Family Life

There’s a delicate balance between being Southern and being a redneck. Probably I’m about to cross it.

Milton Bradley was not a Southerner. Nor was he a redneck. He invented the game we call “Life,” which poured on the market in 1860 when the nation went to war…with itself. But that’s history, and I’m talking literature.

We were supposed to learn in high school that an archetypal hero is an orphan. If you missed that on the SAT, well, here’s an overview:


OEDIPUS: line of confused heritage leads him to marry his mother—oops!

JESUS: earthly mother, but separated from His father by the great divide of flesh

HAMLET: father displaced by his uncle in his mother’s bed

(You notice in these older texts that orphan status relies on misplacement of the father, but not necessarily the mother? The testament of female status is changing in modern times with…)

HARRY POTTER: parents are murdered and he’s entrusted to his muggle uncle and aunt

SUPERMAN: an alien raised by earthlings

SPIDERMAN: with great responsibility comes great power, but no living parents


All these people, ALL these archetypal heroes of ancient and modern times, all of them are not Southern. An archetypal hero is never returning a casserole dish or buying lipstick from his cousin who sells Mary Kay. He is not pictured as a young toddler with a stack of dead squirrels. He does not burn diesel in his tiki torches or spend hours ogling an engine that’s driven four hundred thousand miles past the point where it was declared totaled. That just doesn’t happen.

That is why I will never be an archetypal hero.

I invented my own board game; it’s called “Family Life.” It has nothing to do with the vice and virtues that steer your advancement or demotion in Milton Bradley’s game. In my game, you begin at the grandparents’ row of your family tree, you work your way down through your parents and aunts and uncles, then through your cousins and siblings, then your nieces and nephews. Heaven help you if you get married. The object of the game is to reach YOURSELF through these inherent characters. Every relative is an opportunity to gain success or to lose money. And that can be a simultaneous event in the South. Each branch of the tree (hopefully your tree branches, but not in all cases), each branch has vital influence on how you grow up and what your adult world is like.

As I approach Thanksgiving, with its quilt-covered dining tables and church-borrowed chairs, I’m thankful that I’m never going to save the world. I’m glad to contribute to a potluck holiday with a patchwork of cousins, and where friends are as welcome as family. In my life, there’s enough pie to go around. Literally. We’re Southern. Somehow we always have a pie for every person present. Nobody plans this; it’s just what happens in a family like mine. No, I will not be an archetypal hero, and furthermore, an archetypal hero will not be Southern.