At the end of Thomas Wolfe’s novel “You Can’t Go Home Again,” the protagonist George Webber, realized, You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood…. back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame.. back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory… Yet generations of Americans have longed to go home, either to their actual childhood homes or to metaphorical homes located somewhere in the past…
Susan J. Matt
, writing in The Journal of American History, September 2007
Ever since reading “Look Homeward Angel” when I was an English major at the University of New Orleans many years ago in 1972, I have, on occasion, recalled the impressions his work made on me, and in particular, my concept of “home.”
I grew up in New Orleans, and, unlike so many people there, I could not wait to finish college and leave the city for good, despite all the fascinating and dreamlike qualities of the place.
Decades later, however, and especially since the awful images of the devastation wreaked on the city by Hurricane Katrina, and the great flood it brought, I have thought about returning to visit, to retrace my steps, paths, explore the home streets and sidewalks, trees, backyards, stores, and landmarks that decades ago in my youth were so much a part of me that I could not even imagine living anywhere else, even though from an early age I knew the city of my birth would not be my permanent home.
With Google Maps and Streetview, I can virtually drive down streets of my old neighborhoods, and have so many memories triggered. It’s better than nothing since, as I have said, I don’t think I’ll ever go back for an in-person, physical visit. I’m 74, I’ve been retired eight years, I’m often tired now, and I don’t have any desire to travel anywhere, not even to my fabled hometown. I haven’t been back since 1994, and that visit holds horrible memories of a really bad time when I was out of work and struggling with long-term depression. Bad associations. I wasn’t in my right mind then. I never should have gone on that trip. I won’t go into more details.
Suffice it to say, time has somewhat softened the edges of that unfortunate visit in 1994. Thirty-two years is a lot of time.
Now having mellowed and long ago found my true “dwelling place” in life, I am like so many people who are insistently drawn to their hometowns, to their own familiar landmarks, street scenes, smells, sights, ambience and deep-rooted sense of place that we cling to, no matter where we live, work and are anchored in the present.
I used to peruse the Sunday New Orleans newspaper, “The Times-Picayune,” at the local library, which I read most of my young life. Now it’s a Web site called Nola.com. I occasionally read online articles about New Orleans which pop up on the Internet because it is such a fascinating city with a unique culture and history. People have always said it’s unlike any other city in America.
I think about the parks, walks I once took in the Uptown section of the city, where I briefly lived after I finished a grad degree at LSU in the late 1980s. I can visualize many things about the famous French Quarter, the city’s old neighborhoods and sandwich shops I once frequented, and my high school in Algiers, across the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans. All these images and memories flicker by from time to time. In fact, just last night I looked closely at a huge book of historical and rare color and black and white photographs, and focused again on photos from around 1910 of the French Quarter, Canal Street, the main downtown street I visited so many times growing up, and the old docks and wharves along the Mississippi River. I never cease to be amazed by the intricate lace iron balconies along Royal and other streets in the French Quarter.
However, so many things would have had to be different in my formative years growing up there for me to have wanted to stay or return. The place of your birth and childhood holds enormous influence over where you might choose to call home in a permanent sense. But I never felt that pull strongly enough, and South Carolina, my ancestral home, always called to me, all during my youth and when I was in college. I left New Orleans a month after I graduated from from UNO in May 1973.
Even though I have an increasingly diminished desire to return “home” to New Orleans, to the physical “place,” even for a brief visit, I find myself returning again and again in my thoughts and memories. So in that sense, we can “go home again,” but never actually return. I keep in mind always that the “past is prologue” and the city where I was born and where I spent my formative years molded and shaped who I am today, for better or worse.
Over the years since leaving home after college, I have lived in quite a number of small towns and cities, each indelibly etching themselves in my memory. In each of them, I believe I sought out — however brief my stay — links and reminders of my original “home,” my birthplace, even thinly veiled or far/fetched. Or, was I always simply looking for some mythical, idealized forever home, deep within the essence and unique sense of place of each town and city where I lived. I’ve always had a keen awareness of what that was.
While each new job, and city or town, represented a possible future there, a place to settle down, they all ended up being way stations on my life journey, even the city I actually could realistically idealize and dream of planting roots in — Columbia, S.C. I lived there for eight quite memorable years, in blocks of four years each time. I called this charming university town home. It s everything, even back then, primarily the University of South Carolina. It was located less than an hour from the city where my mother and aunt grew up. I visited my Ai t in Sumter on many weekends. The place was for decades my “second home,” but I could never see myself living there permanently.
For more than twenty years, I had no permanent home amidst the ongoing, and at times seemingly futile, search for permanence, stability and roots.
I held onto this dream of “home” tenaciously, always with regrets that this or that particular place could never be what I imagined it could be.
However, I often think about one idyllic, small college town in North Carolina where I lived for only seven months, and where I imagined I had found something akin to the home of my dreams. Sadly, it was not to be. I thought at the time it might possibly be a dream come true, whereas now I realize I was living a fantasy life as a small-town newspaper editor with an office on a very picturesque and timeless little Main Street. It was all a short-lived dream, with good and bad experiences, as would be the case in any other place. But it served its purpose, and I learned more fully what my journalistic capabilities were.
After years of restless roaming and searching, I finally found my “home” and “home place” here in Charleston. And also the librarian job and career I was always meant to have.
I now have the luxury of indulging in my memories of New Orleans because in many ways Charleston reminds me so much of that city. My paternal ancestors are from Charleston, and lived in the same neighborhood in the historic district where our family home is/was, sold five years ago after my mother died. Life has a way of mysteriously completing circles.
I have never been homesick for New Orleans. I have no one there to visit now, no family or friends in that place. But that doesn’t mean I don’t, near the end of life, often feel the inexorably pull of the beautiful, baffling and mysterious city where I grew up. I have my memories. That is enough.
The house I lived in from age 10-18
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