Border Wars

P reparing me for a competition up South in Pittsburgh, my violin teacher in Memphis—blond, slight, perpetually young—had me practice how I was going to introduce myself before my performance in front of the judges.

为了让我为在匹兹堡南部举行的比赛做准备，我在孟菲斯的小提琴老师——金发碧眼，身材瘦小，永远年轻——让我练习在评委面前表演之前如何介绍自己。

After I went through my lines hurriedly a few times, once with a sour-faced attempt at the smile my teacher had suggested, she said I needed to slow down so that the Yankee judges would be able to understand my Southern accent.

在我匆匆地念了几遍台词后，有一次我苦着脸尝试着老师建议的微笑，她说我需要放慢速度，这样洋基队的评委才能听懂我的南方口音。

I tried again, now actively attempting to stamp out what I had not realized was there.

我再次尝试，现在积极地尝试消除我没有意识到的东西。

“Better,” she said eventually.

“好多了，”她最终说道。

“Better” was how she offered praise when she knew I had genuinely tried but somehow still managed to suck.

当她知道我真诚地尝试过但不知何故仍然表现不佳时，她会用“更好”来表扬我。

After the lesson, I darted out the front door and down the hill to where Mama was waiting in the car, slowing myself just short of a collision with the passenger door.

课后，我冲出前门，冲下山，来到妈妈在车里等候的地方，放慢了速度，差点撞到乘客车门。

“Mama, Mama!” I said into the open window.

“妈妈，妈妈！”我对着打开的窗户说道。

“You think I got a Southern accent?” She replied without looking up from her circulars, “We all have Southern accents.”

“你觉得我有南方口音吗？”她头也不抬地回答道：“我们都有南方口音。”

This was a revelation to me, and a devastating one at that.

这对我来说是一个启示，而且是毁灭性的。

I had heard Southern accents, and I was certain I didn’t sound like Julia Sugarbaker or Whitley Gilbert or Elly May Clampett.

我听过南方口音，我确信我听起来不像朱莉娅·舒格贝克、惠特利·吉尔伯特或艾莉·梅·克拉佩特。

I pondered this possible new thing about myself while Mama talked about that cheating Arkansas ho Bill Clinton’s accent and how people made fun of it even though he was the president.

当妈妈谈论比尔·克林顿的阿肯色口音作弊以及人们如何取笑即使他是总统时，我也思考着关于我自己的这个可能的新事情。

I tuned out her voice and tried to hear how I talked in my head, using the same critical, objective ear I relied on to know when my intonation was off.

我关掉了她的声音，试着听听我在脑子里是如何说话的，用的是我用来判断我的语调何时出现问题的那只批判性、客观的耳朵。

At home in my room with the door closed, I practiced aloud, watching the shape of my mouth and the movements of my tongue in the mirror.

我回到家，关着门，一边大声练习，一边对着镜子观察自己的嘴形和舌头的动作。

I repeated my introduction in different accents: regular, valley girl, Southern, newscaster, New Yorker, and British.

我用不同的口音重复了我的介绍：普通口音、山谷女孩口音、南方口音、新闻播音员口音、纽约客口音和英国口音。

I still couldn’t hear how I sounded, but I was desperate to discern and attain a standard American accent—that is, one with no regional mark.

我仍然听不清自己的声音，但我非常渴望辨别并获得标准的美国口音——也就是说，没有地区标记的口音。

I was sixteen years old, trying to make it in the world.

当时我十六岁，正努力在这个世界上有所成就。

I didn’t need no Southern accent perched like a twanging bird on top of my being black and a girl and precariously middle class and a precariously middle-class black girl whose hair wouldn’t get straight all the way no matter the strength or caliber of the relaxer.

我不需要南方口音，像一只鸣禽一样栖息在我的黑人、女孩、不稳定的中产阶级和一个不稳定的中产阶级黑人女孩之上，无论放松剂的强度或口径如何，她的头发都不会一直变直。

I switched on the television, hoping to find a Cosby Show rerun so I could study Mrs. Clair Huxtable.

我打开电视，希望能看到重播的《考斯比秀》，这样我就可以研究克莱尔·赫克斯特布尔夫人了。

Instead I found the television where I had left it that morning, tuned to The Box.

相反，我找到了那天早上我放的电视，调到了“The Box”。

OutKast’s “ATLiens” was on again, and I rapped along with the song’s lyrics, happy for a brief reprieve from my pursuit of proper talk.

OutKast 的《ATLiens》又开始了，我跟着这首歌的歌词说唱，很高兴能暂时摆脱对正确谈话的追求。

After the second refrain, I couldn’t help but say aloud, “Shut my mouth!” I muted the television and turned back to the mirror, repeating the hook slowly in all those different accents:

第二句过后，我忍不住大声说：“闭嘴！”我把电视调成静音，然后转身对着镜子，用各种不同的口音慢慢地重复着旋律：

By 1998, throwing one’s hands in the air and waving them like one just didn’t care—a standard New York City party chant—had long been mainstreamed.

到 1998 年，高举双手并挥舞着，就像不在乎一样——这是纽约市标准的派对口号——早已成为主流。

The third bar of the chant is improvisational.

圣歌的第三小节是即兴创作的。

The emcee might say and if you rocking with the boogie down Bronx tonight, or if you ready for us to roc the mic tonight, or, my personal favorite, and if you got on clean underwear.

主持人可能会说，如果你今晚在布朗克斯与布吉舞一起摇摆，或者你是否准备好让我们今晚用麦克风摇滚，或者，我个人最喜欢的，如果你穿着干净的内衣。

OutKast had filled in that free space with markers of regional distinctiveness—fish and grits, all that pimp shit—an homage to funky food and Southern players.

OutKast 在这个自由空间中填满了区域特色的标志——鱼和粗玉米粉，所有那些皮条客的狗屎——这是对时髦食物和南方玩家的致敬。

In the process, they had claimed the chant, and hip-hop, for the South.

在此过程中，他们为南方赢得了圣歌和嘻哈音乐。

Their version sounded like this:

他们的版本听起来像这样：

Repeating the refrain in my bedroom, I realized there was no difference between my “regular” voice and the “Southern” voice— my violin teacher was right.

在卧室里重复这句话，我意识到我的“普通”声音和“南方”声音没有什么区别——我的小提琴老师是对的。

OutKast had been rapping in a Southern accent all this time and my slow ass was just now noticing it.

OutKast 一直在用南方口音说唱，而我这个迟钝的家伙现在才注意到这一点。

For years, I had assumed OutKast was making fun of the way country white people talked, or offering them some kind of kumbaya pathway into rap music.

多年来，我一直以为 OutKast 是在取笑乡村白人的说话方式，或者为他们提供某种进入说唱音乐的 kumbaya 途径。

Instead, they had been saying that they were country and Southern and black and rap, and they were damned proud of it.

相反，他们一直说自己是乡村人、南方人、黑人和说唱人，他们为此感到非常自豪。

I had missed that message altogether.

我完全错过了那条消息。

I felt a bit of shame for being embarrassed about my now-obvious Southern accent.

我为自己现在明显的南方口音感到尴尬，感到有点羞愧。

The feeling came up in my chest and threatened to redden my brown face.

这种感觉涌上我的胸口，几乎要让我棕色的脸变红。

I switched off the television and went back to practicing, beating back the Southern border of my tongue until I made it.

我关掉电视，继续练习，击退舌头的南缘，直到成功。

I was gone be somebody and so was my sister.

我已经不再是一个大人物了，我的妹妹也是如此。

Even our local paper (which had once called Ida B.

甚至我们当地的报纸（曾经称为 Ida B.

Wells all manner of things, the nicest of which was “darky damsel”) said so.

威尔斯（Wells）各种各样的事情，其中最好的是“黑暗少女”）都是这么说的。

Our nineteen- and eighteen-year-old faces pictured in the April 11, 2002, edition of the Commercial Appeal said so, too.

2002 年 4 月 11 日版《商业呼吁》中我们十九岁和十八岁的面孔也这么说。

On the left, me with my mouth open wide in a laugh, no South visible on my fresh pink tongue, no light between my teeth.

左边，我张大嘴大笑，鲜粉色的舌头上看不到南方，牙齿之间没有光芒。

On the right, my sister with an appropriate smile, pleasant but not gleeful, top-row incisors and bicuspids visible and even, the spaces between her teeth perfect and a blessing because they meant she didn’t have to floss as much.

右边是我妹妹，她的笑容恰到好处，令人愉快但并不高兴，顶排门牙和二尖牙清晰可见，牙齿之间的空间完美，这是一种祝福，因为这意味着她不必经常使用牙线。

My hair, a lion’s mane crown.

我的头发，一顶狮子鬃毛的王冠。

Her hair, hanging, curled gently on her right shoulder, still relaxed.

她的头发垂下来，轻轻地卷曲在右肩上，仍然很放松。

My left shoulder behind her right, no real borders between our bodies, according to the picture, a two-headed black girl monster with a violin perched atop its shoulder.

我的左肩在她的右肩后面，我们的身体之间没有真正的边界，根据照片，一个双头的黑人女孩怪物，肩膀上栖息着一把小提琴。

SISTERS HIT HIGH NOTES IN LEARNING in bold serif over our faces.

姐妹们在学习中取得了高分，我们的脸上用粗体衬线写着。

We were each valedictorian of our high school classes, 2000 and 2002, and I would have it no other way.

2000年和2002年，我们都是高中班级的告别演说者，我别无选择。

Of me, my sister told the reporter, “She really wanted me to beat the other kids.” She was damned right; we were the Robinson super duo.

至于我，我姐姐告诉记者，“她真的希望我能打败其他孩子。”她是对的。我们是罗宾逊超级二人组。

I told the reporter I was on the “fast track,” finishing college two semesters early because I had so many other things to do.

我告诉记者，我正走在“快车道”上，提前两个学期完成大学学业，因为我还有很多其他事情要做。

My sister was measured like her smile: the introvert, the calmer one, the planner, the saver.

我姐姐的笑容就像她的笑容一样：内向、冷静、计划者、节约者。

She said that our Suzuki violin lessons had taught her patience—just do your best, never give up.

她说我们的铃木小提琴课教会了她耐心——尽力而为，永不放弃。

She was already a somebody better than me.

她已经是比我更好的人了。

It sure took me a lot longer than my “fast track” suggested, but I finally made it and became a somebody, too.

这确实比我的“快速通道”建议的时间要长得多，但我终于成功了，也成为了名人。

At twenty-four, I declared a coming victory over my tongue; I was going to get myself a Professor Voice, which I was going to develop while I was teaching five classes per semester at the community college downtown.

二十四岁时，我宣布我的舌头即将胜利；我打算给自己找一个教授之声，这是我在市中心的社区大学每学期教五节课时开发的。

A Professor Voice was even better than a standard American accent because it connoted that I was now President of Everything.

教授的声音甚至比标准的美国口音更好，因为它意味着我现在是一切的总统。

I used that voice to say Heidegger and Sartre and Few-co and phenomenological and cognitive dissonance.

我用那个声音来表达海德格尔、萨特和法夫科以及现象学和认知的不和谐。

When I read to myself, I sounded like Maya Angelou playing Vivaldi on her viola.

当我给自己朗读时，我听起来就像玛雅·安杰卢用中提琴演奏维瓦尔第。

By then, my sister spoke Japanese and was living in Kure City teaching English.

那时，我姐姐会说日语，并住在吴市教英语。

We were both becoming somebodies in the world, me on one side and her on the other, both at our own paces and with our own voices, across the border of our sisterhood.

我们都在成为世界上的重要人物，一方面是我，另一方面是她，都以我们自己的步调和我们自己的声音，跨越了我们姐妹情谊的边界。

I thought I had crossed the street to greener, richer pastures, but I discovered quickly that I was still on the same side with the same pale-ass grass with the oddly shaped dead patches.

我以为我已经穿过街道，来到了更绿、更肥沃的牧场，但我很快发现我仍然在同一边，同样是苍白的草，上面有形状奇怪的死斑。

That Professor Voice hadn’t provided childcare for my baby or paid nary a bill, nor did it shush collectors on the other end of my phone asking about when I was gone give them some of my adjunct nickels.

声音教授没有为我的孩子提供托儿服务，也没有支付任何账单，也没有让我电话另一端询问我什么时候离开的收款人给他们一些我的辅助镍币。

Besides, the South had been in my throat all along, lurking like strep, coming out in my office (which doubled as department storage) when I counseled women students with black eyes and baby daddies like I was their big cousin.

此外，当我为黑眼睛的女学生和小爸爸们提供咨询时，南方一直在我的喉咙里，像链球菌一样潜伏着，在我的办公室（兼作部门储藏室）里出现。

They asked me why I was there for them, and with them, and why I cared one way or the other—what was a black girl with a Professor Voice doing talking about fighting niggas in the street instead of lecturing on Few-co?

他们问我为什么我会在他们身边，和他们在一起，为什么我会以一种或另一种方式关心——一个带着教授声音的黑人女孩在街上谈论与黑鬼的战斗而不是在Few-co上演讲？

And so again I was ashamed of my voice, for the new border it had erected between being Somebody and being somebody whose name nobody says when the lights turn off.

于是，我再次为自己的声音感到羞愧，因为它在“大人物”和“熄灯后无人问津”之间建立了新的界限。

I was a black girl who had jumped fences and fought boys and made them say my name and resisted death just like my students, and that’s why I was there with them in a storage closet with an old wood desk trying to get us all free.

我是一个黑人女孩，她跳过栅栏，与男孩打架，让他们说出我的名字，并像我的学生一样抵抗死亡，这就是为什么我和他们一起在一个带有旧木桌的储藏室里，试图让我们所有人获得自由。

I had a lot of making up to do.

我有很多化妆要做。

To reckon with that shame, I started using my regular voice again—to do everything from teach sociological theory to holler down the street at a friend.

面对这种耻辱，我又开始用平常的声音做一切事情，从教授社会学理论到在街上对朋友大喊大叫。

(“Regular voice” and “holler” might be a bit redundant, I admit.)

（我承认，“常规声音”和“喊叫”可能有点多余。）

Three years after I had set out to be victorious at the border of my tongue, I had gone from trying to wash the South from my mouth with lye soap to having “Southern Studies” in my job title.

三年后，我开始在舌尖上取得胜利，我从试图用碱肥皂洗掉嘴里的南方，变成了我的职称中带有“南方研究”。

Turned out I found the region in everything, everywhere.

结果我发现这个地区无处不在。

There were variations—the “many Souths,” as it were—and I respected and celebrated intra-regional difference.

存在差异——可以说是“许多南方”——我尊重并庆祝区域内的差异。

I had lived most of my life in Memphis, but I felt an ownership over all of them.

我一生的大部分时间都在孟菲斯度过，但我对这里所有人都有一种归属感。

All the Souths were all mines.

所有的南方都是地雷。

I had also taken to defending the South’s borders from transgression—nothing in without an outsider stamp, nothing out without a Southern one.

我还开始保卫南方的边界免遭侵犯——没有外来者的印记就没有进来，没有南方人的印记就没有出去。

Soul music, Southern.

灵魂音乐，南方。

Trap, Southern.

陷阱，南方。

Hot chicken, Southern.

热鸡，南方人。

UGG boots, stranger danger.

UGG靴子，陌生人的危险。

If I had to confess to being Southern, all the other tongues were gone confess, too.

如果我不得不承认自己是南方人，那么所有其他语言也都承认了。

But I had my work cut out for me at the borders, real and imagined.

但我在边界上已经做好了工作，无论是真实的还是想象的。

P eople from places like Texas and Florida and Delaware and especially Washington, D.C., like to act like they aren’t in or from the South.

来自德克萨斯州、佛罗里达州、特拉华州，尤其是华盛顿特区的人们喜欢表现得好像他们不是来自南方或来自南方。

When I encounter these folks and endure their spiel, I like to explain how a whole entire white man, the sociologist and consummate regionalist John Shelton Reed, has dedicated a lifetime of scholarship to settling this question.

当我遇到这些人并忍受他们的滔滔不绝时，我想解释一下整个白人，社会学家和完美的地区主义者约翰·谢尔顿·里德，是如何奉献一生的学术来解决这个问题的。

Therefore, as far as I am concerned, the issue is closed.

因此，就我而言，这个问题已经结束了。

But it rarely is—the reluctant Southerners will counter with various reasons why their locale is not, in fact, the South.

但这种情况很少发生——不情愿的南方人会以各种理由反驳说，他们的所在地实际上不是南方。

D.C. is too sophisticated.

D.C. 太复杂了。

Florida has a Caribbean influence that excludes it.

佛罗里达州具有加勒比海的影响力，将其排除在外。

Texas, especially West Texas, is a whole other thing unto itself.

德克萨斯州，尤其是西德克萨斯州，本身就是另一回事。

Raise your hand if your state had slavery, I’ll say, putting my Tennessee hand up and glaring at them until they raise theirs in the a-yer like they just don’t cay-er.

如果你所在的州有奴隶制，请举手，我会说，举起我的田纳西州的手，瞪着他们，直到他们在一年中举起手，就像他们只是不说话一样。

If that doesn’t sway them, I’ll pull out a slew of very official white men to make the point.

如果这还不能动摇他们，我会找一大批非常正式的白人来阐明这一点。

Like a good Southerner and a proper black person, I don’t trust the federal government for much.

就像一个好的南方人和一个正宗的黑人一样，我不太信任联邦政府。

But the U.S. Census is not a liar.

但美国人口普查并不是骗人的。

If the Census says Maryland, D.C., Texas, and Florida are the South, then they are the South.

如果人口普查表明马里兰州、华盛顿特区、得克萨斯州和佛罗里达州是南方，那么它们就是南方。

That’s really just that on that.

确实就是这样。

Only wholly unreasonable people (and folks who say “pop” when they mean “drink”) don’t believe in learned white men like the great John Shelton Reed or the U.S. Census.

只有完全不讲道理的人（以及那些在意思是“饮料”时说“流行”的人）不相信像伟大的约翰·谢尔顿·里德或美国人口普查这样有学识的白人。

For them, I just suck my teeth and bless their hearts aloud and go on.

对于他们，我只是咬着牙，大声祝福他们的心，然后继续走下去。

In the states on the border of our nation’s enduring disagreement, the battle is the hardest.

在我们国家长期存在分歧的边缘各州，战斗是最艰难的。

Missouri, that notorious border state, had a whole civil war in its legislature over the Civil War, but kept owning and catching and murdering people just the same.

密苏里州，那个臭名昭著的边境州，其立法机关因内战而发生了一场全面的内战，但仍然继续拥有、抓捕和谋杀人民。

Delaware was about the same way, divided into its urban and agrarian halves.

特拉华州的情况也差不多，分为城市和农业两部分。

Maryland placed a dividing line and later a Mason-Dixon sign right inside of itself.

马里兰州在其内部放置了一条分界线，后来又放置了一个梅森-迪克森标志。

West Virginia created a whole new border, chopping off that left arm of Virginia, making itself the only limb of Tom Jefferson’s great state that would rather not own people.

西弗吉尼亚州创造了一条全新的边界，砍掉了弗吉尼亚州的左臂，使自己成为汤姆·杰斐逊伟大州中唯一不愿拥有人民的肢体。

At its southern and northern borders, eastern and western limits, at the borders between valley and mountain, city and country, the South appears and recedes, and things blend.

其南北边界、东西边界、谷山边界、城乡边界，南方出现又退去，万物交融。

Kentucky, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri became the Midwest; Delaware, D.C., and Maryland became the mid-Atlantic region of the Northeast; but only the South had slavery until the bitter end, we say.

肯塔基州、俄克拉荷马州、堪萨斯州和密苏里州成为中西部；特拉华州、哥伦比亚特区和马里兰州成为东北部的大西洋中部地区；但我们说，只有南方才拥有奴隶制直到痛苦的结局。

Holding the line at those borders is harder than beating back a pumpkin spice latte inside a pair of Lululemon yoga pants on good public transportation while sky high on legal weed.

在这些边界上排队比在良好的公共交通中击退穿着 Lululemon 瑜伽裤内的南瓜香料拿铁咖啡、同时吸食合法大麻还要困难。

I had tried to trespass the border of my tongue, to make a new mouth with a new voice, but I was foiled by my own self—the fact of my geographical location, the fact of my history, my body, my mama and daddy.

我曾试图闯入舌头的边界，用新的声音造出一张新的嘴，但我被自己挫败了——我的地理位置、我的历史、我的身体、我的妈妈和爸爸。

I had tried to trespass the border of class with this new mouth, my violin in tow, but I had found paycheck-to-paycheck weariness.

我曾试图用这张新嘴，拖着我的小提琴，闯入阶级的边界，但我发现了薪水到薪水的厌倦。

Other shoes were dropping all the time.

其他鞋子一直在掉落。

I had tried to trespass the borders within me, my internal borders, the border between who I thought I was trying to be and the pain I had experienced, the monstrous Southern things that had happened to me.

我试图闯入我内心的边界，我的内部边界，我认为自己想成为的人与我所经历的痛苦，以及发生在我身上的可怕的南方事情之间的边界。

I got tired of fighting, so very undone by the two sides, so I tried to sit still, somewhere in the middle, and reconcile it all.

我厌倦了争吵，双方都让我感到很沮丧，所以我试着坐在中间的某个地方，让这一切调和起来。

No matter my mouth or voice, or how many times I work twice as hard, I am bound by the strictures of race, class, gender, and history.

无论我的嘴或声音，无论我加倍努力多少次，我都受到种族、阶级、性别和历史的束缚。

And the closest borders, the ones in ourselves and in our families and homes, are the most difficult to discern.

而最接近的边界，即我们自己、我们的家人和家里的边界，是最难辨别的。

Kentucky is where I learned to reckon with those borders—geographical, structural, familial—and ponder whether or not they are real, or if they matter, or if I can or should cross them.

肯塔基州是我学会思考这些边界的地方——地理的、结构的、家庭的——并思考它们是否真实，或者它们是否重要，或者我是否可以或应该跨越它们。

Kentucky had called itself neutral when the Civil War began, an admirable if preposterous thing, especially since it acquiesced to Union control but still wanted its slavery.

内战开始时，肯塔基州称自己为中立，这是一件令人钦佩但又荒谬的事情，特别是因为它默许了联邦的控制，但仍然想要奴隶制。

Kentucky held tight to the peculiar institution, even when others were at least lip-service outlawing it, until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.

肯塔基州一直坚持这一特殊的制度，即使其他人至少在口头上宣布它为非法，直到第十三修正案获得批准。

Kentucky, where the black population fell to below ten percent after slavery and the Great Migration, and most of that is still in just two counties.

肯塔基州，在奴隶制和大迁徙之后，该州的黑人人口下降到百分之十以下，其中大部分仍然集中在两个县。

Kentucky, where my all-time-favorite cousin got possessed by the devil and was trapped for fifteen years.

肯塔基州，我最喜欢的表弟被魔鬼附身，被困了十五年。

Kentucky, the southern-most state in which I have been certain that I was called a nigger.

肯塔基州，最南端的州，我确信在那里我被称为黑鬼。

Kentucky, now the border between my sister and me.

肯塔基州，现在是我和姐姐之间的边界。

Kentucky: Where I learned that borders are never neutral or safe, and that I shouldn’t search for rest there.

肯塔基州：在那里我了解到边界从来都不是中立或安全的，我不应该在那里寻求休息。

It’s where I learned that the way across a border is under it.

正是在这里，我了解到跨越边界的道路就在它的下面。

M y favorite cousin became pregnant in college.

我最喜欢的表弟在大学时怀孕了。

She moved to Fulton, Kentucky, in 1995 so she could be near her daughter’s father.

1995 年，她搬到了肯塔基州富尔顿，这样她就可以离女儿的父亲更近一些。

The younger of two sisters, my cousin was my favorite because she was the nicest and the prettiest, could whup anybody on her block, always poured me extra Frosted Flakes, did my hair pretty and grown, and told me to watch out for those mannish-ass little boys.

我的表弟是两个姐妹中的妹妹，我最喜欢她，因为她是最好、最漂亮的，可以打败她所在街区的任何人，总是给我倒额外的磨砂片，把我的头发弄得漂亮又长，并告诉我要小心那些有男子气概的小男孩。

She was even-tempered until pushed, with a border in her that held back rage, the tension from which you could sometimes see in her jaw and top lip.

她脾气温和，直到被逼迫为止，她的内心有一道界限抑制着愤怒，有时你可以在她的下巴和上唇中看到紧张的情绪。

I didn’t know then that all of us, every set of sisters, had those kinds of internal borders, walls that spring up when we’re defending ourselves from the worst hurts.

那时我不知道我们所有人，每一对姐妹，都有这样的内部边界，当我们保护自己免受最严重的伤害时，这些墙就会出现。

As adult sisters raising sisters, our mothers were close for a time, different and the same, familiar and uneasy, one side and the other.

作为抚养姐妹的成年姐妹，我们的母亲一度很亲密，既不同又相同，既熟悉又不安，一边又一边。

My sister and I spent the night over at our cousins’ house often, and like younger girls are, we were fascinated by the older girls, their hair and makeup and clothes and dressers and trinkets and chest of drawers and songs.

我和姐姐经常在表兄弟家里过夜，就像年轻的女孩一样，我们对年长的女孩着迷，她们的头发、化妆、衣服、梳妆台、小饰品、五斗柜和歌曲。

We watched them go to junior high and then high school and prepared for our turn to cross.

我们看着他们升入初中，然后升入高中，并为轮到我们穿越做好准备。

My favorite cousin was like a black Cinderella, scrubbing and cooking and cleaning and making sure my auntie’s food was hot off the stove when she got home from work at Kimberly-Clark.

我最喜欢的表弟就像一个黑人灰姑娘，擦洗、做饭、打扫卫生，并确保我阿姨在金佰利公司下班回家时，炉子上的食物是热腾腾的。

I thought the younger child was always the favorite, but my cousin had a fraught relationship with her mom.

我以为小孩子总是最受欢迎的，但我表弟和她妈妈的关系却很紧张。

Like my mother and my aunt, my favorite cousin and her sister had different fathers, and hers wasn’t around.

就像我的母亲和姨妈一样，我最喜欢的表弟和她的妹妹也有不同的父亲，而她的父亲却不在身边。

The older sister’s daddy was some kind of well-to-do.

姐姐的爸爸是个很有钱的人。

I figured he must have given her that straight hair and mean streak.

我想他一定给了她那直发和刻薄的气质。

Some borders we didn’t cross.

有些边界我们没有跨越。

Soon my favorite cousin was a mother of sisters, like my mother and her mother.

很快，我最喜欢的表弟就成为了姐妹的母亲，就像我的母亲和她的母亲一样。

Although Fulton was just across the Tennessee border—just a line somebody made up stealing some indigenous folks’ land—Kentucky revealed itself as more distant than the miles would suggest.

尽管富尔顿就在田纳西州边境的另一边——只是有人偷了一些土著居民的土地而编造的一条线——但肯塔基州却显示出自己比英里所暗示的还要遥远。

It was a battleground for my cousin.

这是我表弟的战场。

Frenemies abounded in that tiny town, which seemed to have negative-two degrees of separation between lovers who traversed the border between good and evil, friend and enemy, in a matter of weeks, or sometimes days.

那个小镇里亦敌亦友的人比比皆是，恋人之间似乎有负二度的分离，他们在几周甚至几天的时间里跨越了善与恶、朋友与敌人的界限。

It was inevitable, then, that some other young woman—egged on by bored and horrid young men and jealous like young women can be in a small town—would start some shit with my favorite cousin.

那么，不可避免的是，其他一些年轻女子——受到无聊而可怕的年轻男子的怂恿，像小镇上的年轻女子一样嫉妒——会和我最喜欢的表弟开始一些事情。

The other woman sent word that she was coming for a fight, and that she was bringing a crew to video.

另一名女子发话称她要来打架，并且要带一群人来拍摄视频。

(Those were the days before WORLDSTARHIPHOP became the internet porn of fight videos, when fight compilations were distributed on videotape along with bootleg VHS movies at the barbershop.) When my cousin got the word, she put her daughters, seven and four, in the bath and headed out to her porch, barefoot, to wait.

（那是在《WORLDSTARHIPHOP》成为网络色情打斗视频之前的日子，当时打斗合集与盗版 VHS 电影一起在理发店里以录像带的形式传播。） 当我的表弟得到消息后，她把两个七岁和四岁的女儿放在浴缸里，然后光着脚走到门廊上等待。

The rival came shortly thereafter.

不久之后，对手就来了。

Sometime during the early moments of the confrontation, my cousin became trapped inside herself, she later said, and she could no longer hear what her rival was saying—some kind of devil got her.

她后来说，在对抗的最初时刻，我的表弟陷入了自己的困境，她再也听不到她的对手在说什么——某种魔鬼抓住了她。

She had not realized she was fighting until three-quarters of the way in.

直到进入四分之三时，她才意识到自己正在战斗。

Before that, she had lost a quick weave, but not much else.

在此之前，她已经失去了快速编织的能力，但除此之外并没有太多。

But then she fetched and wielded a metal dog chain.

但随后她拿起并挥舞了一条金属狗链。

The resulting sentence had my cousin trapped across the border for a decade, some of those years on probation and the latter years getting back on her feet, before she was able to come home to Memphis.

由此产生的判决让我表弟在边境被困了十年，其中一些年是缓刑，最后几年在她能够回到孟菲斯的家之前重新站起来。

In those years, I became a young mother myself, full of all kind of fight and fire.

那些年，我自己也成为了一个年轻的母亲，充满了各种争斗和火焰。

I did my daughter’s hair pretty like my cousin had done mine, glad I had remembered something from her since everybody knew my mama didn’t do hair.

我把我女儿的头发做得很漂亮，就像我表弟做我的一样，很高兴我记得她的一些事情，因为每个人都知道我妈妈不做头发。

I missed my cousin terribly while she was gone and haven’t seen her enough since she returned.

我表弟不在的时候我非常想念她，自从她回来后我就没怎么见过她。

Both our daddies died the May before we voted against Trump, mine on a Friday and hers the following Sunday.

我们的两个爸爸都在我们投票反对特朗普之前的五月去世了，我的爸爸是在周五，她的爸爸是在接下来的周日。

We went to their funerals back to back.

我们连续参加了他们的葬礼。

We cried for each other.

我们为彼此哭泣。

For a minute, I wished we could go back, that I could be sitting between her knees getting my hair cornrowed, eating Frosted Flakes, and watching cartoons.

有那么一刻，我希望我们能回去，我希望我能坐在她的膝盖之间，把头发扎成辫子，吃着糖霜片，看动画片。

Our daddies were gone, and her daughters were grown and in college.

我们的父亲去世了，她的女儿们已经长大并上大学了。

She goes to church with Mama now.

她现在和妈妈一起去教堂。

We both do what we can to keep the borders in us, of rage or tears or too much joy, at bay.

我们都尽我们所能来限制我们内心的界限，无论是愤怒、眼泪还是太多的快乐。

B efore I had accepted that I would not win over the border of my tongue, OutKast had already mapped a new Black South and gone to war at its borders.

在我接受自己无法赢得舌头边界之前，OutKast 已经绘制了新的黑人南方地图，并在其边界发动了战争。

At the now near-mythical 1995 Source Awards, André 3000 uttered our regional rallying cry—“The South got somethin’ to say”— when OutKast won for New Artist of the Year.

在近乎神话般的 1995 年 Source Awards 上，当 OutKast 赢得年度新人奖时，André 3000 发出了我们地区的战斗口号——“南方有话要说”。

This became black Southerners’ “The South shall rise again.” In hip-hop, the region had won a place on the map, making old borders raw—those of rural and urban, South and North, nonviolence and self-defense, Martin and Malcolm, passive and aggressive, Black capitalism and Black liberation, stay or go, Great Migration and reverse migration, borders that had undergirded the Great Black Intellectual Wars from Du Bois and Washington to Dyson and West.

这成为南方黑人的“南方将再次崛起”。在嘻哈音乐领域，该地区在地图上赢得了一席之地，使古老的边界变得原始——农村和城市、南方和北方、非暴力和自卫、马丁和马尔科姆、被动和侵略、黑人资本主义和黑人解放、留或走、大移民和反向移民，这些边界支撑着从杜波依斯和华盛顿到戴森和韦斯特的黑人知识大战。

The South threatened to take over the rest of the nation, to move its borders up and out, to swell and expand to many Souths—an up South and an out South and a down South—to blanket the country’s hip-hop landscape so every scene pledged allegiance to the Third Coast.

南方威胁要接管这个国家的其他地区，将其边界向上和向外移动，膨胀并扩展到许多南方——一个向上的南方、一个向外的南方和一个向下的南方——以覆盖这个国家的嘻哈景观，因此每个场景都宣誓效忠第三海岸。

The East and West Coasts struck back.

东海岸和西海岸发起反击。

50 Cent, the Jamaica, Queens–raised artist who gave us such classic lyrics as “I’ll take you to the candy shop / I’ll let you lick the lollipop,” implied that Southern rappers just wanted to party and didn’t take their craft seriously.

50 Cent 是一位在牙买加皇后区长大的艺术家，他给我们带来了“我带你去糖果店/我让你舔棒棒糖”这样的经典歌词，暗示南方说唱歌手只是想参加派对，并没有认真对待他们的手艺。

Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA, who purchased substantial portions of Memphis’s Stax Records catalogue to sample for his Yankee use, said Southerners didn’t have hip-hop in their blood.

Wu-Tang Clan 的 RZA 购买了孟菲斯 Stax Records 唱片的大部分唱片，供他的洋基队使用，他说南方人的血液中没有嘻哈音乐。

And Nas, whose Natchez-raised father once had a band called “The Okra Orchestra,” maligned Southern crunk music, and Southern crunk dancing in particular, as the death of hip-hop.

纳斯在纳奇兹长大的父亲曾拥有一支名为“The Okra Orchestra”的乐队，他诽谤南方乡村音乐，尤其是南方乡村舞蹈，认为是嘻哈音乐的死亡。

The borders between North and South had long been ruptured, and the South had invaded and won with r&b and soul and jazz even before the war had begun.

南北之间的边界早已破裂，甚至在战争开始之前，南方就已经入侵并以节奏布鲁斯、灵魂乐和爵士乐获胜。

Either Nas and RZA and 50 Cent simply did not know they were the champions of hip-hop’s Lost Cause, or they were manufacturing the kind of fake border walls that we all do when we realize too late that the line we imagined isn’t there at all.

要么 Nas、RZA 和 50 Cent 根本不知道自己是嘻哈音乐《Lost Cause》的冠军，要么他们正在制造我们所有人都会做的那种假边界墙，当我们意识到我们想象的那条线根本不存在时，为时已晚。

It was not enough to cross the border to mainstream America—to the North.

跨越边境进入美国主流——北方是不够的。

Not enough for Southern hip-hop to be played on stations across the country, or for Southern hip-hop artists to top all of the relevant Billboard charts.

这还不足以让南方嘻哈音乐在全国各地的电台上播放，也不足以让南方嘻哈艺术家登上所有相关广告牌排行榜的榜首。

Southerners joined forces across place differences to bolster their strength, becoming rap confederates who would destroy the rap union and create a new United States of Hip-Hop with Southern presidents, senators, flows, and production.

南方人跨越地域差异联合起来，增强自己的力量，成为说唱同盟，摧毁说唱联盟，并与南方总统、参议员、流量和制作一起创建一个新的嘻哈美国。

The 2007 cross-South collaboration “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You)” and its accompanying video was an announcement of this new Southern syndicate.

2007 年跨南方合作的《国际玩家圣歌（我选择你）》及其随附视频是这个新的南方集团的公告。

The video is about a wedding, which stands in for the marriage of these different styles of Southern hip-hop, the formation of an international players community, and the creation of an anthem under which to unite the South.

该视频讲述了一场婚礼，它代表着这些不同风格的南方嘻哈音乐的联姻、国际玩家社区的形成以及团结南方的国歌的创作。

Memphis’s DJ Paul and Juicy J produced the song with a sample from Dallas-raised Willie Hutch, combining a classic soul sound with a trap beat.

孟菲斯的 DJ Paul 和 Juicy J 使用达拉斯长大的 Willie Hutch 的样本制作了这首歌，将经典的灵魂声音与 trap 节拍相结合。

The outerposts of the Southern rap diaspora, Houston (represented by UGK) and Atlanta (OutKast), provided the South’s two lyrical styles over the Memphis production.

南方说唱侨民的前哨站休斯顿（以 UGK 为代表）和亚特兰大（OutKast）为孟菲斯的制作提供了南方的两种抒情风格。

It was past, present, and future.

它是过去、现在和未来。

Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia.

德克萨斯州、田纳西州和佐治亚州。

The “Int’l Players Anthem” was Southern hip-hop’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

《国际球员赞歌》是南方嘻哈音乐的《共和国战歌》。

But no need for more of that story, because we know how it ended—the South won.

但这个故事不需要更多了，因为我们知道它的结局——南方获胜。

It had triumphantly annexed and renamed and reclaimed hip-hop by pushing the border to the oceans and gulfs and beyond.

它通过将边界推向海洋、海湾甚至更远的地方，成功地吞并了嘻哈音乐，重新命名并重新夺回了嘻哈音乐。

Today, the sounds of Southern hip-hop—the lyrical cadences, the drum patterns, the style—are so commonplace that, writing for the Observer in 2016, music journalist Shawn Setaro asked in a headline, “Are the Sounds of Regional Hip-Hop Going Extinct?” Drake is at once Houston, New Orleans, and Memphis (and Toronto and Jamaica).

如今，南方嘻哈音乐的声音——抒情的节奏、鼓点、风格——已经司空见惯，以至于音乐记者 Shawn Setaro 在 2016 年为《观察家报》撰稿时在标题中问道：“地区嘻哈音乐的声音正在消失吗？”德雷克同时是休斯顿、新奥尔良和孟菲斯（以及多伦多和牙买加）。

The NYC-based A$AP Mob is regularly whispered about as warmed-over Atlanta trap music.

总部位于纽约的 A$AP Mob 经常被认为是炙手可热的亚特兰大 trap 音乐。

Indie artists in California are reviving Cleveland’s Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s rapid-fire, eighth-and-sixteenth-note flow, which those Midwesterners had stolen from Memphis’s Gangsta Pat.

加利福尼亚州的独立艺术家正在复兴克利夫兰的 Bone Thugs-N-Harmony 的快速八分音符和十六分音符流，这些中西部人从孟菲斯的 Gangsta Pat 那里偷来了这些音乐。

Atlanta’s Migos earned global popularity for a sound that came from Memphis.

亚特兰大的 Migos 凭借来自孟菲斯的声音赢得了全球知名度。

If regionalism hadn’t already lost its murderous, rigidly policed borders before, Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse,” a pop trap song featuring trap pioneer Juicy J, signaled its ultimate and vulgarly appropriative taming.

如果地方主义之前还没有失去其凶残、监管严格的边界，那么凯蒂·佩里 (Katy Perry) 的流行陷阱歌曲《黑马》(Dark Horse) 就标志着它最终被粗俗地驯服了。

H ow far we have come, cognitively if not temporally, from that history of coastal hip-hop battles, of East versus West and the Dirty Third versus everybody.

从沿海嘻哈音乐之战、东方与西方、肮脏第三者与所有人的历史来看，我们在认知上（如果不是暂时的）已经走了多远。

So far that there are now documentaries of sorts about that war.

到目前为止，已有关于那场战争的各种纪录片。

They aren’t Ken Burns– style PBS epics, but they are no less instructive in their messy and messily told histories, as well as in their clinging to the notion of neat, clean borders between East and West, antebellum and Reconstruction eras, pre- and post-1995 Source Awards, pre- and post-Obama America.

它们不是肯·伯恩斯（Ken Burns）风格的 PBS 史诗，但它们讲述的混乱和杂乱的历史，以及它们坚持东西方、内战前和重建时代、1995 年源奖前后、奥巴马时代前后的美国之间整洁、干净的边界的概念，同样具有启发性。

Both Southern hip-hop’s victorious march to the mainstream and Obama’s victory over the highest racial border wall in the land were violent, pyrrhic, and increasingly bizarre as the realities of victory set in.

南方嘻哈音乐向主流的胜利进军和奥巴马对这片土地上最高的种族边界墙的胜利都是暴力的、代价高昂的，并且随着胜利的现实的到来而变得越来越奇怪。

Notorious, the biopic about the life and death of the East Coast’s giant, came out in theaters days before Obama’s inauguration.

关于东海岸巨人生与死的传记片《臭名昭著》在奥巴马就职前几天在影院上映。

White folks thought that if a biracial, black-identified man could make it to inauguration day without being assassinated, then for sure that day would bring about the double-death of racial and regional borders between black and white.

白人认为，如果一个混血、黑人身份的人能够在就职典礼当天不被暗杀，那么这一天肯定会带来黑人和白人之间种族和地区边界的双重死亡。

But shortly thereafter, even robots on the internet, entirely of their own volition, were calling the president a nigger.

但此后不久，就连互联网上的机器人也完全自愿地称总统为黑鬼。

A couple of years later, at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Obama was able to joke that his white supremacist successor-to-be, having put rumors about the president’s birth certificate to rest, could get back to investigating more important things—like the whereabouts of Biggie and Tupac.

几年后，在 2011 年白宫记者晚宴上，奥巴马开玩笑说，他的白人至上主义继任者在平息了有关总统出生证明的谣言后，可以重新开始调查更重要的事情——比如比吉和图帕克的下落。

These black men’s unsolved murders and the coastal war their deaths reflected were a punchline for a black president whose race enabled him to make the joke just as much as white folks’ belief in him as a post-racial symbol did.

这些黑人悬而未决的谋杀案以及他们的死亡所反映的沿海战争对于一位黑人总统来说是一个笑点，他的种族使他能够开这个玩笑，就像白人对他作为后种族象征的信仰一样。

He had equated birtherism with our national lack of care for black lives and black deaths, which is only funny because we accept this absence of empathy as not conspiracy but as empirically proven, mundane reality.

他将出生论等同于我们国家缺乏对黑人生命和黑人死亡的关心，这很有趣，因为我们认为这种缺乏同理心不是阴谋，而是经验证明的世俗现实。

Birtherism, like the prospect of Trump’s election to the presidency, was absurd then.

生育论，就像特朗普当选总统的前景一样，在当时是荒谬的。

In 2012, when Trayvon Martin was murdered in a Florida suburb, Obama was running for re-election and said the slain teen could have been his son.

2012年，当特雷冯·马丁在佛罗里达州郊区被谋杀时，正在竞选连任的奥巴马表示，被杀的青少年可能是他的儿子。

Two months after Martin was murdered, Tupac Shakur was resurrected as a projected image on the Coachella stage in California to perform for a largely white crowd.

马丁被谋杀两个月后，图帕克·沙库尔以投影形象复活在加州科切拉音乐节舞台上，为以白人为主的观众表演。

We were all wearing hoodies then, which had become newly associated exclusively with black maleness, and I wondered, if Trayvon had been shirtless—like Tupac was on that stage, like white folks liked him and other black men in the 1990s—would he have lived?

那时我们都穿着连帽衫，这已成为新近与黑人男性的专属联系，我想知道，如果特雷冯赤裸上身——就像舞台上的图帕克那样，就像白人喜欢他和 20 世纪 90 年代的其他黑人一样——他还能活下去吗？

I wondered if George Zimmerman would have stood his ground against a hologram.

我想知道乔治·齐默尔曼是否会在全息图面前坚持自己的立场。

At the Africa in April Festival in Memphis that year, I saw a framed print for sale that included images of, among others, Biggie, Tupac, Barack Obama, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Rosa Parks.

那年在孟菲斯举行的非洲四月节上，我看到一张待售的镶框印刷品，其中包括比吉、图帕克、巴拉克·奥巴马、马丁·路德·金、纳尔逊·曼德拉和罗莎·帕克斯等人的照片。

The borders were down.

边界已经下降。

Political prisoners and presidents, rappers and actors, martyrs and live talismans, were imagined together in ways respectability politics would not have allowed before.

政治犯和总统、说唱歌手和演员、烈士和活生生的护身符，以以前体面政治所不允许的方式被想象在一起。

Looking at the faces on that print, I thought the Mayans were right after all: the world had ended.

看着那张印刷品上的面孔，我认为玛雅人终究是对的：世界已经终结。

Tupac’s biopic, released in June 2017 for the artist’s forty-sixth birthday, had the potential to give us some real regional grounding (like Straight Outta Compton had given us the previous year).

图帕克的传记片于 2017 年 6 月为庆祝这位艺术家的四十六岁生日而上映，有可能为我们提供一些真正的地区基础（就像前一年的《冲出康普顿》给我们带来的那样）。

But the film’s release was so thoroughly ensconced in the turbulent and frenzied campaign of our nation’s “first white president” (in the later words of Ta-Nehisi Coates) that its assertion of the borders that animated the 1990s threw our current borderless state, temporal and geographical, into sharp relief.

但这部电影的上映完全融入了我们国家“第一位白人总统”（塔-内西斯·科茨后来的说法）的动荡和疯狂的竞选活动中，以至于它对 20 世纪 90 年代充满活力的边界的主张，使我们目前在时间和地理上无国界的状态暴露无遗。

We already couldn’t tell where the loop ended and real life began, checking to see if we had been shot when videos of police murders of black people autoplay on our newsfeeds.

当警察谋杀黑人的视频在我们的新闻源上自动播放时，我们已经无法判断循环在哪里结束，现实生活从哪里开始，检查我们是否被枪杀。

We already had trouble distinguishing video from the L.A.

我们已经很难区分来自洛杉矶的视频了。

riots from that of the Baltimore uprisings without date-stamped footage.

巴尔的摩起义的骚乱没有日期标记的镜头。

The Tupac biopic was thus doomed in theaters and on the internet and in history.

因此，图帕克传记片在影院、互联网和历史上都注定失败。

Seizing on the Fake News that an iPhone appears in the movie though the device would not have been invented until over a decade later, Black Twitter conjured a Trump-era Tupac— swiping left on Tinder, dropping albums on SoundCloud, and unfollowing Biggie on IG.

Black Twitter 抓住了电影中出现 iPhone 的假新闻，尽管这款设备直到十多年后才被发明，Black Twitter 召唤出特朗普时代的 Tupac——在 Tinder 上向左滑动，在 SoundCloud 上删除专辑，并在 IG 上取消关注 Biggie。

Perhaps he would have moved back to the East Coast after Suge Knight’s incarceration.

也许在苏格·奈特入狱后他会搬回东海岸。

Still up for debate is whether Tupac would have met with our Orange Caesar at Trump Tower about racial reconciliation.

仍有争议的是，图帕克是否会在特朗普大厦会见我们的橙色凯撒，讨论种族和解问题。

These memorial projects for regional hip-hop battles and their iconic leaders—their Grants and Shermans and Lees—reveal a difficult truth about the war’s outcome.

这些纪念地区嘻哈战争及其标志性领导人——格兰特、谢尔曼斯和李斯的纪念项目揭示了关于战争结果的一个艰难的真相。

Southern places, those “many Souths,” joined forces to make a unified coast, taking over the national sonic landscape.

南方的地方，那些“许多南方”，联合起来建立了一个统一的海岸，接管了全国的声音景观。

In doing so, Southern hip-hop, artists and consumers alike, has contributed to its undoing and remaking into an image we don’t recognize and can’t quite locate and bind.

在这样做的过程中，南方嘻哈音乐、艺术家和消费者都为它的毁灭和重塑做出了贡献，使其成为我们无法识别、无法定位和绑定的形象。

Today, the average listener, and even a fair number of musicologists, can’t tell where a particular hip-hop artist is from just by the sound.

如今，普通听众，甚至相当多的音乐学家，都无法仅通过声音来判断某个特定的嘻哈艺术家来自哪里。

Whither and wherefore the South now, Third Coast?

现在南方在哪里，为什么是第三海岸？

The South indeed won the war, but at what cost?

南方确实赢得了战争，但代价是什么？

To make a place for itself, Southern hip-hop had laid claim to the fiction of regional borders.

为了为自己占据一席之地，南方嘻哈音乐声称虚构了地区边界。

This is the same fiction that says black folks are doing better or worse or different in this or that place rather than being disproportionately killed, quickly or slowly, everywhere we are.

这同一个小说说，黑人在这个或那个地方做得更好或更差或不同，而不是在我们所在的任何地方或快或慢地被不成比例地杀害。

M y favorite cousin was in Kentucky from the end of Clinton’s first term through midway into Obama’s.

从克林顿第一任期末到奥巴马任期中期，我最喜欢的表弟一直在肯塔基州。

Off probation but still financially unable to move, she had set her sights on getting back across the border, back South, back home.

缓刑结束后，她在经济上仍然无法搬家，她的目标是越过边境，回到南方，回到家乡。

In the second term of the Bush II years, I had begun coming back and forth to Kentucky, having gotten myself a boyfriend who was from the suburbs of Louisville.

在布什二世的第二个任期内，我开始往返于肯塔基州，给自己找了一个来自路易斯维尔郊区的男朋友。

Fulton felt much farther from Louisville than the geographic distance indicated, and when I would see the sign indicating I had crossed the Kentucky border, I would look west, wistful and sad and ashamed of the distance between us.

富尔顿感觉离路易斯维尔比所示的地理距离要远得多，当我看到指示我已经越过肯塔基州边境的标志时，我会向西看去，对我们之间的距离感到渴望、悲伤和羞愧。

But my boyfriend’s face was there in the way, as he was usually the one driving.

但我男朋友的脸挡住了路，因为他通常是开车的。

He was handsome and a legacy Morehouse alum, while I had gone to the local public schools from kindergarten up to my Master’s program.

他很英俊，是莫尔豪斯学院的校友，而我从幼儿园一直到硕士课程都在当地的公立学校上学。

When we would arrive at his parents’ home—his childhood home—the snow on the outside and the ice on the inside made me think perhaps the North started there, after all.

当我们到达他父母的家——他童年的家——外面的雪和里面的冰让我觉得北方也许就是从那里开始的。

I had dated rich boys before and been refuse and refused by the mothers, who were generally the same whether they were high yellow or Jamaican coffee brown.

我以前和有钱的男孩约会过，都被母亲拒绝和拒绝，无论是高黄还是牙买加咖啡棕色，她们大体都是一样的。

But this one, skin somewhere in the middle, had come further than the others.

但这个位于中间某处的皮肤，比其他人走得更远。

Amongst other things, she had been a higher education administrator on the East Coast while her husband finished his residency, then she had compromised and moved to the Midwest—that’s what they called Kentucky—for him to start his medical practice.

除此之外，她曾在东海岸担任高等教育管理员，而她的丈夫完成了住院医师实习，然后她妥协并搬到了中西部（也就是他们所说的肯塔基州），以便他开始他的医疗实践。

She longed to be back on the East Coast, maybe Baltimore this time.

她渴望回到东海岸，也许这次是巴尔的摩。

Her husband had promised her that they wouldn’t make a life in such a provincial place as Louisville, one that mispronounced its French name, but here they were, two college-educated children later.

她的丈夫向她保证，他们不会在路易斯维尔这样一个地方性的地方谋生，因为这个地方的法语名字念错了，但他们却在这里，两个后来受过大学教育的孩子。

Still in Kentucky.

还在肯塔基州。

She and her husband both joked that she had been a country girl he plucked stick-legged up from poverty, but if there was any trace of that, it, like the lines in her face, did not matter.

她和丈夫都开玩笑说，她是他从贫困中捡来的一个乡下姑娘，但如果有任何痕迹，就像她脸上的皱纹一样，那也没关系。

Her eyes, tiny behind her glasses like her son’s behind his, peered at me, searching for something to recognize and discard, and I tried to hide from them so I wouldn’t become refuse so quickly.

她的眼睛在眼镜后面，就像她儿子在眼镜后面的小眼睛一样，凝视着我，寻找着可以识别和丢弃的东西，而我试图躲开它们，这样我就不会那么快被拒绝。

She admired and resented and pitied my clawing up the class ladder, a single mother with a graduate degree and a baby’s daddy who had died, and she wondered what her son saw in me.

她钦佩、怨恨、怜悯我在阶级阶梯上的攀爬，一个拥有研究生学位的单亲母亲和一个去世的婴儿的父亲，她想知道她的儿子在我身上看到了什么。

She would casually question me in a beautiful upstairs listening room, or reading room, or maybe it was a sunroom, with fine rugs and elegant plants that craned carefully toward the sun, so bougie they appeared to enjoy the Thelonious Monk playing on the fancy speaker system.

她会在楼上一间漂亮的听音室、阅览室，或者也许是日光浴室里随意地向我提问，那里铺着精美的地毯，优雅的植物小心翼翼地向太阳伸展，所以他们似乎很喜欢在精美的扬声器系统上演奏塞隆尼斯·蒙克(Thelonious Monk)。

I had made it across the class border, but not really.

我已经跨越了阶级界限，但并没有真正跨越。

I could pretend, and I could achieve, but I was still the woman with that tongue, adjunct-teaching and striving with past-due bills and collections, and not enough money or will anywhere in my family to get my cousin the one hundred miles south back to Memphis.

我可以假装，我可以实现，但我仍然是那个能说会道的女人，兼职教学，并为逾期未付的账单和催收而奋斗，而我家里没有足够的钱或意愿让我的表弟向南一百英里回到孟菲斯。

Never have I felt as stank in life as I did on that settee in that upstairs room with the unclear use.

我一生中从来没有像在楼上那张用途不明的长沙发上那样感到如此臭气熏天。

Me and him—and them, and that border—broke up the same year my cousin finally made it home.

我和他——还有他们，还有那条边界——在我表弟终于回家的那一年就分手了。

I swore off Kentucky for seven years.

我发誓离开肯塔基七年了。

T hrough the Coast Wars, Kentucky tried to stay neutral like it did in the previous century, but it still didn’t want to be in the Union—clearly not.

在海岸战争中，肯塔基州试图像上个世纪那样保持中立，但它仍然不想加入联邦——显然不是。

No state that births a rap group that calls itself Nappy Roots and allows said rap group to name an album Watermelon, Chicken & Gritz wants to be a part of the United States of America.

没有哪个州诞生了一个自称为“Nappy Roots”的说唱团体，并允许该说唱团体将一张专辑命名为“Watermelon, Chicken & Gritz”，并希望成为美利坚合众国的一部分。

Nappy Roots certainly didn’t want to be neutral.

尿布根当然不想保持中立。

Aided by and spurring on the South’s ongoing sonic and cultural victories, Nappy Roots had pioneered mainstream rap success for country boys from Kentucky.

在南方不断取得的声音和文化胜利的帮助和激励下，Nappy Roots 为来自肯塔基州的乡村男孩开创了主流说唱的成功。

Even though I was still fire-hot at Kentucky for trapping my favorite cousin there, I thought Nappy Roots’ choice to commit to a recognizable South, complete with gospel organs and soul beats, meant that the border might stop being as wretched as it had been to her.

尽管我仍然因为把我最喜欢的表弟困在那里而对肯塔基州感到愤怒，但我认为纳皮·鲁茨选择致力于一个可识别的南方，那里有福音风琴和灵魂的节拍，这意味着边境可能不再像她以前那样悲惨。

Maybe there was a home away from home for her, and maybe after her probation was over, the border would relax and stop gripping her so tightly.

也许对她来说有一个家外之家，也许在她的缓刑期结束后，边界会放松，不再那么紧紧地抓住她。

From Bowling Green and Louisville, Nappy Roots seemed to go to the borders to search out the real country, a racially diverse but unequal middle America where small-town folks got along despite and because of differences.

纳皮·鲁茨似乎从鲍灵格林和路易斯维尔出发，前往边境寻找真正的国家，一个种族多元化但不平等的美国中部，小镇上的人们尽管存在差异，但仍然相处融洽。

Black Southern bohemians added Nappy Roots to their playlists alongside Common, Lauryn Hill, and Mos Def, so-called “conscious” artists from the North, preferring the country gangstas to the city ones busy crafting trap music.

南方黑人波希米亚人将 Nappy Roots 与 Common、Lauryn Hill 和 Mos Def 一起添加到他们的播放列表中，这些所谓的来自北方的“有意识”的艺术家，他们更喜欢乡村黑帮，而不是忙于制作陷阱音乐的城市黑帮。

This group had brought back Arrested Development’s vibe, but instead of gestures toward the African continent as Motherland, the Kentucky country, and other country spaces like it across the South, was the destination.

这个团体带回了《发展受阻》的氛围，但目的地不是将非洲大陆视为祖国，而是肯塔基州和南方其他类似的乡村空间。

Nappy Roots’ video for their single “Po’ Folks” has wizened white folks, barns, overalls, and an elderly black man opening the video, saying, “Welcome to Kentucky.

Nappy Roots 的单曲《Po' Folks》视频让白人、谷仓、工装裤变得干瘪，一位年长的黑人在打开视频时说道：“欢迎来到肯塔基州。

We deal with friendship.

我们对待友谊。

We love to get along.

我们喜欢相处。

Kentucky, I love you!” When I first saw it in college, I was baffled by the presence of white folks because their country wasn’t like ours.

肯塔基，我爱你！”当我在大学第一次看到它时，我对白人的存在感到困惑，因为他们的国家不像我们的国家。

In retrospect, there’s both sincerity and satire in the old man’s declaration, and there’s an invisible interchangeability between “love” and “have” to get along, made possible by the speaker’s Southern accent.

回想起来，老人的宣言中既有真诚，也有讽刺，在相处中，“爱”和“有”之间存在着无形的互换性，而说话者的南方口音却使之成为可能。

I reckon you “have” to get along in a border state that didn’t want to give up slavery, one that sent Great Migration movers flowing across the river to the real Midwest, and one in which your people are ten percent of the population.

我认为你“必须”在一个不想放弃奴隶制的边境州相处，这个边境州让大迁徙者越过河流到达真正的中西部，而且你的人民占人口的百分之十。

If that black man is still alive, I bet he doesn’t think ending the Obamacare Medicaid expansion in Kentucky is “dealing with friendship.”

如果那个黑人还活着，我敢打赌他不会认为结束肯塔基州的奥巴马医改医疗补助扩张是“处理友谊”。

Nappy Roots’ Southern strategy affirmed the Third Coast’s victory in the border wars and also resisted the inevitable and inequitable progress of their hometowns, which meant becoming Midwestern and leaving the South, and its past, behind.

纳皮·鲁茨的南方战略肯定了第三海岸在边境战争中的胜利，同时也抵制了他们家乡不可避免的、不公平的进步，这意味着成为中西部并把南方及其过去抛在后面。

“Them country boys on the rise” with “them big fat wheels” and “vertical grills” knew where they stood.

“这些正在崛起的乡村男孩”拥有“大轮子”和“垂直烤架”，知道自己的立场。

While OutKast gave Southern hip-hop country accents and city critique, Nappy Roots gave us the actual country, way up North—or up South, as it were—something to hold on to, a border to maintain on the outskirts of the rapidly homogenizing mainstream.

《OutKast》赋予了南方嘻哈乡村口音和城市批判，而《Nappy Roots》则给了我们真正的乡村，远在北方——或者可以说是南方——一些可以坚守的东西，一个在迅速同质化的主流边缘维持的边界。

Outwardly, the state was redefining itself as the Midwest, proudly reminding folks that the Cincinnati airport was actually within Kentucky’s borders, selling Appalachia as a region all its own, and championing its mid-size cities as new homes for the droves of millennial and Gen-X whites being displaced from the coasts by richer whites with tech jobs.

从表面上看，该州正在将自己重新定义为中西部，自豪地提醒人们辛辛那提机场实际上在肯塔基州境内，将阿巴拉契亚作为一个独立的地区出售，并倡导其中型城市成为成群结队的千禧一代和X一代白人的新家园，这些白人被拥有科技工作的富裕白人从沿海地区取代。

There is room for regionalism in this landscape of new cities with millennial amenities, but not the kind that calls up painful, palpable borders—just the kind that sells well.

在这个拥有千禧一代便利设施的新城市景观中，有地方主义的空间，但不是那种会引起痛苦、明显边界的地方主义，而是那种畅销的地方主义。

Louisville’s r&b darling, Bryson Tiller, is exemplary of the border’s end, smashing together two genres—trap and soul—so we will understand who he is in America’s new post-border-war, post-racial sonic landscape.

路易斯维尔的 R&B 宠儿 Bryson Tiller 是边境终结的典范，他将陷阱音乐和灵魂乐这两种音乐风格融为一体，因此我们将了解他在美国新的后边境战争、后种族音乐景观中的身份。

Soul is a black Southern sound, made an American export, returned to the States with the British Invasion, and made pop over a generation of sonic appropriation.

灵魂乐是一种黑人南方声音，出口到美国，随着英国入侵而回到美国，并在一代人的声音挪用中流行起来。

Trap, born in Memphis, chopped and screwed in Houston, and made popular in Atlanta, is at once an Atlanta sound, a Southern sound, a hip-hop sound, and an American pop sound.

Trap 诞生于孟菲斯，在休斯敦被砍伐和拧紧，并在亚特兰大流行起来，它既是亚特兰大音乐，南方音乐，嘻哈音乐，又是美国流行音乐。

When we say the words “trap” and “soul,” we know what they mean and what they sound like, but we may have forgotten when, whence, and wherefore they came.

当我们说“陷阱”和“灵魂”这两个词时，我们知道它们的意思和听起来像什么，但我们可能忘记了它们是何时、从何而来、为何而来的。

When everything is Southern, nothing is.

当一切都是南方时，什么都不是。

To be sure, the symbols are there.

可以肯定的是，符号就在那里。

In the video for “Don’t,” Tiller’s most popular single, he dons a cap that bears the words KENTUCKY LIFE marking place in a post-place landscape.

在蒂勒最受欢迎的单曲《Don’t》的视频中，他戴了一顶帽子，帽子上写着“肯塔基生活”，标志着后地方景观中的地方。

There is the insistent staccato rap of the classic trap snare, slowed down to fit the purposes of Tiller’s r&b, less the crooner variety and more the soft, airy, emo sounds popularized by Toronto-raised artist the Weeknd.

经典 trap 军鼓中持续不断的断奏说唱，放慢速度以适应 Tiller 的 r&b 目的，少了一些低吟浅唱的风格，多了一些由多伦多长大的艺术家 The Weeknd 所推广的柔和、轻快、情绪化的声音。

The sound is from everywhere and from nowhere.

声音无处不在，又无处不在。

While Nappy Roots moved between Bowling Green and Louisville, Tiller narrates “Louisville to Lexington” trips on “Exchange,” those two cities placeholders for young commuters traveling for school and work and love between cities anywhere and everywhere.

当纳皮·鲁茨在鲍灵格林和路易斯维尔之间穿梭时，蒂勒在“交换”中​​讲述了“路易斯维尔到列克星敦”的旅行，这两个城市为年轻通勤者提供了在各地城市之间上学、工作和爱情的占位符。

Tiller is a product of Kentucky’s rebranding as something other than Southern, a border that can contain and produce American multitudes.

蒂勒是肯塔基州重新定位的产物，它不再是南部的边界，而是一个可以容纳和产生美国人的边界。

Perhaps Kentucky is who and what America has been all along.

也许肯塔基州就是美国一直以来的样子。

I can still empirically enumerate place differences, quantitative and qualitative, and why they matter.

我仍然可以凭经验列举定量和定性的地点差异，以及它们为何重要。

I still know the borders.

我仍然知道边界。

I remember them, and I recall trying to cross them in myself and on my tongue.

我记得它们，我记得我曾试图在自己的内心和舌头上划过它们。

I remember wanting to destroy them, their walls and how they separated me from who I thought I should be, and me from my cousin, and Southern pasts from Southern futures.

我记得我想摧毁它们，摧毁它们的围墙，以及它们如何将我与我认为应该成为的人分开，将我与我的表弟分开，将南方的过去与南方的未来分开。

But if they are gone now, I wonder if they were ever there, and if they will someday be back unexpectedly.

但如果他们现在走了，我想知道他们是否曾经在那里，以及是否有一天他们会意外地回来。

“D on’t,” the single from everywhere and nowhere that Bryson Tiller released first on SoundCloud, had reached No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart a few weeks prior, but that didn’t mean I had any business being lost in the backroads of Central Kentucky by myself in a rental near dusk.

布莱森·蒂勒 (Bryson Tiller) 在 SoundCloud 上首次发行的单曲《D on't》在几周前就已在 Billboard Hot 100 排行榜上名列第 13 位，但这并不意味着我在黄昏时独自在肯塔基州中部偏僻的出租屋里丢掉了任何生意。

The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost knew Kentucky was still the South and had warned me—but technology had supplanted the Holy Trinity.

圣父、圣子和圣灵知道肯塔基州仍然是南方，并警告过我——但科技已经取代了神圣的三位一体。

The white GPS lady wasn’t loud enough for me to hear her over Missy Elliott on full volume and over me singing Missy Elliott on full volume, too.

那位 GPS 白人女士的声音不够大，让我听不到她用最大音量唱《Missy Elliott》，也听不到我用最大音量唱《Missy Elliott》。

I may also have been dancing too loud.

我也可能跳舞太大声了。

But there I was, now half an hour away from what before was only ten minutes away, and the white GPS lady had grown silent after telling me to continue on some sloping rural road for fifteen miles.

但我就在那里，现在距离以前只有十分钟的路程有半个小时的路程，而那位带 GPS 的白人女士告诉我继续在一条倾斜的乡村道路上行驶 15 英里后就变得沉默了。

I did as she said but I did not trust her, especially when rolling yard after rolling yard had TRUMP-PENCE signs blooming at their edges, which seemed both fair warning and a setup for an ambush.

我按照她说的做了，但我不相信她，尤其是当一个又一个的滚动场边缘都绽放出特朗普-彭斯标志时，这似乎既是公平的警告，又是伏击的准备。

It was March of the presidential election year, an early and pleasant spring, and I was headed to Centre College for student-of-color recruitment weekend.

那是总统选举年的三月，一个早春而宜人的春天，我正前往中心学院参加有色人种学生招生周末。

I knew I was wrong to be there.

我知道我在那里是错误的。

I knew students of color weren’t welcome in small, majority-white college towns like Danville, no matter what the brochures full of blacks and browns might imply, and I felt complicit and wrong because I planned to give my diversity workshop and keynote without telling the prospective students to just turn up the Missy and run.

我知道有色人种的学生在像丹维尔这样的白人占多数的小大学城里是不受欢迎的，无论充满黑人和棕色人种的小册子可能意味着什么，我觉得自己是同谋，也是错误的，因为我计划举办多元化研讨会和主题演讲，却没有告诉未来的学生打开米西就跑。

“This is my country,” I said aloud to fascism, gripping a perfect ten and two and holding out hope the GPS lady wasn’t a white supremacist.

“这是我的国家，”我对法西斯主义大声说道，握着完美的十和二，并希望这位GPS女士不是白人至上主义者。

The computers are coming for black people first.

计算机首先是为黑人而来的。

Arriving in a college town after being on rural roads is a breath, an ease, because there are stoplights (invented by a black person) and thus some kind of order.

沿着乡村道路到达大学城是一种呼吸，一种轻松，因为有红绿灯（由黑人发明），因此有某种秩序。

The violence of those towns is familiar and quotidian—unlike the uncertainty of those roads, with their lying mile markers and suspicious, distant porches.

这些城镇的暴力事件是熟悉且司空见惯的——与那些道路的不确定性不同，道路上有倒塌的里程标记和可疑的遥远门廊。

Every part and place of them harasses you until they know you are affiliated with the college, and they perpetually harass the townspeople who look like you.

他们的每一个部分和每一个地方都会骚扰你，直到他们知道你隶属于学院，并且他们永远骚扰长得像你的城镇居民。

College towns typically have a couple of darling spots for respite, a well-appointed square, a tea shop, or a sparse but surprisingly good gallery.

大学城通常有几个令人喜爱的休息场所，一个设备齐全的广场，一家茶馆，或者一个稀疏但出奇的好画廊。

These comforting spots mute the palpability of that violence for a bit.

这些令人安慰的地方暂时削弱了暴力的明显性。

After I survived the white GPS lady and the specter of Kentucky Trump supporters, I went to Danville’s version of that place, a wall-to-wall whiskey shop with good food.

在我躲过了白人 GPS 女士和肯塔基州特朗普支持者的幽灵之后，我去了丹维尔版的那个地方，一家满墙的威士忌店，提供美味的食物。

I ate and drank and ate to spite fascism, talked town-gown relations and campus rape culture with the sociology-major bartender, bantered with the patrons about Kentucky basketball, and finally strutted back to my on-campus cottage in the dark.

我大吃大喝，用吃来对抗法西斯主义，与社会学专业的调酒师谈论城镇礼服关系和校园强奸文化，与顾客们开玩笑地谈论肯塔基州的篮球，最后在黑暗中大摇大摆地回到我的校园小屋。

Then I felt all kinds of safe and satiated in a way a black girl never should.

然后我感到各种安全和满足，这是黑人女孩永远不会有的。

I felt guilty for feeling safe and satiated because of how many black girls were right then unsafe, and I had done nothing to deserve safety or satiation over them.

我因为感到安全和满足而感到内疚，因为当时有多少黑人女孩不安全，而我没有做任何值得她们获得安全或满足的事情。

In Danville seven years after I had broken up with my Kentucky boyfriend, I had made it across the border of questions about class and race and legitimacy and belonging, evidenced by my ability to walk into the town’s lovely places, have some fine food and drink, and be welcomed despite my blackness and history and life in the Deep South.

在丹维尔，在我与肯塔基州男友分手七年后，我已经跨越了阶级、种族、合法性和归属感等问题的界限，这一点从我有能力走进镇上可爱的地方，享受一些美味的食物和饮料，尽管我是黑人、有历史和在南方腹地生活，但我还是受到了欢迎。

I had brought my Professor Voice, but I didn’t even need it.

我带来了教授之声，但我什至不需要它。

No need to hide who I was.

无需隐藏我是谁。

Maybe I had been wrong about this place.

也许我对这个地方的看法是错误的。

Maybe everybody here listened to Bryson Tiller.

也许这里的每个人都听了布莱森·蒂勒的讲话。

Maybe I would tell the students just to be themselves from the start, to not worry about the borders in and beyond themselves, and they could be just fine anywhere they wanted to be in this world.

也许我会告诉学生们从一开始就要做自己，不要担心自己内外的界限，他们可以在这个世界上任何他们想去的地方都很好。

Maybe the border had finally been neutralized.

也许边界终于被解除了。

Maybe the border was over.

也许边界已经结束了。

The next day I fancied myself just as fine as the food and drink and cross-racial conversation I had had the night previous, and likely finer, throwing my booty back and forth in a form-fitting dress across that same sidewalk on the way back to my cottage.

第二天，我想象自己和前一天晚上的食物和饮料以及跨种族对话一样好，而且可能更好，在返回我的小屋的路上，穿着合身的衣服在同一条人行道上来回扔着我的战利品。

They say Mama came out pigeon-toed and switching, but I had acquired my walk much later when the grown-woman thickness could no longer wait.

他们说，妈妈出来时内八字，经常变换姿势，但我是在很久以后才学会走路的，当时成熟女人的厚度已经等不及了。

I was headed back to gather my things for my keynote, deciding whether or not I would keep on the blue tights or change into the maroon ones.

我正回去收拾我的主题演讲的东西，决定是继续穿蓝色紧身衣还是换上栗色紧身衣。

A car pulled past me on that safe two-lane college-town road, slowing up a bit as if to ask for directions.

一辆汽车在那条安全的双车道大学城道路上从我身边驶过，放慢了速度，好像在问路。

Its front-seat passenger threw out a Styrofoam cup full of ice and liquid, and spit out a “nigger” to go along with it.

其前座乘客扔出了一个装满冰块和液体的泡沫塑料杯，并随手吐出一个“黑鬼”。

The driver hadn’t well calculated the speeds—my big-booty walk, the speed of the car, the velocity of the projectile relative to the volume of liquid in the cup—so the cup and its contents somehow missed my ass and thighs and landed with a quick thud-crash at my feet.

司机没有很好地计算速度——我的大屁股走路、汽车的速度、射弹相对于杯子里液体体积的速度——所以杯子和里面的东西不知何故错过了我的屁股和大腿，然后迅速地重重地落在我的脚边。

I stopped and watched the car accelerate off, attempting half-heartedly to commit its license plate to memory, looking around to see who else might have seen, wondering if the driver had recognized me, and deciding too late to curse.

我停下来，看着汽车加速驶离，半心半意地试图记住它的车牌，环顾四周看看还有谁可能看到了，想知道司机是否认出了我，但决定咒骂已经太晚了。

I looked down at the mess at my feet.

我低头看着脚下的脏乱差。

The ice was there, ejected and sad and afraid to melt on the sidewalk.

冰就在那里，被喷射出来，令人悲伤，害怕在人行道上融化。

The liquid was busy integrating and darkening the concrete.

液体正忙于整合并使混凝土变暗。

Kentucky couldn’t even do one-shot drive-by racism right.

肯塔基州甚至无法正确处理一击即过的种族主义。

I wore the maroon tights.

我穿的是栗色紧身衣。

M y sister liked to stop overnight in Bowling Green on her drive home from her interpreter job in Indiana, where she worked some sixty hours a week.

我姐姐在印第安纳州做翻译工作，每周工作大约六十小时，开车回家时喜欢在鲍灵格林过夜。

She would stay in the same hotel and in the morning she would get up and have breakfast and go to her favorite place, Bargain Hunt.

她会住在同一家酒店，早上起床吃早餐，然后去她最喜欢的地方“讨价还价”。

Then she would head home.

然后她就会回家。

Bowling Green was a halfway point of sorts, a stop, a respite, before the rest of the journey to Memphis.

在前往孟菲斯的其余旅程之前，鲍灵格林可以说是一个中途站、一个停靠站、一个喘息的地方。

And on her way back to work, from holiday or bereavement leave for our father’s funeral, she would set her old GPS for Bargain Hunt, Bowling Green, KY, and head there first.

当她从假期或丧假去参加我们父亲的葬礼返回工作的路上时，她会将她的旧 GPS 设置为肯塔基州鲍灵格林的讨价还价狩猎，然后先前往那里。

After our fathers died, my cousin told my sister about the voice she’d heard during that fight all those years previous.

我们的父亲去世后，我的表弟告诉我姐姐她在多年前的那场战斗中听到的声音。

My sister, in telling it to me, said demons like that try to talk to us all the time.

我姐姐告诉我的时候，她说这样的恶魔一直试图和我们说话。

She said we needed to plead the blood of Jesus over whatever we touched to make sure the demons couldn’t cross the border to us; we needed to leave them no access portals.

她说我们需要为我们所接触的一切祈求耶稣的宝血，以确保恶魔无法越过边界来到我们身边；我们需要不给他们留下任何入口。

She bought new things from Bargain Hunt to replace her old things, including her own lamps that she brought to the hotel in case the hotel lights were access portals.

她从 Bargain Hunt 买了新东西来替换旧东西，包括她自己带到酒店的灯，以防酒店的灯成为入口。

On Good Friday the year after Daddy died, those demons came for my sister and she succumbed, with her own kind of spiritual leash chain.

爸爸死后那一年的耶稣受难日，那些恶魔来找我妹妹，而她也屈服了，带着她自己的精神束缚。

She was supposed to make the trip home to Memphis that Resurrection weekend, but she had planned to visit a friend in Nashville instead of making her usual stop in Bowling Green.

她本应在复活周末返回孟菲斯，但她原本计划去纳什维尔拜访一位朋友，而不是像往常一样在鲍灵格林停留。

But she had a psychotic break before she set out and never made it to the border, institutionalized in Indiana.

但她在出发前经历了一次精神崩溃，从未到达边境，在印第安纳州被收容。

To get back to her, help her fight the holy border fight, and bring her home, I’ll have to drive through Kentucky, across the border, to the Midwest.

为了回到她身边，帮助她参加神圣的边境斗争，并带她回家，我必须开车穿过肯塔基州，越过边境，到达中西部。

R eal or not, for black folks, region and regional borders have been part of strategies we used to lay claim to the co-creation of the nation, of national identity and culture.

不管真实与否，对于黑人来说，地区和地区边界一直是我们用来宣称共同创造国家、民族认同和文化的战略的一部分。

They have been how we have claimed home when and where there was no quarter, and when home doesn’t seem accessible in this country or in the vast continent from which our ancestors were brought.

当我们在这个国家或我们的祖先来自的广阔大陆上似乎无法找到家时，我们就以这种方式声称自己是家。

And how fitting that a thing that is ours becomes, again, a thing that is everyone’s.

属于我们的东西再次成为每个人的东西是多么合适。

Paul Mooney has said “everybody wanna be a nigga but don’t nobody wanna be a nigga”—that folks want the spoils without the burden.

保罗·穆尼说过“每个人都想成为一名黑鬼，但不是没有人想成为一名黑鬼”——人们想要的是战利品而不是负担。

But isn’t riding through Ole Miss’s campus blasting 2 Chainz from a pickup adorned with a HERITAGE NOT HATE sticker a damn good spoil?

但是，骑着一辆贴着 HERITAGE NOT HATE 贴纸的皮卡车穿过 Ole Miss 的校园，狂轰滥炸 2 Chainz，这难道不是一种非常好的战利品吗？

Isn’t 2 Chainz a kind of son of the Confederacy, the one comprising UGK and OutKast and Cash Money and No Limit and Juicy J and DJ Paul and Nappy Roots?

2 Chainz 不是 Confederacy 的儿子吗？这个联盟包括 UGK、OutKast、Cash Money、No Limit、Juicy J、DJ Paul 和 Nappy Roots？

Aren’t we all in one trap or another?

我们不都陷入了这样或那样的陷阱吗？

Didn’t Obama end racism?

奥巴马不是结束了种族主义吗？

Everybody wants to be Southern but don’t nobody want to be Southern, too.

每个人都想成为南方人，但并不是没有人也想成为南方人。

To enjoy the culture, to have gentrified ham hocks, but not to deal with ham hocks’ relationship to slavery or slavery’s relationship to the present and future.

享受文化，拥有高档化的火腿，但不去处理火腿与奴隶制的关系或奴隶制与现在和未来的关系。

Folks want the fried chicken and Nashville and trap country music (an actual thing) and sweet tea, but they don’t want Dylan-with-an-extra-“n” Roof or the monstrous spectacle and violence in Charlottesville or the gross neglect and racism after Katrina.

人们想要炸鸡、纳什维尔、陷阱乡村音乐（真实的东西）和甜茶，但他们不想要迪伦的额外“n”屋顶，也不想要夏洛茨维尔的可怕景象和暴力，也不想要卡特里娜飓风后的严重忽视和种族主义。

No one wants the parts of the South that make America great again.

没有人想要让美国再次伟大的南方地区。

It’s high time we move beyond the border sketched out in John Egerton’s provocative 1974 book, The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America —the South has been everything below the Canadian border all along.

现在是我们超越约翰·埃格顿 (John Egerton) 1974 年颇具争议性的著作《迪克西的美国化：美国的南方化》中所描绘的边界的时候了——南方一直是加拿大边境以下的一切。

If the Black Lives Matter chapters across Canada weigh in, then the South is above the Canadian border, too.

如果加拿大各地的“黑人生命也是命”分会发挥作用，那么南部也位于加拿大边境之上。

Though I’ll admit that “everything below the Arctic circle” doesn’t have a good ring to it.

尽管我承认“北极圈以下的一切”听起来并不好听。

Things are dirty on both sides of our nation’s internal border, it’s just that some folks won’t confess it.

我们国家内部边界两边的事情都很肮脏，只是有些人不承认而已。

The borders in us and between us seem ever more real, even as we strive to tear them down in service of one sound, one nation, undivided.

我们内部以及我们之间的边界似乎变得更加真实，即使我们为了一个声音、一个国家、一个不可分割的国家而努力拆除它们。

But one side always wins, and borders are never neutral.

但一方总是获胜，边界从来都不是中立的。

I’m just glad that the border wars in me are over for now.

我很高兴我内心的边界战争现在已经结束了。

When it’s time to cross Kentucky again, I’ll know exactly what I’m getting into, and I’ll be ready.

当再次穿越肯塔基州时，我会确切地知道自己将面临什么，并且我会做好准备。

I wonder if America ever will be.

我想知道美国是否会如此。

Zandria F.

赞德里亚·F.

Robinson is author of This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South and Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life, written with long-time collaborator Marcus Anthony Hunter.

罗宾逊是《这不是芝加哥：后灵魂时代南方的种族、阶级和地区身份》和《巧克力城市：美国生活的黑色地图》的作者，与长期合作者马库斯·安东尼·亨特合着。

Her writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Scalawag, the Believer, and the New York Times.

她的作品曾发表在《滚石》、《Scalawag》、《信徒》和《纽约时报》上。

In 2017, she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for an essay she wrote for this magazine.

2017 年，她因为本杂志撰写的一篇文章入围国家杂志奖决赛。