What is the South?

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette ^ | March 6, 2005 | Paul Greenberg

[quidnunc]

New Orleans – "What’s the South like?" said the man in the white suit at the next table, mulling over the question. "That’s what they all ask. Well, that depends on which South you mean — the antebellum mansion, the fly-specked roadhouse, or the latest of the New Souths, the Sunbelt. Or northern Mexico, aka Texas. Or one of the uncountable other Souths. Which image is the facade for which?"

The man in the white suit soon warmed to his inexhaustible subject: "One South fits into the next like one of those Russian dolls. Do not be quick to decide which is the real South. There is no such thing. Nor is it easy to see which culture is supplanting the other at any given time. The professional Southerner may turn out to be all leaf and no roots; the most Southern of us all may never think on what it means to be Southern."

Our new friend paused to sip at his mint julep. "Actually, I prefer Scotch. I drink these just to give the tourists something to talk about. The South, you see, is the complete preservation of tradition on selected occasions. The South is the Natchez Trace, that dream highway meandering through forests only as deep as the right-of-way, with faithful old retainers cannily posted at convenient distances to guide and refresh, and assure us that all is as it appears to be before they disappear to rearrange the scenery. The real South? The South is the most unreal part of this dream America, and therefore the most enduring."

The sun shone bright on the tables at the sidewalk cafe, and the man in the white suit paused to set his drink down ever so carefully before continuing. "The South," he said, "is a high road that rises up green and lush beyond every curve and over every rise. The South is also Highway 61 that runs right alongside the Trace, featuring misspelled signs and abandoned drive-in movie theaters. It’s grass growing through the cracks of an abandoned parking lot. New dreams here fade before the old ones do. To be Southern is to want nothing more than to live by the side of the road and board up the windows to outsiders.

"The South is driving along a Mississippi back road in the dead heat of a hot Sunday afternoon listening to a black preacher on the radio praising the Lord in half song, half sermon — as close as contemporary man may come to the original spirit of the Psalms. Logically, it would seem easier to say grace over oysters Rockefeller and trout meunière at Galatoire’s than over potlikker and biscuits with Hoover gravy, but of course it’s the other way ‘round in the South, as it is everywhere. There never was a religion of thanksgiving that could match a single prayer uttered out of sheer desperation. And the South has more desperation than cotton and soybeans and rice put together; it grows like kudzu in the night.

"The South," the man in the white suit continued, his voice deepening preacher-like, "is no longer Christ-centered, if it ever was, but it is Christ-fixated; here even oh-so-rational agnostics seem to have a bitter edge of fervor to their denials of faith. Flannery O’Connor told us that. It would take a Dostoyevsky to understand us; we sure can’t, though we never cease confidently explaining ourselves to one another."

The man in the white suit paused for a sip and the hint of smile before continuing: "Perhaps Dostoyevsky would not know us at all; he is much too dark. But Potemkin, that rascal, would. He reminds me a lot of our own good old boys. The kind who are determined to save our priceless heritage but only if the price is right. The Southern ideal is the classical one — of harmony, completeness, evenness. Our beau ideal is not the tortured and agonized existential hero, or the witty and ambitious leader at the top of the greasy pole, but the whole man. Our ideal is the man without a mark on him, the women in the portraits that grace the halls of antebellum mansions, which were the contemporary equivalent of Disneylands in their time and, strangely enough, remain so. Our hero is Robert E. Lee, never Abe Lincoln. Even if he was born in Kentucky. He is too complicated, too broken and put back together again. We have no use for your knights of the doleful countenance; our heroes must be wrinkle-free. The ideal Southerner must be all of a piece — of alabaster. No wonder we break under the strain of living up to such impossible specifications. Lee never broke, he did not even rise and fall; he was simply, always, Lee. But he is the model, not the reality. The blueprint, not the ramshackle result… .

"Our idea of the good has come to be the simple, the whole, so instinctively understandable as not to require explication, at least not in words. That would be to desecrate it, like cracking a piece of marble. The Southerner aims for a literal integrity. Perhaps that is why we keep producing the partial, the incomplete, the unnatural, and explicating them to death. As usual, Flannery O’Connor explained it: ‘Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man … .’ She had it right. As usual.

"The key," said the man in the white suit, "is the past. You can change the name of Confederate Boulevard to something else, but it remains in the mind, like a gray ghost, like fallen leaves rustling against the tombstones in an old cemetery. Nothing is more real or renewable than the past. It is the only thing that lasts. Though it lingers longer in some places than others — like here in New Orleans and in the nameless little cotton towns one passes through on the way to someplace else. But there is no escaping the Southern past even along the franchise rows, in the midst of the industrial parks, at the tractor pulls, even next to the air-conditioning vents.

"We are the only part of the country," the man in the white suit explained, "to have been defeated and occupied, and defeat lasts longer than victory and in some ways is sweeter. Whether we learned anything from defeat and occupation is problematic; we were not so much instructed as fascinated by the experience. Its effect has been not cautionary but romantic. The politicians we honor are not the most effective or successful, but the dreamiest. How else explain the pointless worship of Jefferson Davis?

"Most of all," the man in the white suit declared, after a moment’s reflection, "we hate the politician who can see a little further than most and commits the indiscretion of telling the rest of us about it. We cast him into obloquy as soon as he betrays any sign of prescience. The only reason we still honor John C. Calhoun, who may have been the most far-sighted of them all, is that we have confused that hard-bitten realist with a romantic dreamer. How Bobby Lee let himself get mixed up with all that nonsense will always be a mystery to some of us. But you cannot have his kind of greatness without his kind of naiveté."

The man in the white suit looked at the river shimmering in the distance, as if thinking of the whole South sending its watery tribute down the Mississippi to New Orleans and the Gulf.

"Southernism," he said, "is itself a curious, alien patriotism, the product of both America and of the separate nation we were for four long, arduous years, perhaps longer. We are still a different country in the important, informal ways that are the most enduring. The honorable Southerner, like General Lee or Admiral Semmes, is still on parole, sincerely wishing to live up to the terms of his pardon, but without violating some interior honor. That produces an interesting tension. The Southerner is tempted to make up for his slightly subversive past by bouts of star-spangled jingoism that are not very convincing, or lasting. He is bound and determined to be a good American, but something inside still rebels.

"What’s the South?" the man in the white suit repeated. "It is a reflection in a shattered mirror; the images no longer fit if they ever did. It is Blanche DuBois and General MacArthur, John Gould Fletcher and Andrew Jackson, Delta and hills, Ossie Davis and Ross Barnett, Uncle Remus and James Branch Cabell. It has no one, sure image. The best course is to depend on none of them, but to approach the subject without preconceived or received ideas, which, at least for a Southerner, is an impossibility. You have to be a transplant to see it clear, as in a telescope or under a microscope. But then it becomes some dead thing, which is not the South at all."

A streetcar over on St. Charles whirred and clanged by in the distance, and the haze of the day grew steamier. A tray of beignets and café au lait caught my attention and appetite. When I turned back, the man in the white suit was gone. Only his empty glass remained — palpable, shimmering, waiting to be filled again and again. Like the South herself.

Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has been away. An earlier version of this column appeared in the Democrat-Gazette on July 24, 1992. E-mail him at: paul _ greenberg@adg.ardemgaz.com.

[Paul C. Jesup]

In the South there's a lot of sugar-belle sappy sweet faces and good ole' boy back slaps that leave you feeling positive until you turn your back and get your throat cut from behind.

Your sense of expectations of betrayal from others is a sign of your own "trust" issues with others and that you forget that the kindness could be genuine.

[peacebaby]

IMO, Southerners bend over backwards to avoid offending someone. We separate our honesty and forthrightness into what's offensive and what's constructive, and if we can give an opinion that is forthright and honest without being offensive, we'll do so. If we can't be honest without offending, we'll say nothing.

Like thumper said, if you can't say anything nice, don't say nothing at all.

[stand watie]

!!!!!!!!!!

[Rebelbase]

LOL! I never once considered the observation I wrote about until I had it been described to me by a yankee whom I worked with.

I said "a lot", not "all", but thanks for the psychoanalysis anyway.

What do I owe you?

[Paul C. Jesup]

What do I owe you?

Try to consider the kindness from other people to you to be genuine.

[YaYa123]

We've been stationed in Hinesville and Columbus Georgia, and Enterprise, Alabama, and home sweet home to me is a northern suburb of Atlanta. But I've lived in Kansas, northern California, and Pennsylvania. Maybe it's because my experience living outside the south has been in or near military bases, but "southern" seeming people live all over the country. Culturally and politically conservative people, polite, pleasant, friendly, and helpful to newcomers.

For me, what separates the south from the rest of the country are hot, steamy nights, with air so heavy you can feel the weight of it when you go out on the porch to enjoy the starry sky. For me, the south is kudzu, fried food, and people who've loved you so long, they're more like family than just family friends.

I can't speak of inner cities down here, (which seem perpetually controlled by corrupt and or inept African American Democrats, but the rest of the south seems booming. That ugly "race thing" is long gone, as Black Americans, Hispanics, Asian, Eastern Europeans, Africans, and us native White Folk peacefully co-exist, and thrive together.

[The Loan Arranger]

My Lord, how many years ago was all that?

[ladtx]

I'm The South
Performed by Paul Ott
Written by Paul Ott Copyright © 

I'm the Little Rock of Arkansas
The Smokey Mountains and a cross-cut saw
Louisiana cooking and a watermelon vine
I'm a tall Georgia Pine
And Georgia's on my mind
I'm the Tennessee Waltz and all night sings
The Florida sun and Silver Springs
I'm Huck and Tom and the old folks at home
I'm Clingman's Dome

 Why, I'm the stars that fell on Alabam
I'm coffee in the morning
And an old smoked ham
I'm a Carolina moon, a dusty delta dawn
Magnolias in Bloom
I'm a thoroughbred grazing on Kentucky bluegrass
I'm coon hounds, bird dogs and tea of sassafras
I'm the Mississippi River as it rounds the bend
I'm Gone With The Wind
Y'all come back again

 I'm hanging moss on a live oak tree
Southern fried chicken and a cypress knee
Why, I'm the birth of the blues in New Orleans
The land of dreams
And I'm a trout a' jumpin' in a cool clear stream
I'm an antebellum home on the Natchez Trace
A rusty plow on the old home place
Azaleas a' blooming in beautifu Mobile
I'm the Virgina Reel
Derby Day in Louisville

 That Southern hospitality in Charleston
and in Raleigh
A Georgia peach, a cotton patch, Miami Beach
I'm Dan'el Boon and Robert E. Lee
The Seminole, Choctaw and the Cherokee
Well, I'm everything good 
you've ever dreamed about
Hush your mouth

 I Am The South

 

[houeto]

Krispy Kreme? Check this page out.

http://www.estarcion.com/gastronome/archives/001603.html

[houeto]

Krispy Kreme Never tried one.

I have. They're nuthin' compared to a Shipley's!

[wardaddy]

Why does white men having sex with black women bother you?

It's rather common in the Caribbean. When I grew up in Jackson Mississippi, most of the outlying bordellos were run by black madams and staffed mostly with black or mullato women.

And, nowadays on MYV and throughout most of the sports world and whatnot, a blonde Nordic babe is considered a score for a brother.

I thought we were colorblind these days.

Folks here swoon over Halle and even Condi(?).

I prefer Thandie myself but that is another thread.

As to the rest of your curious post, hostility amongst black youth for whites in the South in urban areas is now just as endemic as it was in northern urban hoods. Not much difference now. It's the culture I guess.

I think there are more black on white racists than the reverse today....at least that has been my experience.

[Cedar]

Psychology never understands real love.

[Cedar]

"IMO, Southerners bend over backwards to avoid offending someone. We separate our honesty and forthrightness into what's offensive and what's constructive, and if we can give an opinion that is forthright and honest without being offensive, we'll do so. If we can't be honest without offending, we'll say nothing."

Great posts from both you and Paul C. on this matter.

You analyzed right!

[higgmeister]

What do I owe you?

Try to consider the kindness from other people to you to be genuine.

And when a Southerner waves at you he is just being friendly.

[SamAdams76]

While it is true that the hills and forests of Vermont and New Hampshire are decked in rolling vistas of majestic fall hues each year, the time of such beauty is far too short-lived. And, yes, there is a certain clean-lined and uncluttered, almost macabre beauty to stark, dark, skeletal-appearing tree limbs raised in supplication to a winter sky filled with snow flakes. The still, echoing sound of footsteps breaking through the crust of new snow in a chill that makes breathing a visual art has a charm of its own as well. But, that too is soon overcome by the wearisome toil of days of such limiting restraint within a small, confined, closed-in space and effort-filled drudgery to accomplish even the most simple of mundane tasks. The same roaring fire in a fireplace that was not so long before a comfort soon becomes the sound and presence of the jailer that holds one captive in a closed-in space without the healing touch of the much needed and desired, warming, life-restoring rays of sunlight astride the land. We've usually got the sun here in the south even on the most bitter of winter days.

That is a great passage and I really liked the entire article. One of my favorite things to do in the winter here in New England is to take a long walk in the woods by myself when it is frigid cold and there is a blanket of snow on the ground. The absolute silence and starkness of the bare trees against a white background is very appealing to me. Then, as my limbs and extremities begin to freeze, I head back home looking forward to sitting in front of a crackling fire and a hot mug of Kahlua coffee. Then perhaps a roast turkey dinner with sweet potato.

But at the same time, I equally love being in the deep South in the middle of summer. While everybody else is indoors with their AC cranked up, I can be found outdoors sitting under a sycamore tree with a pitcher of iced tea and reading a good book while some country or bluegrass music plays on my portable radio. I then like to watch the thunderheads build in the western sky and hear the distant rumbles of thunder. As the storms move in, a cooling breeze rustles the trees and I head indoors to watch the storm from the screened-in porch. Then as nightfall comes, I watch for the fireflies and then fall asleep to the thunderous sounds of crickets and the occasional howls and hoots of the local wildlife. Then I awaken to a hazy, humid morning, and after a breakfast of biscuits, bacon, and grits, I will head to the fields to pick berries while listening to all the bird calls while trying to avoid stepping in a fire ant hill or inadvertently plunging my hand into a spider's web.

There are many people up here (in New England) that go down South for the winter. But I like to do the opposite. I love the extremes of the weather. So in a perfect world, I would spend winters in Maine and summers in Alabama.

[higgmeister]

As the storms move in, a cooling breeze rustles the trees and I head indoors to watch the storm from the screened-in porch.

I can tell you've been to Alabama! I love to watch
the mother of all thunderstorms among the pines
from the screened-in porch. God's agnostic baiting.

[Paul C. Jesup]

You're welcome. :D

[Paul C. Jesup]

So true, both your comment and your sig. :D

[peacebaby]

Speaking of southern storms, my favorite weather is "tornado weather" when the barametric pressure rises. I have a memory as a young girl of sitting on a limb of a mimosa tree that was growing on the knoll of a pasture, and the barametric pressure was high and the wind was rustling the tree limbs. The mimosa blossoms sent out such heady aromas. And I could look out over the field and hold on to that mimosa branch and it would rock me back and forth - like a baby.

[Cedar]

I dream of places I cannot be --
fields of my homeland
where dead cotton stalks lie scattered
like bodies
which didn't survive the war of winter;
circled only by red-wing blackbirds
dipping low then high
but free,
yes, free in the expanse
God created for them
and me.

I dream of places a part of me --
(places I cannot be)
walking through fields of frozen time
where only the present remains;
still the moment exists
and just warm air against the cheekbones
can be felt
while running, walking
and free,
yes, free in the rhythm
God created for us,
for me.

I dream of places I cannot be --
but only cannot be today.
For behind these walls
time marches on and on,
while circling just below the ceiling
are hopes of a tomorrow
where time just might be stopped
in a field,
a field of my homeland,
for me.