This post is definitely not of the same quality as today's Unreal Nature post of the same title. She extracts quotes from southern luminaries like Reynolds Price, while I am only able to dredge some of my own impressions of the south. Nor am I the keen observer Price or Walker Percy are.
The south and I have changed in ways that neither would have thought possible in the early to mid 1950's. I recently wrote a short piece in The Sun's Readers Write section, July issue, in which I witnessed an incident in 1958 that would be unthinkable today. At least it is my firm belief that it would be. I lived in an extremely segregated town in South Carolina in the 1940's, with separate drinking fountains in department stores for White and Colored, separate waiting rooms in train and bus stations, and separate, but certainly not equal, schools and housing. Of course, when we moved to Ohio in 1951, the town we lived in didn't even allow blacks in town overnight. and Puerto Ricans withstood discrimination almost as deep as any southern black. I don't know that the south's segregation was any worse than the north. And decades later, 1967, when stationed in northern California, a bar and restaurant owner told me that should I ever bring any black friends from the base in with me none of us would be served. So, I don't understand how the south was so much different in terms of race relations from other sections of the nation.
Race was not, and still is not, the issue that most separates the south. I believe that until relatively recent times, it was the weather. Before air conditioning life in the south was different. People learned to cope with oppressive heat and humidity, and became more aware of the power of weather expressed through thunder storms, drought, and most especially, hurricanes. Weather provided a cloak smothering everyone in its folds, and you either learned to cope, or be miserable. Read Walker Percy's entry in Ms Heyward's post again. Weather even influences literature.
With air conditioning, living became pleasant, or at least bearable. People from other sections of the country discovered the pleasant conviviality of southern people, along with relatively low populated areas and moved into the south. However, like Dave Smith says in the final excerpt, when you drive a few miles away from the populated areas, the old south seems almost to be alive. Rural North Carolina isn't much different in terms of prosperity from the way it was in the first half of the last century. There is AC, but there is equally as likely to be a single or double-wide manufactured home on blocks, barns deteriorating, and fields fallow. Rural NC is still largely poor. There are enclaves of magnificent homes in gated communities, but they are just that, separate and gated.
Quoting again from Unreal Nature, "… It depends on whether we are talking about myth-reality or fact-reality." Truthfully, it's impossible to talk about one or the other. They are too tightly wound to be separated. We, slipping into my southern nature, live in a culture that is myth and fact, equally experienced. We know the facts of our past, but choose to focus on myths that relieve us of responsibility for them. I'm a quilter and I have a book of historical quilts, some sewn by slave women, but the citations all say owned by so-and-so, the lady of the manors. There were very poor farmers in the south that never owned a slave, and there remain poor farmers that barely exist from crop to crop today.
I remember a southern time in which we kids chased fireflies in the dusk as the grown-ups sat on the back porch and listened to the radio. Whip-poor-wills and bob-whites called through the night, and all was right with the world. That time exists only in my mind, because I know even at that very time my uncle and cousins were in Europe fighting a war. When they returned, everything would be different and the old south would fade into obscurity. I remember 1958 when a black man from New Jersey was wronged in Charleston and I could do nothing about it. I remember having to learn not to use 'boy' when speaking of blacks I was stationed with.
We have changed, this south and me. We haven't learned quite yet how to separate the myth-reality and fact-reality. Perhaps it is time to simply move on, to build new facts, and wrap them in revised myths. As the last line of the Dave Smith excerpt of Unreal Nature's post says, "Art says here’s the myth and here’s the reality. Now you feel of the thing and decide for yourself."
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