Southern Distinctiveness, Yet Again, or, Why America Still Needs the South

Abstract

In 1976 Democratic Party nominated a true blue son of South--Jimmy Carter--to be its presidential candidate. During that campaign, and especially after Carter's election, things southern--from rednecks and born-again Protestantism to potlikker and red-eye gravy--were journalistic rage. Southerners did things differentially, they--we--spoke differently, we ate different kinds of food, we believed and acted differently, and, during those early Carter years, national media seemed entranced by southernness of it all, believing themselves, I suppose, called first to understand South and then to help American people--or at least non-southerners among us--understand it too. I was finishing graduate school in Baltimore at time, and I remember my Yankee friends asking me an inordinate number of questions about South, about being southern. Of course, I was neither first nor last southerner to have enjoyed that particular pleasure: southerners have been explaining, telling about, South for generations.(1) We saw some of same curiosity--this attention to southernness--in 1992 presidential election, but by then novelty of a southerner sitting in White House had worn off, and, anyway, Arkansan Bill Clinton gave country other things to talk about. And if sometimes-southerner Al Gore wins 2000 election, I doubt very much that region will again be scrutinized and stared at as it was in late 1970s. Still, Gore's real but delicate Tennessee roots, as Los Angeles Times puts it, have motivated some media attention already, and I suspect more is to come. past is never dead. It's not even William Faulkner once said, and I think he's right.(2) In South, to be sure, past is not past, but even in America, past is not even past, if topic is South. The reasons for this are easy enough to understand. All know that until quite recently--say, 1970s--the relationship between South and America was strained, to say very least, and it had been so for two centuries or more: from antebellum slavery debates through Civil War and Reconstruction to modern Civil Rights movement of 1950s and 1960s, region and nation were at odds. Indeed, South and America fought--politically, legally, culturally, and even militarily--and that conflicted, sorrowful past is not easily forgotten. As title of a 1998 New York Times article has it, South's History Rises, Again and Again. No culture, of course, exists only in present: all draw on, hark back to, a past significant precisely because of its continued moral, identity, and emotional utility. In this South is no different, but what is unusual is how explicitly, how routinely, and how pervasively region's history, that very particular southern past, is evoked in present: South of then is recreated and oddly memorialized, concretized in a sense, in South of now.(3) Images abound of South's past continuing to rise again and again, and some of those most sharply etched--in particular, those that portray in one way or another conflict between nation and region, or South's outcast nature--are found in today's newspaper. A special section of very first issue of New York Times to appear in new century, titled Reflections on Century Past and Decades Ahead, included interviews with individuals for whom twentieth century's signal moments remain vivid memories and with those who, according to Times, inherit this history. Not surprisingly, people interviewed were from places with histories heavy with drama and death, shame and struggle, pain and possibility: India, Cambodia, and Germany, Russia and China, South Africa and Middle East, and Detroit and American South. Two southerners were interviewed about past and future of race and rights in region, and, perhaps paradoxically suggesting continuity amidst change, were from localities about as opposite in cultural trajectory as one could imagine, that New South symbol (or perhaps No-South symbol), Atlanta, and what historian James Cobb has called the most Southern place on earth, Mississippi Delta. …