Posted on 11/24/2005 10:36:41 PM PST by Nasty McPhilthy
SAVANNAH, Ga. - At a cozy corner table of Mrs. Wilkes' Dining Room, Andrea and Roland Lemke sit elbow-to-elbow with complete strangers as the manager rings the bell at 11 a.m. and asks for bowed heads.
After the blessing, the Lemkes help pass bowls of fried chicken, creamed corn and collard greens around a table shared by men in suits and tattooed college students. After lunch, they carry their own dirty dishes to the kitchen.
At this popular Savannah eatery, a $13 lunch doesn't just come with Southern hospitality - the customers are active participants. The Lemkes, recent transplants from Milwaukee, are still getting used to it.
"They're incredibly gracious people," said Andrea Lemke, who retired a year ago with her husband to neighboring Hilton Head Island, S.C. "The first thing we noticed about the South is your presence is always acknowledged. Things can be terribly cold and hard in the North sometimes."
Among the stereotypes of backwoods rednecks, English-mangling accents and entrenched racism, there's one trait for which Southerners are proud to be pigeonholed - their manners.
Not everybody believes a Southern upbringing gives folks an edge in etiquette. A recent AP-Ipsos poll found that while 55 percent of Southern adults believe they are more courteous than people in other regions only 35 percent of Americans outside the South agree.
The Lemkes became believers after moving into their gated community just across the Savannah River. Whether riding in their car or hiring contractors to work on their home, theirs clearly wasn't a Wisconsin welcome.
"As you're driving down the street and people are jogging or walking, they all wave. And I don't even know these people, for crying out loud," Andrea Lemke said. "I'm always addressed as 'ma'am' or 'Mrs. Lemke.' It drove me crazy when I was dealing with contractors. They never called me by my first name, even though I'd given them permission to do so."
It's impossible to measure whether Southerners honestly have bragging rights when it comes to courtesy. But regional historians say the South definitely has its own distinct culture of manners that grew from its small-town, agrarian settlements and flourished among the slave plantations of the 19th century.
Slavery established a Southern caste system of gross inequalities in which slave-owning white planters, poorer white farmers and black slaves saw rules of decorum, largely adopted from the English gentry, as essential to getting along.
"You had social classes, races and genders that were well-defined," said Charles Reagan Wilson, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. "Manners were what made the social system work amid all the possibility for conflict."
Social courtesies, even if only surface-deep, played a key role in the racially tumultuous century between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act. Rules of racial etiquette allowed whites to prolong their crumbling social order. For blacks, being impolite to whites could mean death.
"After the dissolution of segregation, Southern manners have lived on as the benign part of more than 300 years of injustice," said Edward L. Ayers, a Southern historian at the University of Virginia.
Today, the region's reputation for graciousness has become a mass-marketing vehicle. States use the promise of Southern hospitality to promote themselves to tourists, who spent $149 billion - 27 percent of U.S. travel dollars - in the Southeast in 2003.
Travel South USA, a group promoting tourism in 12 Southern states, asked focus groups in Toronto last January to give their impressions of the South. It hoped to find a unifying theme for diverse destinations from the West Virginia mountains to Louisiana's bayous.
More than anything, the Canadians thought of Southerners as gracious hosts, said Fran Poole, the industry group's marketing director.
"A lot of us would like to get away from some of the stereotypical Southern things, but they still think of us in very stereotypical ways," Poole said. "So why fight that impression? Let's use it to our advantage."
Charleston, S.C., has boasted for a decade its distinction as America's best-mannered city. Etiquette guru Marjabelle Young Stewart has bestowed that title on the coastal city each of the past 10 years, based on letters from people gushing over its graciousness.
"Their manners match the beautiful weather," said Stewart of Kewanee, Ill., author of more than 15 etiquette books. "When you hear Charleston, oh! They're so soft, so gentle."
Ironically, the importance Southerners have placed on courtesy may also have made them more prone to acts of violence.
Ayers studied the legacy of Southern violence for his 1985 book "Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South." His conclusion - homicide rates in the South have historically been higher than in other regions. That pattern still holds. The FBI reported last month the South accounted for 43 percent of the nation's murders in 2004, while it's home to just over a third of the U.S. population.
The South's reputation for courtesy and its killing rates aren't contradictory, Ayers said. Southerners tend to be thin-skinned. Insults a New Yorker would casually shrug off would be fighting words in Birmingham.
"We're, if anything, very sincere. We really mean it when we say `ma'am,'" Ayers said. "We just take words very seriously, both of respect and disrespect. And that's where a lot of this violence comes from."
As the South catches up with the hectic, high-tech pace of a more homogenous America, is the region losing its grip on graciousness?
Lydia Ramsey, a Savannah consultant who teaches business etiquette across the country, believes so. After eight years of instructing engineers, accountants, professors and charity workers in basic manners, spotting flaws and faux pas has become second nature.
"I can't help but notice people with extremes in dress and table manners," Ramsey said over lunch at a crowded cafe, her fingertips resting on the edge of the table. "That guy behind you practically has his chin in his bowl."
Growing up in Augusta, Ramsey and her brother were drilled in details of decorum - how to shake hands, how to hold a knife and fork - by their physician father. She recalls him noting on a hot July day, "I saw Mrs. Bell downtown on Broad Street, and she wasn't wearing any stockings."
Etiquette lessons during Ramsey's upbringing often revolved around the family dinner table. She suspects our fast-food culture is partly to blame for slouchy manners in the South and elsewhere.
"I don't know what the correct manners are for eating out of a McDonald's bag," Ramsey said. "We're holding on a little better in the South. But people are rushing around, not paying attention to things. I hear people say, `I don't have time to be nice,' and that's unfortunate."
We visited Savannah a year or two ago, and the one thing I'll always remember was being called "Sir" in a restaurant. Very nice.
We live in Western, NC in the Blue Ridge Mountains. When we go into Charlotte to a mall, we get bowled over by the teen-age punk-mall-rats.
Don't lable a state if you haven't explored the state.
For many FReepers, that's the unofficial forum motto.
"...homicide rates in the South have historically been higher than in other regions. That pattern still holds. The FBI reported last month the South accounted for 43 percent of the nation's murders in 2004, while it's home to just over a third of the U.S. population."
Before buying this as stated, I'd like a breakdown by race. Just who is killing who, and by region?
Homicide is probably greater in big cities, too. Who?
If everyone is so damned polite, then why are these folks living in a gated community?
Exactly so!
An armed society, is a polite society!
Ms.B
An armed society, is a polite society!
...or just a very noisy one.
Good for business, eh?
Happy Thanksgiving!
Ms.B
Pardon? Good for business?
And yes, happy Thanksgiving
Good fences make good neighbors. We should try it with Mexico.
People moving from Up North would naturally want a gated community; they want to live without fear.
My parents drilled us with the "Yes ma'am" "Yes sir" culture she had learned from her (Alabama) parents, and we in turn drilled our children. I have a difficult time with clients who are not used to being addressed as "Mr. Jones" and answered with "yes sir" but I explain to them that I grew up with a Southern mama and she'd reach out from home and snatch me bald headed if I didn't hew to my upbringing. I say it with a smile and they get used to it. And I got so knee-jerk about it with my kids that I have automatically corrected strangers in elevators, "Don't say uh huh, say yes ma'am," and then had to apologize and explain! In Atlanta there is a school called "At Ease, please" that teaches adults how to eat with silverware and what is proper conversation at a dining table, because they are going to be taking clients out to nice places and possibly be taken out by employers to be who will judge them on how they conduct themselves in public. Their parents can't teach them because their parents don't know either. All my sisters have used this school as a threat.
The homicide rate is about 90% Blacks killing Blacks. But of course we are terrified to admit that Blacks would ever commit any crimes.
Us too. My daughter is 6, and it's all about the pleases, the thank yous, and the yes ma'am / no sir. It's the funniest thing when we visit my Wisconsin in-laws. They get a big kick out of my li'l southern belle.
Of course. Because it makes them look like the uncivilized louts they are, and they resent that.
Love all the little stabs in this article. The author is writing about manners and OF COURSE he has to bring racism into it a few times. As if Northern cities like Chicago and New York don't have racism that's as bad as or worse than anything found in the South.
Here on Long Island I have a gym membership, and although in the abstract there's no business reason for the staff to interact with people as they leave the gym, it's obvious that the staff has been briefed otherwise. Someone will say goodbye unless everyone is completely absorbed in something that requires attention. And that's noticable here, and appreciated.
Because they came from Wisconsin and didn't know better.
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