Inevitably, when some tragedy occurs, numerous voices rise up to proclaim, “This ain’t us! I can’t believe it — fill in the blank — happened here.” This line of thought requires blinders that work to shield individuals from the realities of the communities they inhabit. They see tragedies as happening elsewhere, outside of their own space. No matter what the tragedy, it’s always a “not us” tragedy. Yet, when occurs to “us,” it becomes a “This ain’t us!” mantra, vociferously working to maintain an image of purity, safety, and community even when that veneer becomes shattered by tragedy. This sentiment weaves its way throughout S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed when a school shooting occurs in Charon County. The residents, unable to deal with the violence in their midst, attempt to push it outside of themselves by claiming that things like this just don’t happen in Charon.

Charon, a small community with 23 churches, hides its secrets behind masks, putting up a front to the world while shielding the truth from the light of scrutiny. Describing the community, the narrator states, “Small towns are like the people who populate them. They are both full of secrets. Secrets of the flesh, secrets of blood. Hidden oaths and whispered promises that turn to lies just as quick as milk spoils under a hot summer sun.” Everyone hides a part of themselves from others, and I would argue, even, that one cannot truly know their true self. That, unfortunately, is an argument for another day. The masks, which also play a huge role in All the Sinners Bleed, allow individuals to navigate the community, adhering to “social norms” while hiding “deviant” or “violent” behaviors and bury the violent past of the region itself.

The narrator continues, “The myth of Main Street in the South has always been a chaste puritanical fantasy.” The presence of the church, to keep people in line, and the desire to uphold some form of false chivalry and respectability, serve as nothing more than a fantasy for the community, one that they know, in there heart, to be false; however, they do not want to admit to themselves the fact that what they present is nothing more than a lie, a mask, that denies them the ability to reckon with the past and to become their true selves. The PTA president stands in front of the other parents while her alcoholic husband beats her. Lovers meet in secret, outside of the gaze of the steeple, to consummate their illicit love. Youth group members and the kids of powerful people, put money in the hands of street pharmacists, looking for an escape from reality.

The fantasy hides the truth. The fantasy hides the foundation of Charon County, one “founded in bloodshed and darkness.” The long lineage of Charon County involves the decimation of the Indigenous population in 1805. Cannibalism in 1853. A poisoning at a United Daughters of the Confederacy event in 1935. The revival baptismal drownings of 1968, and much more. “The soil,” the narrator tells us, “of Charon County, like most towns and counties in the South, was sown with generations of tears.” The soil tells the story. The truth seeps down deep into the Earth, residing there to pull anyone down who refuses to acknowledge its existence.

When people say “This ain’t us!”, they deny the violence in the soil. They deny the history that surrounds them. When they make this statement, they ignore the history of enslavement. They ignore Indigenous removal. They ignore the history of lynchings. They ignore Japanese incarceration. They ignore McCarthyism. They ignore the German American Bund. They ignore the Chinese Exclusion Act. They think of history not as a living, breathing thing but as something past, long since completed. They think of it as something sealed off from them in the present.

Recently, while looking on a local Facebook group, someone posted about a protest in the community where people held signs calling out fascism. One person in the comments basically proclaimed, “Fascism ended in 1945.” When I say this comment, alongside others that stated that the people in the photo, all of them older, retired individuals, were “outside agitators,” I couldn’t help but think about the proclamation, “This ain’t us!” The commenter’s statement ignores the fact that ideologies don’t just go POOF and disappear. They don’t evaporate into thin air once fighting ceases. They survive.

As well, the commenter uses projection to deny reality. The persons does this by essentially saying, “The protestors don’t know what fascism is, and even if they did, it ain’t here because that ain’t us.” I have written about this before, so I won’t rehash it here, but I will say that this line of thinking serves as a deflection and leads to the person doubling down on their beliefs and thoughts. It’s like the seventeen-year-old camper told Lillian Smith when Smith taught her that racism is wrong. The camper told Smith, “It was as if somebody had swung a bright mirror in front of us. The whole thing opened up!” That “opening up” made her face herself but also made her think about what the new knowledge would do to her life once she returned from camp. The camper chose to double down, ignoring what the reflection showed her.

People don’t want to face the violence and secrets that surround them. They want to, like the residents of Charon County before the school shooting, live in “a chaste puritanical fantasy” that allows them to think of themselves as above reproach and violence. Titus Crown sees through this fantasy, and he calls it out again and again in All the Sinners Bleed, especially in his conversation with Darlene. He tells her that he is sick of people saying that things like this don’t happen in Charon, “like everyone around here is a goddamn virgin and no one has ever stepped on a sidewalk crack or stole a grape from the Safeway.” He knows the truth. He knows the masks. He knows the hypocrisy of the “Christ-haunted” South that uses Christianity as a shield for the true nature of the community.

When someone says, “This ain’t us!”, think about why they say it. They say it to mask themselves and to feel superior than others. They say it to disance themselves from violence and tragedy. They say it to dodge confronting their own reflection and past that stares back at them when they look in the mirror. They say it to mitigate the violence enacted upon others. They say it to make themselves feel better. But, in saying it, they deny any responsibility for the tragedy and deny any move towards progress that will prevent such tragedies in the future.

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.