Posted on 03/06/2005 6:59:01 PM PST by 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.
One of my favorite accounts is in JT Glisson's "The Creek". His description of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, an outsider, who bought a place in their small community to write about them and capture the "essence" of Crackers/Southerners, is priceless.
"The Creek" sounds interesting. Thanks.
This is addressed to everyone who is Southern born and raised-Do you think that there is a "black South" and a "white South"?
I ask that in all seriousness because I am a native Californian who lived down there three years in the Seventies I used to ponder that a lot.It seemed that in many ways race relations were healthier and more open in the South,unlike much of the North where you can live much of your life not seeing a black face if you are white.
HOWEVER,some things I saw still haunt me today-the after hours club in Beaumont,Texas where white men would go to party with young black women.The time outside Athens,Georgia when on a university affiliated field trip I walked into a white cop and a black cop pulling knives out on EACH OTHER.Observing a Klan rally in Metarie and watching dozens of cars going down Airline Highway spitting and cursing at two lone peaceful black protestors.The time at the Red Caboose restaurant when a large black woman held a steak knife to the neck of a young white teenager after he referred to her school as a "nigger school".The time a NOPD officer pulled a gun on me after a traffic stop and told me to"start running"after he checked my black companion's ID.
I still miss the South.There is a profound beauty and mystery about the region that still fascinates me today.Yet the above incidents and many others made me feel there is still a distinct difference in perspective depending on whether you are black or white.
Feedback please.
I WANT SOME CATFISH AND HUSHPUPPIES!!!!
Ah hushpuppies! Back in '91, we spent a week in South Carolina, and I must have gained 3-5 lbs -- mostly on the hushpuppies!
The South is long, hot summer nights where you can fall asleep to the sound of passing trains or occasional rumbles of thunder.
The South is what will save America from political correctness and Hollywood.
The South is ultimately about redemption.
This Greenberg guy has compared Southern Heritage defenders to Nazis and the poster of this thread is no South lover.
No feedback but just think your post is interesting.
http://minorjive.typepad.com/hungryblues/2004/12/the_southern_st.html
Sure you're not confused with his son? If what you say is true the apple don't fall too far from the tree.
It was Paul Greenberg from Arkansas. I had a row with quidniuc over it.
Quid didn't post this to be sweet.
Sorry, he compared us to Arabs not Nazis.
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1022783/posts
Greenberg is ok at times...like Krauthammer....sort of wishy washy on culture but a hawk.
What an odd comparison.
What you described is all a part of the South--just one South, not two.
There are bad attitudes on both sides of the races. But there can be closeness too. As you said, in the North and other areas of the country you can go a long time without seeing blacks. In the South we grow up side by side.
When I was a child my mother had a black "maid" who helped with the cleaning and cooking (Mom had the four of us children in five years and was just a little stressed by it all). I loved Edna, our maid, and she loved me. I probably spent as much time with Edna as I did with Mom, when I was a baby. So I always had a real love for Edna.
A few years ago I worked for a small newspaper, and my supervisor was a black lady. We had a great time working together, spent half the time laughing. We still call each other every few months to stay in touch.
So what you mentioned does exist in the South--but the other also exists, the love and the caring for one another. And the caring is the part that's never written about in the newspapers or the movies, only the bad.
Also there is an understanding of one another. The Southern blacks are different from the blacks in other parts of the country. (Just as the white people are different.)
Southern white people understand Southern black people, just as Southern black people understand Southern white people. Some problems still exist on both sides, but no one understands the other better.
And yet it all-- the love and the problems-- takes place in one South.
I am the Grand Caliphate btw...lol
if I could only find my harem.
a slight correction in 51
a slight correction in 51
Hey nobody's perfect.
You are Big Daddy!
No, I don't.
Is there a Black California and a White California.
Is Watts a community in LA?
Can you explain why the policemen that beat Rodney King
had to have their trial in Simi Valley?
Did racial problems occur in every major city in the US?
Do incidences still happen to this day in places other than
the South?
If you're wondering if your question annoyed me, it did!
It also caused me to try to remember the number of
Black Persons I even saw in Northern California when
I lived there in the Seventies. I seem to remember it was
very few.
You are Big Daddy
"Well Yeah" He said with a smirk :>)
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