I wasn’t sure about the best way to write what I thought about the South. It’s a big and varied place, and I had simply driven through it. I didn’t live there, didn’t built any deep relationships, I only saw things that surprised me. But in the wake of what happened in Charleston this month, I feel we need to do a lot more talking and stake out some positions.
What I noticed in our weeks down there is that “Southern hospitality” is real, and a little unsettling if you come from up north and aren’t used to every social interaction having so many elements. One afternoon we stopped for lunch at a chicken joint in Fort Payne, Alabama. The fellow who took order looked us up and down, and thoughtfully said “Now, I haven’t seen y’all around here before. Where you from?” It took about twice as long to get the words out as I expected, so I nearly began answering before he was finished. That began a friendly conversation about the amount of snow we’ve had in Massachusetts, about how long it takes for spring to come up there, about where we were heading, about what else we’d see in Alabama.
It was perfectly fine and fun in small doses, but for an introvert like me this amount of social engagement is grueling. And I wonder about the culture that makes them like that. The easy answer, which probably has some truth in it, is that most for most of the time the South was hot and sparsely-populated and there was no point rushing past the minutiae of daily life.
This kind of formal politeness can be suspiciously false, but it is a way of life. Only a cold and remote northern Romantic would believe that casual interactions should be based on honesty and sincerity, as an excuse to be rude and brusque. It’s no radical observation that these kinds of masks we were in society are essential to get things done. At the same time, politeness is essential if your culture is based on arbitrary race-based injustice and social regimentation.
It’s a reflection of a deeper kind of sense of self. I can’t remember for the life of me who said it — Faulkner? Fitzgerald? — that Southerners were the Americans most like Europeans because they had been defeated. That they preserved a sense of tribal identity and “heritage” that vanished in the fluidity and flux of the rest of the United States.
All these kinds of boundaries are defensive mechanisms in a sense, a way of engaging at a relatively shallow level so you can forestall engaging on anything serious. On the highways of the south, you wonder about even the possibility of national dialogue and exchange as you see one giant pick-up after another with some variation of the Confederate flag slapped on it. Driving through Alabama and Mississippi, you reflect every now and then that if you want to look into the eyes of real, burning, violent racial hatred you just had to get off any exit and drive to the nearest nursing home.
Back in March, I felt despair about this. So so many political and economic elites benefit greatly from division, there is no way we can have a serious conversation about this, even if we wanted to. The desperation to avoid these conversations is what struck me back in March. When you walk around Lee Circle in New Orleans, or ponder the pompous historical markers outside the mansion where the traitor Jefferson Davis died, or consider that the Emanuel Church in Charleston is on friggin’ Calhoun Street.
Or so I thought, until the shooting earlier this month. It is great to see that apparently a critical mass of people have come around to the empowering idea that maybe the state shouldn’t flaunt a symbol that to many represents generations of hate and violence. That all that nonsense belongs in museums, that they are about history — the reality of what happened — and not “heritage.”
No writer I admire ever wrote a passage that makes me cringe the way a certain passage in William Faulkner’s weak novel Intruder in the Dust does. At one point Faulkner himself seems to emerge and editorialize about how important it is for the South to grapple with its demons on its own and everyone else should butt out. That was wrong then, and still wrong now.
What I noticed in our weeks down there is that “Southern hospitality” is real, and a little unsettling if you come from up north and aren’t used to every social interaction having so many elements. One afternoon we stopped for lunch at a chicken joint in Fort Payne, Alabama. The fellow who took order looked us up and down, and thoughtfully said “Now, I haven’t seen y’all around here before. Where you from?” It took about twice as long to get the words out as I expected, so I nearly began answering before he was finished. That began a friendly conversation about the amount of snow we’ve had in Massachusetts, about how long it takes for spring to come up there, about where we were heading, about what else we’d see in Alabama.
It was perfectly fine and fun in small doses, but for an introvert like me this amount of social engagement is grueling. And I wonder about the culture that makes them like that. The easy answer, which probably has some truth in it, is that most for most of the time the South was hot and sparsely-populated and there was no point rushing past the minutiae of daily life.
This kind of formal politeness can be suspiciously false, but it is a way of life. Only a cold and remote northern Romantic would believe that casual interactions should be based on honesty and sincerity, as an excuse to be rude and brusque. It’s no radical observation that these kinds of masks we were in society are essential to get things done. At the same time, politeness is essential if your culture is based on arbitrary race-based injustice and social regimentation.
It’s a reflection of a deeper kind of sense of self. I can’t remember for the life of me who said it — Faulkner? Fitzgerald? — that Southerners were the Americans most like Europeans because they had been defeated. That they preserved a sense of tribal identity and “heritage” that vanished in the fluidity and flux of the rest of the United States.
All these kinds of boundaries are defensive mechanisms in a sense, a way of engaging at a relatively shallow level so you can forestall engaging on anything serious. On the highways of the south, you wonder about even the possibility of national dialogue and exchange as you see one giant pick-up after another with some variation of the Confederate flag slapped on it. Driving through Alabama and Mississippi, you reflect every now and then that if you want to look into the eyes of real, burning, violent racial hatred you just had to get off any exit and drive to the nearest nursing home.
Back in March, I felt despair about this. So so many political and economic elites benefit greatly from division, there is no way we can have a serious conversation about this, even if we wanted to. The desperation to avoid these conversations is what struck me back in March. When you walk around Lee Circle in New Orleans, or ponder the pompous historical markers outside the mansion where the traitor Jefferson Davis died, or consider that the Emanuel Church in Charleston is on friggin’ Calhoun Street.
Or so I thought, until the shooting earlier this month. It is great to see that apparently a critical mass of people have come around to the empowering idea that maybe the state shouldn’t flaunt a symbol that to many represents generations of hate and violence. That all that nonsense belongs in museums, that they are about history — the reality of what happened — and not “heritage.”
No writer I admire ever wrote a passage that makes me cringe the way a certain passage in William Faulkner’s weak novel Intruder in the Dust does. At one point Faulkner himself seems to emerge and editorialize about how important it is for the South to grapple with its demons on its own and everyone else should butt out. That was wrong then, and still wrong now.
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