My grandfather's side of the family hails from a little town called New Hope, Alabama, population ~2,500, and he moved his family back after retiring from the air force in the late 70s. New Hope was where my mother went to high school, and like many teenagers in small Southern towns, she couldn't wait to get out. That's precisely what she did: she eventually married my father, moved 15 minutes yet a world away to the neighboring city of Huntsville, and never looked back. Though I still have family in New Hope, I've never visited it, and I haven't seen that family since I was an infant.
After living across the world for a year, I've become a little more receptive to my Southern roots. I used to bristle when people acknowledged the South, but the older I get, the more I appreciate Alabama for what it is. In a sense, photographing New Hope felt like a good way to get in touch with this long-ignored side of myself on a visit home. Over the three weeks I spent in Huntsville, I ventured there several times to see the world my mother used to live in, to talk to locals, and to finally meet my own extended family for the first time. I'm not sure what conclusions I expected to come to via this little experiment. Maybe I was looking for the romanticized, idyllic idea of Southern life that many of my friends overseas seem to perceive. Maybe I was looking to find something so backwards and foreign that it served to justify my decision to move my own life 4,954 miles across the ocean. In the end, what I found was gray area; for every measure hospitality and community here, there is a counterbalance of ignorance and poverty. New Hope and its residents are every bit as nuanced as any other small town. It's tempting to portray the South as a sum of one of its many stereotypes, but its character is somewhere in between.
To me, New Hope feels like the kind of place that's quickly vanishing from the landscape of modern America, or at least Madison County. Nearby communities have been quickly developed into suburbs and shopping centers in recent years, and the many residents assume New Hope will eventually come to the same fate due to its prime location. As more of the region is built up, it feels far less self-contained than it did during my mother's childhood. Though people still move to New Hope for its low cost of living, it seems as though technology, social media, and the pace of today's world have made it more difficult to structure lives solely within city limits. As the years go by, the culture of small town life has become less pronounced.
In another sense, other things haven't changed at all since my mother's time there in the 70s. The ice cream shop my mother frequented is still a town standby, as are many other local businesses from her high school days. The holy trifecta of football, religion, and Southern food continues to reign supreme over the culture (as is the case with many small Alabama towns). Even as the world changes, not everyone in New Hope has ambitions of moving away like my mother did, and the element that draws back prodigal natives is often the sense of familiarity. People return to take care of family members, to start families of their own, or simply to retire. In the South, people can make their world as big or as small as they want it to be, and each decision has its merits. If you're raised in a place like this, it's hard to shake it off completely.
Given her personality and her upbringing as an air force kid, mother would never have been happy staying in New Hope. She denies that her time there influenced the person she's become, but I'm not so sure if I agree. As kind and unassuming as she is, my mom is also one of the strongest people I know, and I'm aware of how hard she worked to get what she wanted out of life. In my mind there's no doubt that some of her strength comes from how she dealt with this chapter of her past. Other people I know from New Hope see it differently. My dear friend Robby grew up there as well, but he acknowledges that his childhood made him into the person he is, if only to teach him at an early age what he doesn't want for himself. Then there are those like my great uncle Benny, a lifelong resident of the area who loves it for all of its quirks. Meeting him didn't feel like meeting a stranger, and I think it's because his warmth and kindness embodies New Hope- and small town Alabama culture- at its best.
As for me? My relationship with Alabama is still complicated. Being a product of the deep south has impacted my character more than I would have ever admitted as a kid; I may have shaken my accent years ago, but the older I get, the more I recognize bits of its culture in myself. Still, day-to-day life in New Hope is different than my own experience, even if my own childhood only took place 15 minutes away. Then there are other times where elements of life here feel like coming home. Sometimes that scares me, but mostly it feels like embracing a part of my history that, both directly and indirectly, has influenced the person I've become. It's not just on my mom's side: my dad spent his whole childhood and adolescence in another rural Alabama community, as did his parents and his parents' parents. I admit that I credit a good bit of my personality and wanderlust to my mom, who grew up as an air force kid and (until Alabama) never stayed in one place for long. Still, the bottom line is that I lived in the south until I was 22 years old, and there's no doubt that small town Alabama has shaped parts of me, both negatively and positively.
