Escaping Georgia

Counter-Currents

1,147 words

Smoke from chemical plant fire in Conyers, GA on Sunday, September 29. Image source X

I’ve lived in the Atlanta area for seventeen and a half years. That’s at least seventeen years too many. The first few weeks were OK, though. I’ve wanted and tried to leave for years. Now that my departure date looms less than two weeks away, I get the sense that Georgia is saying, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” Or to paraphrase Nietzsche, “That which is leaving should also be pushed.”

I thought Portland was soggy, but Atlanta’s ceaselessly maddening rain is one of the many reasons I’ve yearned to vamoose. Portland averages a measly 36 inches a year compared to Atlanta’s 50. Portland’s precipitation tends to be misty and drizzly, but Atlanta’s ferocious downpours make you feel compelled to build an ark.

Dozens of tall pine trees surround my house, and after a few days of deluges, the red Southern dirt turns to mud soup. In the six years I’ve occupied this abode, three trees have fallen due to the rain’s pummeling. One tree crushed my back deck to splinters. Another mangled the fence. One fell with a loud thump right onto the front lawn. Another time a tornado sent a 12-foot branch flying like a projectile missile into our roof. I’ve developed a severe case of hard-rain anxiety to the point that I’ve spent thousands of dollars having trees removed merely to protect the only house I’ve ever bought from obliteration.

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Much of this year has been consumed with fixing up this shack for sale. A week ago, after the sales contract had been signed and it looked as if we’d finally be fleeing the coop, Hurricane Helene blew through our downscale lakeside estate. My wife grew up in New Orleans and is still rattled by Hurricane Katrina. She I cuddled tightly in bed last Thursday night, clenching our jaws and fearing that the rains would send a tree crashing through our roof, squashing the house sale and keeping us stuck here. Georgia’s shoddy infrastructure tends to cause hours-long electrical blackouts if someone sneezes too hard. Helene dumped 11 inches of rain over two days, which is a record for the Atlanta area ever since they began measuring such things around the time that Reconstruction ended.

But our house remained intact. Crisis averted.

On Sunday afternoon, a chemical plant fire in Conyers, GA sent apocalyptic-looking smoke clouds billowing over Interstate 20, forcing evacuations in the immediate area. The toxic disaster’s epicenter was precisely 11.0 miles from the front door of the house I’ve been trying to sell. “Fantastic,” I thought. “Just when we’d escaped total ruin with the hurricane, the whole area will be condemned and cordoned off as a Superfund cleanup site.”

By Monday morning, all seemed safe. But on Monday afternoon, my phone blared with a warning that read:

Public Safety Alert 1:40 PM

Georgia Emergency Management Agency Homeland Security Agency on behalf of the Environmental Protection Division local area emergency LOCAL AREA EMERGENCY due to ROCKDALE COUNTY BIOLAB FIRE. The EPA is MONITORING air quality for CHLORINE AND RELATED COMPOUNDS. Chemical levels are UNLIKELY TO CAUSE HARM TO MOST PEOPLE.

“UNLIKELY TO CAUSE HARM TO MOST PEOPLE.” I guess we’re breathing “mostly peaceful fumes.”

On Tuesday during a routine medical exam, a dipstick urinalysis showed “abnormal” levels of ketones in my pee. A quick and frantic phone search of my precise levels said it was five times over what was considered “life-threatening.” It said I might have already suffered irreversible organ damage. If I didn’t move fast, I could enter a coma and die. My attending physician—a black woman like nearly everyone in Georgia seems to be these days—did not dispute that I should probably flee to an emergency room.

The ER, which is the only barely efficient one I’ve visited during my overlong stint in Georgia, was abnormally overcrowded because other hospitals had been shut down due to the mostly peaceful chemical disaster. The place was jammed with fat, feral, wheezing, coughing mutants straight out of an A. Wyatt Mann cartoon.

It took four hours for doctors to see me, and it turns out that both me and my black female doctor had misread the results. My ketone levels were fine for a urine test, but they would have been deadly if found in my blood.

But being in that emergency room only hammered home the idea that by remaining in Georgia, I am living on stolen land—land that has been stolen from black people. When I first came here in 2007 and was renting a weekly motel, I felt as if I’d taken a wrong-way turn and somehow wound up in Nigeria. I’ve been drowning in the state’s ublaquity for nearly two decades.

This is a state that almost elected Stacey Abrams as governor a few years ago. It’s a state that ran Herschel Walker for the US Senate. Atlanta hasn’t had a non-black mayor in 50 years.

Out of all American states, Georgia ranks third for total number of blacks, behind only New York and Texas. It has the third-highest quotient of blacks, behind Mississippi and Louisiana.

When people think of “the South,” they typically think of Klansmen and lynchings. They hardly ever seem to think “the section of the country with, by far, the highest percentages of black people.”

As a natural-born Yankee, my initial impressions of Georgia came from redneck-scare movies such as Two Thousand Maniacs! (set in the fictional town of Pleasant Valley, Georgia) and Deliverance (filmed in the North Georgia mountains). Even 1992’s My Cousin Vinny reinforces the idea that if one were to innocently drive down into the Peach State, you’re likely to face much more danger from rural whites than from urban blacks.

But my whole time here, I’ve known two white people in Atlanta who were murdered by blacks. A third was attacked and received permanent brain damage after his black assailant smashed a chair over his head. And the week after Barack Obama was elected America’s first gay black president, a black male teen robbed my son’s mother at gunpoint in a supermarket parking lot in broad daylight.

Typically, this sort of fearless predation doesn’t come from the meek and oppressed. It’s the sort of territorialism displayed by primates who are saying, “We own this place.”

While readying my house for sale, I told a chubby white air-conditioner repairman that one of the reasons we were leaving Georgia was that it rained too much.

“Oh, I can never get enough rain,” he smiled.

“How about black people? Can you ever get enough of them?” I asked.

“Well, that’s another deal,” he laughed.

Maybe this is one of the many reasons that Georgia has never felt like home to me. Atlanta is the black Mecca, and since I’m neither black nor a Muslim, it’s hard for me to relate.

But if you can never get enough rain and black people, come to Georgia.