It has happened countless times. A Southerner, homesick and lonely, sits in a bar in Boston, Chicago, or San Francisco, nursing a glass of Jack Daniels and musing upon the asperities of Yankee hospitality. A stranger approaches and orders a straight bourbon on the rocks. The forlorn Southerner's eyes light with merriment: he has caught the unmistakable intonations of a Southern accent. A kinsman! Far into the night the two men trade rounds of whiskey and swap yarns about coonhounds, catfish, tent revivals, Ole Miss beauty queens, Bear Bryant, and half-witted filling-station attendants. Having affirmed a bond of mutual understanding, they stagger off to their rooms, engulfed in the happy haze induced by well-aged whiskey.
To Northerners this scene appears quaint, curious, droll, or even downright repellent. What is it with these Southerners? What makes them so clannish and resistant to national homogeneity? My God, don't they realize that life offers more than flea-ridden dogs, feminine pulchritude, fleet halfbacks, and devotion to Dixie? With knowing winks the Northerners in the bar dismiss the two men as simple-minded good ol'boys, samples of the South's contribution to regional local color. But are they?
In this case, one is a successful businessman from Atlanta who has an MBA from the University of Virginia, serves on the mayor's advisory council, and ushers at the First Presbyterian Church. The other holds a PhD from Yale, has written two books on Kierkegaard, and teaches philosophy at Vanderbilt. Both have left the farms and folkways of their ancestors far behind, and their lives are governed by the same necessities and demands that order the existence of similar people in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Denver, and Seattle.
Yet both are Southerners, and temporarily marooned in an alien land they revert to age-old customs and deeply rooted mores; united, they celebrate their similarities and single themselves out of the (to them) undifferentiated mass of Americans. They perform a rite of identification worthy of two Englishmen who stumble upon one another in the sodden jungles of Borneo.
What accounts for this odd phenomenon? And make no mistake: it cuts far deeper than does a similar meeting between two Midwesterners, one from say, Minnesota, the other from Ohio. Today's Southerner is admittedly an American first; as a resident of the emerging "Sunbelt" he may be the quintessential American of the future: self-confident, prosperous, patriotic, religious, happy, and exuding suntanned vitality. But the materializing reality of a standardized culture that stretches from Richmond to Los Angeles has not completely stripped the Southerner of his distinctive attributes. He remains slightly apart, not quite at one with his fellow countrymen who dwell north of the Mason-Dixon line.
The deepest sources of the Southerner's particularity lie not in his drawling speech; not in his penchant for bourbon whiskey, cornbread, gifts, greens, and hog meat; not in his alleged laziness and devotion to the principle that anything worth doing is worth putting off until tomorrow; not in his religiosity and often fevered supernaturalism; not in his rural roots (after all, the Midwest boasts far more farmers than does the South); not even in his legendary attachment to kith, kin, and home. All of these characterize the Southerner, but none penetrates to the core of his uniqueness; they are effects, not causes---results, not the
...
Read Full Article
|
