I Was Homeschooled in the Rural South, and It Made Me a Futurist
School Day in the Pocket Dimension
My mother used to wake my brother and me up by opening the blinds and singing, “School Day, babies! School Day! School Day!”
We couldn’t stand it at the time.
Now, I love remembering her voice singing that.
There was morning light coming through the windows. There was my brother and me, somewhere between sleep and protest. There was my mother, opening the day like it belonged to her, like education was not something that had to happen somewhere else, under fluorescent lights, inside a building that did not love us. School began in our house. Not because the world outside did not exist, but because my mother had decided the first world we learned inside would be one she helped make.
People hear “homeschooled in the rural South” and think they already know what kind of story this is.
They imagine isolation. Limitation. Backwardness. A child cut off from the “real world.” They assume homeschooling means poor socialization, poor education, weird children, parents who are unqualified to teach. They assume the rural South means poverty, racism, hillbillies, backward philosophies, low ambition, and a place people spend their whole lives trying to escape.
But that is not the story I came from.
I was raised and homeschooled in the rural South. I turned out a futurist.
Not because I was removed from reality.
Because I was close enough to see its seams.
The World Outside the Blinds
Outside the blinds, the rural South was not simple. It was not just front porches and family reunions and somebody’s grandmother’s pound cake cooling under foil. It was also a place where Black people knew what roads not to drive down.
There are roads in my hometown I still wonder about. Roads I have never taken because I do not know where they go, and because I know enough to understand that curiosity is not always safe when you are Black in a rural Southern town.
There are places where Black people just know: don’t go there.
There are towns people call “previous” sundown towns. But previous is a generous word when the danger still has a pulse. There are unspoken rules. There are places you can feel yourself being watched before anyone says a word. There are situations where nobody has to call you anything for you to understand exactly what they think you are.
I went to a grocery store recently. The woman checking people out was so nice to the man in front of me. He was an older white man. She chatted him up like customer service was a ministry. Then I came behind him, and her whole demeanor changed. She was cold. Rude. She did not want to speak to me. She did not want to help me with my groceries. She did not want to take my money. She did not want to touch my hand.
And it bothered me.
It bothered me very badly.
Another time, my mother and I went to Hobby Lobby. We paid in cash. The woman in front of us paid in cash too. But when we paid, the cashier took out a little flashlight and checked our money like we were suspicious. Like our cash needed interrogation. Like our presence had already entered the store guilty.
That is the kind of thing you learn to live with. You choose what to fight and what not to fight because if you respond to every single instance of racism, you will be fighting every day of your life.
It is woven into things.
Into roads.
Into stores.
Into the way somebody’s face changes when you walk up behind the person they were just kind to.
Sometimes, I am surprised when an older white person is nice to me. It makes my day in a way I almost resent, because kindness should not feel like a plot twist.
So when I ask, how do you think you are going to turn out if you are raised in a culture of people raised to despise you, I am not asking as a thought experiment.
I am asking from the inside of a place I love.
I am asking from the inside of a place that has teeth.
The South I Refuse to Surrender
And still, I do not divorce myself from being Southern.
I strongly identify as Southern. More specifically, I identify as a Southern Black woman, which is a whole different culture within the culture of the South. There is “The South” as people imagine it from the outside, all plantations and debutantes and white gloves and Jim Crow nostalgia dressed up as heritage.
And then there is my South.
My South is walking up the road to my auntie’s house with the sun shining down on me and the asphalt hot beneath my sandals.
My South is playing dodgeball against the side of our double wide before we got the porch extended, waiting to see who my mother would throw the ball at and whether we could get out of the way in time, hollering and laughing in pure petrified delight.
My South is sitting out on the front porch in rocking chairs and feeling the wind blow through, making the wind chimes sing and the shade that much sweeter to be in.
My South is riding four-wheeler ATVs all around the yard and up the road, feeling the wind whipping by and watching the clouds from behind my dad while holding on tight.
My South is the drive-in movie theater with cousins and parents packing the car full for only $15 a car. Snacks passed back and forth between seats. Tuning the radio to the familiar frequency five minutes till and listening to old ’50s music before the previews roll. Hearing the owner wish me a “Happy Birthday” one year, which made my whole day that much more special and exciting. Chitchatting with the people working inside who have been there since I was little and know us and our snack preferences by sight now without even having to ask.
My South is playing with the baby cows next door and sharing philosophical thoughts with our neighbor’s donkey who is as old as I am.
My South is family reunions, doing the Wobble and line dancing with the grown folks out back before eating a slice of homemade red velvet between rounds of barbecue. It is all the people who have since died and are not here anymore.
It is collard greens. Black-eyed peas. Cornbread. Candied yams. My mama’s cooking. Being in the kitchen and running around barefoot in my house.
It is lying in patches of sun like a little cat. My childhood home was east facing, so when we opened the front door early in the morning, the sun would pour in. A lot of my school days started with me lying in those patches of sun, soaking it up.
That is also the rural South.
This family land has been in my family for 132 years. I stand on that. I may be scared of bugs and snakes and all the different nature-y things. But I really resonate with being from this place.
This place feels like home to me.
More than any other place.
So no, I am not Southern by accident. I am not Southern by surrender. I am not Southern because I have made peace with everything the South has done or allowed or inherited.
I am Southern because I know the difference between belonging to a place and being owned by its worst imagination.
I did not become a futurist because I hate where I came from.
I became a futurist because I love it enough to imagine it otherwise.
My Mother Did Not Trust the World With Us
My mother’s decision to homeschool us was a radical act.
A revolutionary act.
She did not frame it that way at first. She was a mother making a decision about her children. But sometimes a Black mother protecting her children is the most practical kind of revolution there is.
My mom has a master’s degree in education. She grew up in the education system around here. She had put nieces through the education system around here. She knew good and well what kind of system this was for a Black child coming up in a rural Alabama community.
At one point, my brother had a rough first week at school. My mother talked to the teacher and the principal. The principal said something like, what I am asking you is, can you trust us with your child?
And my mother realized: no.
No, she could not.
That was the thing.
She did not trust them with her child.
So she pivoted accordingly.
She homeschooled us from kindergarten all the way through high school graduation. She did not originally intend to do that. She asked us every year in middle school whether we wanted to go to public or private school. We always said no.
At the time, in our immediate community, there was no one else homeschooling. It was just us in our little area. Later on, we met more Black homeschooling families within maybe a 30 minute to an hour radius. But at the beginning, it was my mother making a choice most people around us did not understand.
People assumed we were isolated. They assumed we were behind. They assumed we were not really learning. They questioned us to see if we were smart, to see if we were actually being educated.
But what they missed is that my mother was not hiding us from the world.
She was refusing to let the world swallow us whole.
There is a difference.
A bubble keeps you from knowing the world exists.
A pocket dimension gives you somewhere to become strong enough to enter it without disappearing.
Somebody Came Up With This
At first, our homeschooling looked a lot like traditional school at home. My mother bought curriculum because she thought, okay, this is what I need to do to educate my kids properly.
We had textbooks. We had subjects. We had structure.
But over time, especially in middle school and high school, my mother allowed us to help tailor our education. I was creative. So I had art classes. I did art projects. A lot of my studies were geared around art and art research and being creative. I was allowed to knit and crochet and try different kinds of art. We went to parks and playgrounds. We studied at the library and read books. We went to museums. Education did not have to mean sitting in one place all day waiting for permission to think.
I learned that education could be shaped.
I learned it could be flexible.
I learned it could be something I enjoyed.
I learned I could have agency inside it.
And because I was homeschooled, I could see the machinery.
I could see my mother choosing curriculum. I could see her arranging the day. I could see her deciding what we were going to study and how. I could see that my education was structured by my mother, by the people who wrote the textbooks, by the people who created the programs.
Somebody came up with this.
That realization may sound simple, but it changes everything.
When you are inside a traditional school system, it can feel like the curriculum has existed since the dawn of time. Like the school day is a law of nature. Like the way things are arranged is just how things have to be.
But no.
Somebody sat on a school board somewhere and put together your education.
Somebody built the textbook.
Somebody chose the schedule.
Somebody decided what mattered.
Somebody came up with this.
I remember learning about Columbus again and again. Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492. I had read about Columbus every single year up until third grade, and eventually I was like, I do not want to learn about Columbus anymore. I want to do world history.
And my mother honored that.
She let world history enter.
That mattered to me. I loved world history. Even though I grew up in the rural South of Alabama, I always felt connected to the larger world. Not just the United States, but the world. My imagination was allowed to stretch beyond my hometown, beyond my state, beyond what was immediately around me.
That is what homeschooling did for me. It taught me that learning is not just obedience.
Learning can be a conversation.
A question.
A door.
A map.
And once you realize education is built, you start to realize other things are built too.
Homes.
Schedules.
Systems.
Traditions.
Theories of success.
The so-called normal path of life.
You are born. You go to school. You graduate. You go to college. You get a job. You get married. You have kids. You work that job until you are old and then you go on home to glory.
That is one story.
But it is not the only story.
Somebody came up with that too.
The Future Is Plug and Play
Home was not just where school happened.
Home was a world inside the world.
A pocket dimension.
Inside that house, there could be different rhythms. Different questions. Different priorities. Different ways of learning, moving, thinking, and becoming. The outside world still existed. We still had church. Dance class. Sports. Cousins. Community. Grocery stores. Roads not taken. All of it.
But inside the house, my mother had made another world possible.
That is why I say your home is a pocket dimension.
You can teach what you want to teach. You can live how you want to live. You can create a whole different culture inside your home than what is taught in the outside world. Of course, you have to be able to adapt, because you are going to interact with the larger world. But home can still be a world of its own.
A world within a world.
And once I understood that, I could not stop seeing it everywhere.
I started to understand that the future is plug and play.
Education is plug and play. Home is plug and play. Culture is plug and play. Governance, economics, technology, family structure, daily life—all of these things have been imagined, arranged, tested, enforced, inherited, repeated.
There are so many different governance models. So many different educational models. So many different economic models. So many different ways people have lived throughout human history. It is truly like a buffet of options.
For me, futures thinking is plugging in different nodes and seeing what lights up on the map. Seeing what comes alive. Seeing how different elements and ingredients interact with each other.
It is a research and development kitchen.
It is asking: what happens if we do this?
What happens if we add this?
What happens if we stop assuming this has to be this way?
I have always been that kind of person. I look at something and say, okay now, but how can we add on to it? How can we make it better? What is off with it? What is wrong with it? What can be done better? How can this function better?
I have always been kind of like a little inventor, tinkering with things. Philosophy. Religion. Education. Story. Home. The future.
Homeschooling supported that in me.
Traditional educational systems often say: do not question. You are here to follow, not question. You are here to take orders, not question.
Homeschooling said: okay, you have questions. Let’s explore them. Let’s deepen into them.
That is where my futurism came from.
Not from an obsession with technology or distant tomorrows.
From learning to ask: who built the present? Who benefits from it? Who is harmed by it? What else might be possible?
The South taught me that inherited worlds can harm people when nobody questions them.
Homeschooling taught me that worlds can be built otherwise.
Together, they made me a futurist.
Because of It
For a long time, people have treated the rural South like a place to escape. A place people leave if they are ambitious enough, educated enough, lucky enough, chosen enough.
And I understand why.
I know the danger.
I know the roads.
I know the cashier’s face changing.
I know what it feels like to realize kindness has become surprising.
But I also know the sun patches.
I know the drive-in.
I know my mother’s voice in the morning.
I know the wind chimes.
I know the donkey.
I know the red velvet cake and the Wobble and the people who are gone now.
I know family land.
I know the world my mother built inside the world she did not trust with us.
That world did not make me smaller.
It gave me enough room to become.
And once you grow up inside a world someone built with intention, you begin to recognize that the world outside was built too.
It was never fixed.
It was never inevitable.
Somebody came up with this.
Which means somebody can come up with something else.
I was not made a futurist despite being homeschooled in the rural South.
I was made a futurist because of it.