Is the title of this post familiar? Did you hear it in your head in a parent’s voice, or grandparent’s voice? Maybe an aunt’s or uncle’s?
If you’re at least third-generation Southerner, it’s a sure bet it, or an essentially identical sentiment (“we don’t discuss these things,” maybe?), has been part of your life. It’s typically about what is, or what is perceived to be, a family’s dirty laundry. Occasionally, depending on how many families and how dirty the laundry, it metastasizes into a darker part of a city’s sociocultural identity. (New Orleans, anyone? Savannah?)
Though it certainly occupied the same headspace, my sister Jenny and I didn’t even get the whispered admonition about the death of our mother’s father, our beloved Papaw. We lost him in 1990, and we believed for the next 13 years he had died of lung cancer. After Mom died in 2001, followed by her mother in 2003, we discovered in Granny’s things that Papaw had died of AIDS.
That’s a fitting example. We’ve come a long way since the ’80s in what we know about AIDS and how we talk about it, and hopefully it wouldn’t be a thing today. It was definitely a thing then, particularly for two old South matrons who had marinated from birth in “things we don’t talk about.”
Said things get superficially defensible cover in politeness, Southern gentility, and minding one’s own affairs. They can, however, easily become accomplices in terrible things when misapplied. I was angry at Mom for years when I found out about Papaw, but the only real harm done was to the trust I had that my mother knew who I was. (I somewhat get it in 1990, but I was 30 years old in 2001.)
What if we’d instead found police reports documenting that my grandfather had regularly beaten my grandmother? What if that was the thing we didn’t talk about?
How many domestic violence victims suffer with the full knowledge of close family members because “that’s not something we talk about”?
Familial human trafficking is a terrible problem in the United States, and it can be multi-generational. How many people are being trafficked by a family member because “that’s not something we talk about”?
You reckon a child has been ever been abused by a teacher, coach, or other authority figure and tried to tell someone, only to be dismissed because “that’s not something we talk about”?
This persistent aspect of the cultural old South works against us on this. There is a time and place for polite conversation; for not making a scene. There is a time and place for avoiding certain topics. Knowledge, or even suspicion, of the above heinous crimes does not qualify. Domestic violence, human trafficking, and sexual abuse are always things we talk about.
If you know or suspect someone is in trouble, report it. That may be a call to local law enforcement, or to an authority figure. If you’re mistaken, you may feel momentarily awkward or embarrassed. If you’re not, you may save someone’s life.