By Jan Rosenberg
Acknowledgements
Preface
Take me back to the place
Approach the On Ramp
Talking About Home
Home is Within, Home is Outside
Saturday in the South
This World is Not My Home
We Didn't Know: How Could We?
End Trip
A Place to Belong To: Talking About Home
Farm market sign, Marianna, Florida
Language is powerful. Sometimes we think language other than our own is more expressive. For example, Yiddish, the language once spoken by Eastern European Jews, is considered full of expressions, some of which have entered into the English language. "Oi vey!" is a popular phrases expressing exasperation. A bagel is a bagel. In German we have "kaput" and Dumkopf." Spoken, these phrases elicit strong images. Their English translations, "oh pain!" and "dumbhead" just don't sound or look right.
But interviewing people about home was an exercise in listening to and witnessing the power of the English language. People from Arkansas to Texas used specific words that elicited images, sounds, and smells. Some of these words are:
| Belonging | Grandmother | Tranquillity |
| Community | Mama | |
| Community service | Peace | |
| The Delta | Place | |
| Family | Rest | |
| Friends | Safety |
Words such as these place emotions about home in a tight order, controlled with culturally common words. Each words evokes an image and a tingling sensation recognized and accepted region-wide.
People's descriptions of home define what I call "home making." Home making is as an all permeating activity. We can feel it outside, within, around, and beyond our selves. Home making is alive and ever-changing in our lives, depending on how we see home at any given moment. In whatever manifestation, we all engage in home-making.
While in a convenience store parking lot in Lake City, Florida, I exchanged greetings with a woman who was sitting in her car. I asked her what came to her mind when she heard the word "home." "Oh, my goodness! Safety, peace, tranquillity, serenity." The words seemed to tumble out of her mouth. Just down the road in White Springs, sitting on his plant filled porch, Gerry Cox had a more philosophical view: "You know, to me, home is more of an idea than it is anything else. To me home is wherever I have my family with me and I've got work to support them.
Plowed cotton field, Mississippi Delta
"People always extend your idea of home. Home is where you're comfortable, it can be anywhere, It's just where you're comfortable being."
That comfort can be emotionally tied to the land. Sally Chow, a third generation Chinese American living in Clarksdale, Mississippi, told her 8th grade home economics class, "Home to me is the Mississippi Delta; it's where I live."
Back in Lake City, Patricia Brady shares a thought that combines Gerry Cox and Sally Chow's thoughts. She inserts a sense of home into a concept of place: "When I hear the word "home" I think of a place where you can retreat to that's actually where you feel "at home" like you're wanted or you're loved or somewhere you can come when you can't go anywhere else."
Bobby Johns
Home as a place can be isolated, but home as a concept is a bit more difficult to tie down. This fluid sense of home is our home within that is philosophical and spiritual. The physical can be injected with the home within. Bobby Johns, a Creek Indian and master woodcarver from Perdido Key, Florida, sat with me on his wooden swing nestled in his large wooded yard. He looked around the yard and told me, "My concept of home is peace, tranquillity, comfort, pleasure, and joy. I just dearly love to come home, I hate to go anywhere, it's definitely my comfort zone."
Bessie Eldreth
Bessie Eldreth, sitting in her living room surrounded by family photographs, looked at the wall as if she were looking beyond to the snow dusted Boone, North Carolina mountains: "It's not a house, it's a home. … Love and peace and happiness, and that's the way I'd have to describe my
home."
