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.
And I remember laying on a blanket at Stone Mountain looking up at the moonlight through the pines.
I took a bunch of kids on a field trip to Stone Mountain when I was at UGA in 1971.Very impressive.
It was our favorite place. They have a huge summer-long laser show with fireworks and great music. They make the stone carving on the side of the mountain come to life. If you're ever back in Georgia, make it a point to revisit. You'll love it...and with that, I bid you goodnight. Morning comes early and too soon.
Already happening. Metairie today could be almost any aging suburb in any sunbelt city. The kids there watch the same crap on MTV as kids anywhere else in the country, wear the same Abercrombie cloathes (or knockoffs), and use the same slang (well, with thicker accents). Even the yats are dying.
In Beaumont, the old redlight district, Crockett St., has been renovated and reopened with trendy bars owned by local celebs like Clay Walker, and a few trial lawyers.
As for the small towns, WallyWorld is taking care of them day by day.
A lot of the stuff you experienced is gone for the better, but a lot is simply lost to cable television, chain stores, and a more mobile, unattached and irreverant population.
bump for later reading
Now moved to Fresno, CA, but after sixteen years, I will always have a spot in my heart for the friends I have been blessed with in Vicksburg. The South is so special.....for it will always be my Home.
It occurs to me that the reason the South is what it is is because of the common culture. You can go to Georgia or Alabama or Mississippi or South Carolina or Florida (most parts, anyway) or Louisiana and the only thing that changes are the license plates on the cars. Excepting dietary differences (which are a marvel in themselves and worthy of extended examination), the South is seamless.
Oh yes, there is a white South and a black South and like-it-or-not, we are a part of each other's history....and culture. I think it will only get better.
Born in southGeorgia. Mother grew up on a farm in Coleman County, GA. Mother's mother had a cook whose name was Trudy. Trudy was the grand daughter of a slave. Grandmother and Trudy were best friends. Trudy lived in a two-room house in the backyard. She papered her walls with newspaper and rodeo posters. Grandmother and Trudy died two weeks apart. Mother and her sister attended Trudy's funeral.
Grandmother's backyard was sand swept clean with a handmade broom. The house had been painted once or twice - a sign of some prosperity.
I remember the smoke house and the well, and the windmill standing in the garden. A huge pomagranite tree grew beside the house, and in the little bathroom I could see through the floorboards the chickens under the house. I'll skip any description of the outhouse.
We kids used to ride in the back of the truck out into the cow paster. The cows would follow the truck, and we'd push each other out of the truck. Had to run like hell to get back on the truck before the cows trompled our butts.
I gave the chickenpox to the black kids. Chicken pox in the summer in South Georgia is unforgiving.
My dad was from Boston, GA, between Valdosta and Thomasville. One of his many uncles had a farm outside Macon and he spent some summers there doing farm stuff. It was a major undertaking to travel that far in those days.
Boston, GA....real south Georgia. below the "nat line." Humidity can kill a person sometimes, sufficating.
Lots of plantations down there. Lots of wealthy people buying up these plantations and building horse farms. Jimmy Buffet frequents the area around Thomasville. One of his favorite barbeque joints is on the highway between Thomasville and Tallahassee.
I love the blended smell of the honeysuckle and the cherry laurel blooming in the summer time. Such juxtoposition.
I love my south. I have a love affair with the south. And I hope to preserve it for my children. I mourned the loss of my uncle's south Georgia country home by sale. If I could have bought it, I would have. My consolation is that my cousin's home (in the back pasture), is stillavailable. He put two tenant houses together, built a porch, used beautiful worn wooden railings from an old hotel as bannisters.
Yes, we're quirky, but no more so than any other region, I don't suppose. What's really quirky? - ice fishing up north, I think.
Who wants Dunkin Donuts when you can have Krispy Kreme?
I have a friend from CT who is constantly bemoaning the "Armpit Weather" as she calls it here in NC. I wonder what she'd think of the weather in southern GA. AL, MS or LA?
Give me GA. weather any day. I wanna go HOME!
/wailing ceased :)
Then come on home. :)
What is the South? A place with less snow, ice, and sub-zero cold weather. That's why I am a happy transplant.
Okay. Let me say this. Kimberly, who won the "Wickedly Perfect" top prize, didn't have a drop of Atlanta in her. Where was she from?
I miss just sitting on the porch in early evening in the spring and watching the lightening bugs.
I must admit, Dunkin Doughnuts has better coffee. Thank goodness we have a few around here. The doughnuts are equal...they are all too fattening! LOL
In college when I mentioned the love and stong bond between us and our housekeeper growing up. A psych prof told me "that wasn't love, she was PAID." I know he was wrong! I know Macel loved us....the prof just wasn't from round here.
Listening to the frogs and the crickets and the cacades making their beautiful music.
they say (who's they?) that the reason Southerners move so slowly is the oppressive heat. Maybe.
"Quarterly meetings" at the old Methodist church in south Georgia. We still drive down for the day. Leave the diet behind. You can expect the usual - fried chicken and pomento cheese and sweet tea. And the pies!
I'm not a coffee drinker, lol, so can't comment on the coffee at either place, but I do contend that a HOT Krispy Kreme is HEAVEN in your hand and a Dunkin Donut is a poor imitation. lol
Let the donut wars begin! :)
I've heard that in the North, people will tell you how it is, point blank with no resevations about disappointing or offending you.
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.
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