark skin though because our families are from Europe.
Europe’s pretty cold, I guess.”
“Aw, but
that isn’t fair,” I whined. Why couldn’t God
have blessed me with built-in sunscreen? “I still get
sunburned. I don’t think that’s the answer.”
Rebecca didn’t like it when I got sulky, so she closed the discussion with THE UNARGUABLE ANSWER:
“Well, God is God. He can do whatever He wants.”
“This
stuff makes no sense,” I proclaimed with a large sigh.
But Rebecca ignored me, knowing I was still pouting. She slouched
back into her chair and started humming and tapping again. I was
left to occupy myself with my unsatisfied mood and colored yogurt until
my mother came out (as she always did) to yell at us for just sitting
around doing nothing.
As far as
Rebecca and I are concerned, our days of trying to convert the other
are over; we now stand a respectful distance from each other’s
beliefs. We have both grown and matured enough to almost meet in
the middle. She has come to the conclusion that Man cannot
progress without science (an accomplishment for the girl who was once
convinced that the school systems, which are required to teach
evolution, were condemning her to Hell), and I have come to the
conclusion that religion is necessary to Man because it helps provide
distinctions between right and wrong.
Even if I
never argued evolution to anyone in Shelby but my friend, I still could
not escape the Southern Bible Belt perspective of Darwin—that he
was an atheist who was out to destroy religion. Darwin and
evolution is hard for Southern Baptists to swallow because they view
everything in the Bible as historically accurate; for them, there are
no symbols or metaphors. It would be near impossible, then, for
any Southern Baptist to retain their religious beliefs and accept that
humans have evolved through the ages from another human-like
species.
Most
Southerners, however, would never come right out and announce their
opinion of Darwin. Southern hospitality prevents all but the most
crude and uncivilized from ever directly stating their opinion if they
suspect that the opinion might offend the person they are talking
to. Only when that person is gone will the talk suddenly begin to
buzz. It is more acceptable for a Southerner to imply their
opinion through their actions and daily habits. For example,
churches tend to be the center of social life in small towns and thus
have more influence on people. It is not unusual for the general
avoidance of evolution or the declaration that evolution is heretical
to make churchgoers wary of Darwin. For someone who was raised
within a church in the South, it is difficult to break away from the
fold and declare any support of Darwin. Such an action would
lower your public acceptance, heighten the gossip, and leave you
wondering at the disappointed, guarded look that people have when they
talk to you. Few are willing to jump out of such a socially
acceptable wagon into the lonelier one Darwin holds in small Southern
towns, and only some (such as myself) are comfortable straddling both
ideas. That fear, I have always thought, was the saddest part
about the deep traditionalism in the South—that someone might be
unable to express their opinions because they are afraid of what people
might say or think of them, so much that they shy away from even
educating themselves on the subject.
* * *
“Well?” demanded Abbe, who was still staring at me.
“What should I do with this?”
“Just
move it over,” I said, still feeling oppressed by the paper but
also remembering that the person who tacked it there probably felt as
strongly about Genesis as I about science.
She removed
the tack and placed it on the side of the poster. My friends made
their way out of Loyola, but I took one more look at the poster and
strip of paper. Darwin and Genesis both stood out, and I felt
much better putting the two—science and religion, progress and
morality—next to each other.