"Well, Lemme Let You Go" - The Art of Ending an Evening Among Southerners

An "Irish goodbye" is one of my favorite means of leaving an event with a larger crowd, but in more intimate settings within Southern culture, there stands a collection of rituals leading up to, and including, one's actual departure. The ceremonial dance is a delicate one: hesitancy mixed with determination, forward movement laced with slow stops, and lingering all the while with one eye toward the road. But why is that the case?

I have seen various versions of “cultural goodbyes” written about over the years by people from different regions. There are unmistakable similarities across geographically distanced areas. Some writers have given names to the various stages, steps, and movements as they have interpreted them, and I have done the same. But nearly every one of those tellings is written as a comedy of delay — the joke being how long it takes these poor folks to get home who are almost being held against their will. I don’t believe that is the heart of it. Delay is what you call a thing when you are holding off or holding back.

Down here leaving is a rite. A rite has parts, the parts come in an order, and every soul standing around knows this order without remembering when they learned it first. Rites also have sacrifices. The way we leave is not due to holding back in delay; it’s giving back out of love.

Though some of the particulars of each goodbye vary, if you are from the South or have spent time with us, you have experienced these.

Nobody down here has ever trusted a goodbye to hold the first time it’s said, and there is a reason for that. We have all been through the other kind of farewell, and we know exactly what it costs to be too quick about it.

The Statement of Intent: You do not decide to go home yourself; your hand decides it for you and informs you afterward. You find that, at the end of a sentence, and likely within a small lull in activity or conversation, you suddenly nod and pat the arm of the chair or the sofa — a judge with no court, and no case before you, but this is the gavel's strike.

You then speak the words that begin the ceremony. At this point, there are options:

"Well, lemme let you go."

"Already kept you too long as it is."

“We'd best be goin'."

"We've got work in the mornin'."

"Gotta go check on the dog."

In every case, these are not mere words, but the formal filing of your intent. It is the serving of a public notice that sometime in the next hour an engine may be turned over. Everybody in the room has heard the words before and knows exactly what they are worth when it comes to immediate action: next to nothing. But this is the approach and has been for ages, and so it is honored.

The Gathering of the Young: The word goes out of the front room and down the hall and through the kitchen and out the back door into the dark where the children were last heard out past the propane tank running full tilt at nothing in particular, three of them and somebody’s cousin. An adult goes out onto the back steps and calls names into the night and the night hands back the faint barking of a dog two farms over and nothing else.

So, the search turns inside, and they are collected one at a time, the way you’d gather eggs from a hen that moves her nest. One is under the bed with the cat and has entered into a deep friendship with that feline that he does not intend to break for any earthly reason. Another has taken shoes off sometime between supper and now and cannot give an account of them, and the shoes are found in two different rooms in odd, high-up places, which raises questions nobody has the time or the inclination to ask. And one has been asleep since eight o’clock on the coat pile in the back bedroom and has to be carried out folded over a shoulder like a sandwich board, with hair sweated flat and one arm swinging limply.

The Eventual Crossing of the Threshold: You are now standing with those you have visited, and here is where it turns peculiar: the talk you had in the chairs, on the sofa, and around the table just lies down and dies at the edge of the doorframe, and a brand-new line of conversing gets born right there, healthier and hungrier than the first one ever was.

Somebody’s hand is on the knob; it stays on the knob. The door may open a crack while the cold or the heat, depending on the season, slips through and stretches out on the floor like a hound that’s been let in before. Nobody sits back down, because sitting is a retreat, whereas standing is a promise of departure (albeit a faint one).

The Timeless Realm of the Porch: Now you are out the door, which looks and feels like swift progress to the uninitiated, but it isn’t in the slightest. The porch is an entirely new country unto itself with its own climate, laws, and customs, and no clock in it anywhere. You all stand, look down, and scuff your feet, while the conversation runs to the phase of the moon, and the fig tree that never did take, and whether the county intends to fix the road this side of the Resurrection, and whose boy it was that got the scholarship.

Nobody moves much except to nod and shift weight from one foot to the other.

The Offering of the Fixed Plate: Then one of the home's occupants is gone. Vanished. No announcement, no excuse, just gone mid-sentence back through the door like hearing one's own name called out urgently from the other room, and the rest of you go on talking as though leaving a conversation so suddenly were a normal thing.

The person comes back with a gift. Foil over the top of it, crimped down all the way around the edge with two fingers, sealed tight as a tomb and very heavy. "Here, I fixed you a plate."

You must receive it and comment on the generous heft of the offering while saying, "You didn't have to do that."  

You did not ask for it yet are not permitted to decline it. There is no place in this world in which such a refusal exists. To do so is to disgrace grace.

When it is placed in your hands, the words come that undo the whole evening’s work of departing: "Oh, just bring me back the dish when you get a chance,"

There it is. The leaving has scheduled its own sequel, and everybody standing on the porch knows it, and not one of you says so. The next visit is now guaranteed.

Caveat: There is a possibility that you will choose a silent return of the plate onto the porch swing cushion while they are in town getting feed or groceries, and even then, you never bring the plate back empty. You must include a thank you note, fresh cookies, a little candle that you bought from the booster club, or a refrigerator magnet you picked up on vacation.

The Solemn Procession of the Guest: Now they escort you off the porch, down the steps, and across the yard, because it is considered poor form down here to let a guest reach the automobile without a witness. They accompany you as one carries something valuable, or something deceased — the honor guard is the same either way.

Along the way, there will be a consideration and commentary on the clouds, a dogwood, the hole where a dogwood used to be, the Christmas lights of the neighbor down the road (no matter the time of year), and then a fresh subject opens up like a new door in a wall where there had not been one moments earlier.

The Middle Point of the Driveway: In time, upon arriving at the car, the extension of your fingers toward the door works on a person like a divining rod works on water: it draws straight up whatever’s been laying at the bottom the whole evening. Somebody’s daddy still driving at ninety-nine, and who’s going to be the one to take the keys. What that new place out on the highway will do to the store that’s been there as long as anyone can remember. The salad brought to the potluck and the way it is made needing to be explained twice, along with the special ingredient’s location on the specific aisle of the Piggly Wiggly.  

The cold engine has not turned over. Nobody has looked at a watch since supper. The car door hangs open in the dark like a hymnal left on a pew.

And at some point — hard to say how long — the key is turned. Engine running. But your window is down, because it must come down; that is not optional, that is doctrine. 

"I ain’t gonna' hold you up," they say, and it is a promise that expires in the saying of it.

Then there are three more things, and each one of them is the last one or nearly so. And maybe a fourth thing, could be five. But your left arm is either warm or cold, again, depending on the season, while the right side of your body is either cooler from the air conditioner or toasty from the heater. The plate in the lap is warm, regardless. You sit astride a thermal Mason-Dixon line.

In the back seat, every child is already asleep, except the one that never sleeps.

The Last Look Back: Then, finally, there is movement. You back out slowly and swing your headlights around as the gravel gives way to blacktop. You wave. They wave. As you begin to drive, you look in the rear-view mirror: they are still standing, both arms going, and they stay there until your taillights wink out of sight, because that is the office they were given and they mean to discharge it with all the unspoken ceremony it carries. (For my Mama, I always tap my brakes three times, so she sees me in the dark just as my car disappears behind the pines.)

You are a half mile down the road before you roll up your window. And that porch light will burn a good while yet. It always does.

One More Thing Before You Go:Cold does not speed up the goodbye. People will stand in a hard freeze until their ears go the color of a cured ham rather than cut a sentence short.

Rain is the only true editor this ceremony has ever submitted to. A blowing rain takes the porch clean out of the equation and folds it into the doorway, and it collapses the escort down to one umbrella held at such an angle that the guests go to the car half-dry and the host goes back to the house soaked to the shoulder, which is not an accident and is not negotiable.

In a real gullywasher the whole business can be got through in less than eleven minutes. Everyone involved will feel afterward like they left something unfinished and will carry it the rest of the week like a sneeze that never came.

Mosquitoes work quick, but not cleaner. Their bites rarely remove more than five minutes’ worth of jawing, and what’s left gets talked out at double speed with a slap laid in every so often for punctuation. It makes a man telling you about his knee surgery sound like he is being applauded for it.