For a long time I've wondered if there's one question that defines Charlotte.
I got the idea from that book "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." The book is set in Savannah, Ga., and there's one part where a woman talks about how you can tell where you are in Georgia by the first question they ask when you arrive.
The way she puts it, in Atlanta they ask: "What's your business?" In Macon they ask: "Where do you go to church?" In Augusta they ask: "What's your grandmother's maiden name?" But in Savannah, the first question they ask is: "What would you like to drink?"
Well, I realized that Charlotte has its own first question, and that question is: "Where are you from?"
How many of you are from west of the Mississippi?
How many from north of the Mason-Dixon line?
How many of y'all used to live up North somewhere, moved down to Florida, then decided Florida was too hot so you ended up here? We've got a name for you: halfbacks. Started out up north, went way down south, then came halfway back.
Some people are not even sure native Charlotteans exist anymore -- kind of like the ivory-billed woodpecker. If you run across native Charlotteans, don't feed them. They need to learn to survive on their own in the wild.
This has always been a city of newcomers. We don't have tenth-generation families running the town. What we have is incoming U-Haul trailers.
People move here every day because there are jobs here and the weather's nice and this is not one of those stagnant towns that just sits there and decays. This is moving water.
Our New South City has half a dozen good bagel places but only a couple decent barbecue joints.
Our New South City is a place where people spend half a million bucks for condos that overlook Turn One at the NASCAR track.
Our New South City is a place where you can dance to the latest remixes from the New York clubs but you can't find Johnny Cash on the radio.
Our New South City is a place where billions of dollars change hands in uptown computer servers, but gigantic mill buildings all over the Carolinas sit empty.
In a lot of ways, Charlotte is defined by what it's not -- not too cold, not too dangerous, not too dirty, not too set in its ways.
What we have left to recommend us is our people. What makes Charlotte Charlotte is what you make of it when you get here.
We don't have a lot of any one thing, but we've got a little bit of everything. You want a great comic-book store? We've got that. You want Ethiopian food? We've got that. You want a sports bar where Pittsburgh Steelers fans gather on Sunday? We've got that.
Some people look at Charlotte, with all this chrome and glass uptown, all these sprawling suburbs, all this relentless growth, and they decide that we are a city without a soul.
We do have a soul. Our problem -- and our great strength -- is that our soul looks different every time you look at it.
When you're in a job like mine, you look for signs -- figuratively and literally. And a couple of years ago I saw a sign that sums up Charlotte better than anything else I've seen.
It was out on Central Avenue, which is sort of the United Nations headquarters of Charlotte -- people from all over the world have started small businesses there. You can find everything from Bollywood DVDs to a bakery owned by a couple from Serbia.
This is the sign I saw:
STARLIGHT CHINESE RESTAURANT
WELCOME AMIGOS
If we can live up to the Starlight Chinese Restaurant, we'll be fine.
Amigos, welcome to Charlotte.
Editors' Note: A version of this column ran in Living Here 2006-07.
IN MY OPINION Tommy Tomlinson
