Something That Won't Let Go

Is there a South anymore?--Willie Morris

This morning I stumbled upon something I read many years ago but had forgotten:  an essay by the late, great Willie Morris, first published in 1986.  (I was a charter subscriber to Southern Magazine - not to be confused with Southern Living - which, alas, folded after only a few issues due to a massive cancellation of subscribers:  they had dared to publish an article discussing how the gays were gentrifying an old neighborhood in Birmingham.  With pictures, even.  Which of course was completely unacceptable for a family magazine down here, even in the Eighties.)

A quarter-century later, I think it is safe to say that yes, despite the advent of home computers, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, Supercenters, and Starbucks, there is still a South, still a Southern identity, both vulgarized and modernized beyond what our grandparents would have believed possible - changed but unchanging, attenuated but still palpable and vital in the music and manners, speech and thought, of the great arc of piney woods and verdant fields that extends from Virginia to Texas, this green and pleasant land.  Something different, something apart from the rest of the country that still lingers for good or ill in the rhythms of mind and memory.

I used to be proud, fiercely proud of my Southern identity:  a form of patriotism.  You Yankee boys don't know anything about that, this middle allegiance between the loyalty you feel to your family and the love you feel for the United States.  Southerners of the old school - down till my generation, anyway; I don't know about the young people today - felt just as passionately a third loyalty that fell somewhere between the other two, and partook of both, but was distinct, a pride and an identity all its own.  George Wallace in a speech one time referred to Southerners as "the greatest people on the face of the earth."  Which of course was an unremarkable phrase down here:  anyone who heard it would have thought the Governor was merely stating the obvious.  Yes, it was that kind of pride:  unreflecting and immovable, determined to take a stand, to live and die in Dixie.  My country, right or wrong.

It took a long time for the full consciousness of all that was wrong, deeply and tragically wrong, to dawn on me.  I was long past grown before I could understand why some writers and artists, like Willie, seemed to turn their backs on the South, moved away, distanced themselves from all the goodness and glory of being Southern.  Now, of course, the scales have long since fallen from my eyes.  Now, of course, I am not deceived, I see clearly what lies in the dark shadows of our moonlight-and-magnolias landscape:  the ignorance, intolerance, and cruel, overweening pride.  The self-perpetuating lies beneath our lilting tongue that every closed society is prey to.  I understand now why Willie and others left - why they had to leave. 

Though of course in a very real sense, you never can leave:  the South, after all, is not so much a place as a state of mind. 

An excerpt from Willie's essay:

DOES THE SOUTH exist any longer? One has to seek the answer on one's own terms, of course, but to do that, I suggest, one should spurn the boardrooms and the country clubs and the countless college seminars on the subject and spend a little time at the ball games and the funerals and the bus stations and the courthouses and the bargain-rate beauty parlors and the little churches and the roadhouses and the joints near the closing hour.

I did not judge the South remotely dead in a roadhouse near Vicksburg on a recent Saturday of the full moon. The parking lot was filled with pick-up trucks. That afternoon, only a mile beyond the hill, they had put 20,000 miniature American flags on the Union dead in the battlefield for Memorial Day, and the bar talk was vivid on this and other things. Dozens of couples in all modes of dress gyrated on the dance floor to Willie Nelson tunes, and the unprepossessing interior echoed with wild greetings and indigenous hosannas. There was a pride in this place that I knew in my ancestral soul, a pride not to be unduly tampered with, and if you had had the mettle to ask one of those people if the South still existed on that night, he would have stared you up and down and replied: "Who you, boy?"

I know a black South African student whom the Soviets courted at the University of Moscow before he decided to take a fellowship here. I enjoy watching the South through his eyes. "When I first came, I was afraid I'd made a big mistake," he says. "But the South grows on you. It seems so removed, but it's vividly real. I'll miss it when I go home. I don't understand why your national media wants a uniform U.S.A."

Nor, for that matter, do I. But I can testify to the hostility and ambivalence toward the South that still exists in many areas of the nation. Is it the lingering fear of differentness? I testify also to my own self-ironies, for when I dwelled in the North I felt more Southern than I ever had before; back home again to stay, I feel more American.

Perhaps in the end it is the old, inherent, devil-may-care instinct of the South that remains in the most abundance and will sustain the South in its uncertain future. The reckless gambler's instinct that fought and lost that war. Snake Stabler calling a bootleg play on fourth down, a Texas wildcatter putting his stakes on the one big strike, a black mother working 16 hours a day to educate her children, a genteel matron borrowing from the banker to send her daughter to a university sorority so she can marry well. It is gambling with the heart, it is a glass menagerie, it is something that won't let go.

Photo: The Ruins of Windsor by Eudora Welty, 1935.