Who’s a Yankee?

Growing up in the American South, I learned to call people in the North “Yankees.” The word just described someone who wasn’t from the South and who happened to live north of Kentucky.

My mother once described a sad experience she had as a little girl. Her parents moved from Kentucky south to Georgia. At her new elementary school she became friends with classmates and got invited to their homes to play. One day after school, she asked a friend to come and play. The little girl replied, “My mama says I can’t play with you anymore, because you’re a Yankee.” Mother said she had cried at the time because in Atlanta, apparently, Kentucky was part of the North. Therefore, she was a Yankee.

When my parents first married, they lived in Missouri, a “border state” during the Civil War. Mother said she traveled all the way to Memphis to give birth, so that I would be born in a Southern state, Tennessee, and never be accused of being a Yankee.

When I grew up, I spend several years in the North, and discovered that “Yankee” didn’t mean every part of the North. It mostly meant New England. So, I had to change my understanding of what Yankee meant.

During my first year in Japan, I regularly took long walks at night for exercise. One night a car loaded with young Japanese boys shouted at me, “Yankee, go home!” I had to laugh, because it was the first time in my life I had been called a Yankee.

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