southern atheist

There are various means of being an outcast in one's own life.

Perhaps you overdress to a more casual event. You say the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place--and you're dubbed a weirdo from then on out. Any action, no matter how large or small, can render a person a "freak" simply by acting against or in spite of a social norm.

Sometimes, being an outcast has nothing to do with appearance or action and everything to do with simply existing in a certain place and time.

From age four to thirteen, I attended public school in the Appalachian Mountains of northwestern North Carolina. My artist mama moved the family there from Missouri, hoping the misty mountain vistas would prove more inspirational than the rolling crop fields of the midwest.

As a very young child, I adored school; words, in particular, opened galaxies of possibility and creative release. When the school district closed for a snow day during my kindergarten year, fat tears silently slid down my face while mama tried to assuage my sorrow by offering to let me eat ice cream for breakfast. It is safe to assume that I garnered the "Perfect Attendance" award most every year. I loved school.

But in middle school, everything changed--as it does when bodies are morphing into strangers of the children we once were, and hormones make concentrating on Algebra or verb diagramming impossible. Cliques were formed, popularity ranking establishing with the blonde, athletic girls soaring to the top of the queue. At the time, I was neither blonde nor athletic, read fat fiction paperbacks on the hour-long bus ride to and from school, and ate granola and fresh vegetables in my lunch instead of the small chip bags and chocolate candies my classmates received from their mamas.

Until middle school, none of this mattered.

And until middle school, my religion--or more specifically, my lack of religion--had never been questioned.

For some reason that eludes me even today, on the first day of my sixth grade social studies class, Mrs. Bullock asked us to go around the room and tell the class where we went to church.

It was the beginning of my end.

My guts surged and heaved as each student calmly stated the name and location of their church; some even divulged the name of their pastor or reverend. Brain screaming, I considered the options. I could lie and make something up but even at almost eleven-years-old I knew Mrs. Bullock would probably be able to tell that I was lying. I have always been a terrible liar (today I joke that if I played poker, I would lose every hand). My entire emotional repertoire plays out across my features: I cannot hide anything and therefore successfully lying is a virtual impossibility.

The girl next to me drawled, "My family goes to Heritage Baptist," and the flames licking my neck and chin exploded over my entire head. It was my turn.

"I don't go to church," I mumbled, looking at my hands contorting in my lap, nails bitten to the quick.

"What?" Mrs. Bullock asked. I wasn't sure if she was shocked by what I said or simply unable to hear my quiet confession, so I paused, then repeated,

"I don't go to church."

Until that moment, I thought I loved quiet. But the silence filling the room in the next heavy seconds nearly slayed me. Without even fully understanding the rules of southern girl middle school propriety, I knew it was all over. The boy next to me went on and told everyone where his family went to church, but I could hear nothing but the howling of outcast in my pounding ears.

The following day, I considered playing sick so as not to have to face my classmates and Mrs. Bullock. But, given my aforementioned lack of falsehood capabilities, I knew this would never work. As unconventional as we were, my mama believed in the innate potential in public education and dissuaded my younger brothers and me from playing hooky.

The day sluggishly trudged through morning classes and lunch. Mrs. Bullock's class directly followed the lunch period and while nothing seemed amiss to that point in the day, as soon as I slipped into my seat, four of my classmates took turns coming over and handing me worship pamphlets from their respective churches. In homes I would never enter, my aberrant existence made its first and only appearance: My classmates went home and reported to their parents that there was some kind of weirdo freak person who did not go to church.

In many other parts of the country, and in 2021, this would never sort of thing never would have transpired. But smack in the middle of America's Bible Belt in the early 1990s was a time and place unto its own.

Word quickly spread through the narrow halls of the sixth grade corridors that I was churchless, godless, and therefore, likely irredeemable. Had I been able to convince my mama to let me switch schools, this would have been my new goal in life. My once treasured educational space became a battleground: The whispers and side glances ricocheted shrieking crossfire all around me. The head popular girl--the blondest, most athletic, meanest of all--stopped me in the hallway and demanded,

"You don't believe in God?!"

It was likely this very moment in which I learned to roll my eyes and walk away--a defense mechanism that will only get a person so far in life. But in that moment, I took back an iota of my independence and ability to embrace weirdness. I rolled my eyes, walked down the hall, and felt the tiniest smattering of triumph deep inside.

The next three years of middle school were the toughest of my academic life: The bullying escalated and that young, blonde terrorist continues to haunt my adult sleeping dreams once in awhile. Today, though, I know that being different will always be a challenge for some. It has made me stronger and more fiercely independent than I could have imagined and ultimately, I am grateful for the chance to simply be me.

~

©def, 2021

d.e. fulford is a full-time university writing instructor and author of the poetry chapbook, southern atheist: oh, honey (now available from Cathexis Northwest Press). Thank you for reading!