Axar.az presents the article “My Home” by John Samuel Tieman.

We vacationed in the Ozarks. My father's side of the family comes from the foothills of the Ozarks. I love this place when I don't hate it. One night, I spent an hour just watching the clouds. Another night, I spent an hour just watching the moon over the lake and its near-by forest. I love this place. These are my people. They're generous, kind, fun-loving. I put on my “Vietnam Veteran” cap, my St. Louis Cardinals t-shirt, hum “Jolene” and I'm home. Then there are all the Confederate flags, which I hate. On my father's side, I come from an unbroken line of hillbillies with as pure a pedigree hoosier-wise as any Windsor ever traced. And, yes, I love both Bedřich Smetana's “Vlatava” and Dolly Parton's “Jolene”. I'm as comfortable on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis as I am walking the trails in the Ozarks. It's a paradox I embrace.

And, yes, those Confederate flags. The racism. The xenophobia. The anti-Semitism. The homophobia. Yes, I hate it. I sometimes think that when God sees such cruelty, when God sees the carelessness of humans … . When God starts to doubt the reason for the creation, God then remembers the Ozarks in the morning, in the early morning when the fog still lies low in the valleys, when the fog wraps those valleys in more shades of blue and gray than mere language ever names.

So someone on TV asked the other day, “Where is Missouri?” I think he wanted to ask, “What is Missouri?” I expect my friends in Azerbaijan to know little about my state. But many Americans likewise know from little to nothing about my home. Missouri is a “flyover” state, right? Isn't it one of those M-I-something places, Minnesota, Michigan, Mississippi, one of those? They say “Midwest”, but what is it – is it in the middle, or is it in the West? Or is it southern? Don't Missourians speak with a Southern accent?

Where is Missouri? We live at the mean center of the United States. There are a variety of calculations to determine the center, but, to quote a fellow Missourian, “Thems ain't nuthin' no how.” In Standard English, we're it. We're the center. Why do you think everyone has to “fly over” us to get anywhere?

What is Missouri? A friend went to the airport to pick up a guest from somewhere out east. The guest started speaking like he was some drunken Texan comforting a dying armadillo he'd just run over. My friend finally asked. The guy explained that he was just being polite and speaking in a Missouri accent. Really? We speak the Midlands Dialect Of American English. There are variations of the dialect. Some of us sound like Huckleberry Finn, that's true. Most of us sound like the CBS Nightly News. We're not Southerners. Nor are we Westerners, Northerners, or Easterners. And just because a few of us use “y'all”, that doesn't make us Southerners. Please note that many of us say, “all of you.” Well, OK, and “you'ns”. But many of us actually speak Standard English.

What do people know about Missouri? Six million folks live in Missouri. About three million live in Greater St. Louis, and another two million live in the Kansas City area. Both of these metropolitan areas cross state lines. So you want to picture the average Missourian? The average Missourian is a suburban woman reading her “St. Louis Post-Dispatch” on her lunch break at her high-rise office. A lot of folks want to picture Missourians as small-town folks. OK. In “Waiting For Guffman”, Parker Posey's character, Libby Mae Brown, the perky Diary Queen employee, so, yes, that is one kind of small-town Missourian. So is Sheryl Crow. President Harry Truman was a small-town Missourian.

I resent the stereotype – fly over country, a bunch of hoosiers. We have great universities. The “St. Louis Post-Dispatch” has received 19 Pulitzer Prizes. The Arch is perhaps the most beautiful, or at least the largest, abstract sculpture in the world. We fry the finest catfish, and most years play some of the sweetest baseball in either league. We are the home of Langston Hughes, William Least Heat-Moon, William Burroughs, Reinhold Niebuhr, Vincent Price, John Goodman, T. S. Eliot and Josephine Baker. Anna Marie Bullock, known to the world as Tina Turner, graduated from Sumner High School in St. Louis, Class of 1958, and it was here she got her start in music. Scott Joplin wrote some of his finest music here. Heidi Gardner, of “Saturday Night Live”, hails from Kansas City. About one in six Missourians are Catholic. My neighborhood in St. Louis has one of the largest Jewish populations in the United States. You don't think of Missourians as Jews and Catholics, yet here we are.

Then there's racism. There's virtually segregated schools, economic injustice, and white flight. The greatest pain of racism is to tell someone that, because of the color of their skin, they will spend their life unwanted, unloved, uncared for. But there's nothing particularly Missourian about racism. Racism is as All-American as the balk or the double play.

I resent the “hoosier” implication, that all Missourians are unsophisticated. Just because we speak the Midlands Dialect Of American English, that's no reason to presume that on weekends we all go recreational cow tipping. This Saturday, my wife and I are going to the symphony. Missouri is conservative, true. Yet my congressional district was until recently represented by a Democratic Socialist, Cori Bush. Now it's represented by a liberal Democrat, Wesley Bell. In my neighborhood, you'll run into Hasidic Jews but nary a hillbilly. That said, we've seen folks who have traded teeth for meth. It's just not common. Which brings us back to that accent. Neither my wife nor I pronounce it “Missour-ah”. That said, my wife hates it when I “wa-R-sh” the clothes.