Where does the South begin?

As you can probably tell, I'm finished reading Ulysses. I got curious about the official "border" between North and South (is there a border between the East and the Midwest?) and I found this great article which is full of interesting and idiosyncratic facts:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/where-does-the-south-begin/70052/

It features several different maps and ways of determining the beginning of the South, including a map of where you could buy sweet tea at McDonald's prior to their national rollout in 2008.

It has my favorite defnition ever:

What those accents have in common, according to Rick Aschmann's research of regional dialects, is that the South is defined by areas where people pronounce "pen" as "pin." 

Learning to say "pen" instead of "pin" has been one of the goals of my adult life. Apparently the "i/e" substitution is common across multiple twangs and drawls, throughout the south.

According to this piece, both southern Indiana and southern Illinois are part of The South.

My home is not below the Mason-Dixon line

It’s a long straight drive down through Illinois to get to Memphis, cornfields repeating themselves beneath a flat unwavering sky. It’s got to be one of the most boring drives imaginable. And yet somehow in that stretch of I-57 that takes you from Chicago to Cairo, probably around the time the flat suddenly becomes a hill and gully descent towards the Mississippi River, the world changes from North to South, and the accents change with the landscape, from flat Midwestern nasal vowels to a twangy drawl that Southern Illinoisans swear is Southern, and that as a child in Memphis I doubtless called Yankee.

If I’m the only one in the car (oh who am I kidding, even if I’m not) at some point I will begin singing “Going Down to Cairo” at the top of my lungs.

Going down to Cairo

Goodbye, and a goodbye

Going down to Cairo

Goodbye Liza Jane

I always sing it fast and twangy and I get louder on the “black them boots and make ‘em shine” part.  For those of you not from around these parts, I should probably tell you that Cairo is pronounced Kay-ro.  If you need to back up and read again with a corrected pronunciation, go ahead. I will wait. The right vowel can make all the difference.

Cairo, Illinois, and the rest of the state, I had always believed, was above the Mason-Dixon line. My Uncle was a truck driver and he used to talk about driving up to Cairo. Now I’m a Chicagoan, Cairo is down. When I was a child and people talked about the North (boorish Yankees) and the South (home), they spoke of anything-above-Tennessee as being “above the Mason-Dixon line.” It turns out that line, demarcated by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon back before the Declaration of Independence, was way East, keeping Pennsylvania out of Virginia and Maryland, and dividing Delaware in half.  There is no Mason Dixon line for me to cross over when I travel from Chicago to Memphis.

But there’s something there. I feel it. I see it. I hear it. My heart simultaneously leaps up in joy and fills with a dull thudding anxiety.  Usually the first rumblings of joy happen as the hills begin to bubble up, there are pine trees growing beside the highway instead of cornfields, and the blood in my veins feels the tug of the Mississippi River, slow and inexorable, so powerful it can’t be swum. The bridge is enormous, you drive over one more hill and then there it is, looming in the distance, a long high bridge of steel arches, and if I’m alone in the car, when I drive up the quarter mile of ramp it takes to get onto the bridge proper, I roll down my window and holler like Bo Duke. If the kids are in the car, I holler at them instead: “Look, ya’ll look, it’s the Mississippi River oh look!” And just like that, my accent is there, the second “look” has two or three extra syllables for emphasis.

Is it the bridge? Is it the water? It will be three more hours until Memphis, we will have to slip through a corner of Missouri and then wend our way through more flatness, Mississippi River flatness, passing soybean and cotton fields beneath an unforgiving sky, past ugly fastfood marquees through dusty West Memphis, Arkansas, and then again “oh look girls look, there’s the bridge!” the second Mississippi crossing is right in front of me, wider than the first, I have a moment of panic where I try to remember am I supposed to take I-40 or I-55 and then I drive up onto the huge M shaped bridge that is lit at night, I see downtown Memphis winking in the sun with it’s low-rise skyline, a sign in the middle of the bridge says WELCOME TO TENNESSEE, I holler one more time, and I am home.

Knoxville: Summer 1915

Knoxville: Summer 1915, the prologue to A Death in the Family (Agee) is so beautiful it almost hurts.  It's funny that we think of the lyric essay as something created recently by the Seneca Review, but this prologue is a lyric essay.  I'm recalling, Laura, you were reading a book on criticism written by Agee and two other critics, and you said "we think we've invented all this new criticism but they were doing it then."  I feel the same about this essay.

Agee describes that most magical of things -- a child's long summer twilight in the security of family and neighborhood. He invests a huge portion of the essay in sensory detail, especially in trying to capture the specific sounds: various types of hose sounds, locusts, crickets. "Meantime from low in the dark, just outside the swaying horizons of the hoses, conveying always grass in the damp of dew and its strong green-black smear of smell, the regular yet spaced noises of the crickets, each a sweet cold silver noise threenoted, like the slipping each time of three matched links of a small chain.

I found it masterful the way he invoked the cricket. His first descriptive phrase is musical, lyrical, delightful to the eye and ear, but I didn't follow his meaning (although obviously I know what a cricket sounds like) -- "each a sweet cold silver noise threenoted" -- I couldn't grasp his notion of a cold silver noise.  Then he clarifies: "like the slipping each time of three matched links of a small chain."  Oh! Now I hear it!

He also restates everything he said in prose in verse, before closing the essay with a kind of coda-prayer.

My clumsy efforts here are not beginning to touch the magic of this piece, which captured my heart with its lyrical blend of sound and image, of repetition and musical syntax. ("Now is the night one blue dew.")

I'm really enjoying reading the pieces in this Southern Selves book. There is something soothing to my inner ear. Because I'm interested in sound, and in meditative memoir, this piece in particular stands out to me as a model.  I'm going to find the whole book and read it.

On Joyce and Being an Expat

Since, no matter what else I read, everything is gobbled up by Ulysses in my brain, and I want to find my way back into this project, I've been looking at the common threads.

Here's an interesting fact: James Joyce left Dublin to WRITE ABOUT Dublin.

Isn't that what I did? Isn't that what so many Southerners do?

Why couldn't he stay there? Why did he have to leave?

One of the reasons he left was the intense moral authority of the Catholic Church; the other was the authority of the British Empire. He felt there were nets tying him up, preventing him from being able to make the work he wanted to make. He left to free his mind.

I think about myself as a young woman, trying to come out, trying to be a sexual being, trying to be vibrant and alive, trying to be free in my own body. I left Memphis because I felt my body unfree there because of the authority of the Bible and the Belt.  Not only was my body hemmed in and judged and shamed; my voice didn't work. I'm not speaking in metaphor.  I lost the ability to sing twice in my childhood and once in college.  All three times I lost it because of the intense out-of-my-bodyness I felt when the singing teachers told me the ways I was doing it wrong. I couldn't sing in Memphis, home of the blues, birthplace of rock and roll, cradle of american musical civilization.

After college I got a job as an actress and moved to the big city. Atlanta. Atlanta was easier in so many ways. It was Southern but enlightened; urbane but drawling; the music was good, the food was good, the air felt right, not too far from home, but I felt freer there.

Two years later I relocated to the real big city. Chicago meant a sudden imprisonment in my accent; it meant a backwards step in my freedom because I came as a girlfriend, not as me; I had to lose myself to find myself and it was only when I came to Chicago that I awakened that nostalgia, that physical longing for the past, for home, even though home had been in so many ways oppressive.

The things I missed -- that I still miss -- are sensual.  Food. Soft air. Slowness, drawl, I miss the sounds of Memphis more than anything. The rhythms of speech that are curved not angular, I miss the diphthongs, oh how I miss them in my own mouth, I'm all clipped nasal midwestern now. Chicago hurts my ears.

It was when I got here that I started listening to country music. Before that I despised country music as the ultimate symbol of redneck racism, of smallmindness, of violence, of white boys dipping snuff leaning against  the back of their pick up trucks before school listening to Hank Williams Junior sing "Just a-swanging."

It wasn't until I moved to Chicago that I began to truly write. I wrote my first song. I wrote pages of memoir (all lost, all lost, things I am sure I no longer remember, but I ripped up the pages in embarrassment) and I began to find my singing voice and my writing voice, in this cold place that hurts my ears.  It's a joke I used to make onstage all the time, that I never would've written these songs if I hadn't moved to Chicago and gotten so damn cold I had to sing just to keep warm.

Joyce is a viscerally aural writer; that is, his words are at times almost physical experiences, in the body and ear as much as in the mind. At times he uses language to imitate the sound of music, especially in the Sirens episode of Ulysses. He described the technique he used as a fugue, and the words wind in and around each other in phrases and rephrases, with onomatopoeia and repetition and double and triple meanings that operate like layered notes, with senselessness that slowly (oh-too-slowly) reveals itself as sense.

I'm thinking of playing around with writing prose using blues forms or other southern forms of music (for some reason I love bluegrass best, even though it's from the other end of the state) as a way of bridging the space between my thoughts and my ear, especially since it was my cold and homesick ears that led me to write.

Southern Selves

I've now read all the female contributions to Southern Selves, the anthology of autobiographical southern writing we are reading.  This includes the following selections:

Dorothy Allison, from Skin:  Talking About Sex, Class & Literature
Maya Angelou, from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Kaye Gibbons, The First Grade, Jesus and the Hollyberry Family
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Belle Kearney, Slaveholder's Daughter
Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady
Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi
Evelyn Scott, Background in Tennessee
Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream
Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

That's quite a list.

The book introduced itself as being one where writer's write evocatively with a "sense of place," beyond mere geographical location.  (Compare this as a location where black Americans "knew their place".) Certain hallmarks of Southern storytelling, humor, and folksy charm is lauded by the editor.  But, in truth, only the selections by white women fall into this category, and even some of the white writers do not.  Women like Florence King or Dorothy Allison clearly hail from this tradition, as is Kaye Gibbons, humor + personal insight and memoir + a certain colloquial storytelling charm.

But the other women fall into one of two different categories, both of which are inscribed by race.  The great African American writers included in this anthology write almost exclusively about being black in the South.  Whether it's the peerless Harriet Jacobs writing about being pursued by her lecherous master or the inhumane torture following the Nat Turner uprising, or Maya Angelou writing with pride and a sense of community about listening to Joe Lewis win a fight over the radio and the fear and care that followed such a victory when walking back home, these women are bringing important personal and social history into their accounts.  I fell in love with the style in which Anne Moody wrote her selection (none of which are essays in their own right, by the way, but excerpts from longer works).  Moody tells the story of Emmett Till's murder.  I knew the circumstances of his death, have seen art made about it, and had heard it used as a rallying cry against white racism.  But Moody made it far more personal than I've ever experienced by telling it with the very humanistic details of her own fear and awakening:  becoming aware for the first time that she could be killed for the color of her skin.  Her fourteen year old anxiety and worry is present throughout the piece, and is best represented by her dropping a china dish from her trembling hands in the home of the racist white woman she worked for.

The other category dealing with race was white women who grew up in the incredibly racist South, fighting against what they perceived as wrong and inhumane.  In all cases, these essays had telltale "confessional" moments of when the writer first became aware of the imbedded racism, or their early oblivion to it, or even the racist "sins" they themselves committed.  (One example:  Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, in The Making of a Southerner, describes how she and her childhood friends "played" Klu Klux Klan or how she successfully debated at school the "con" side as to whether or not black people should be considered equal to white.)  In all of these essays, the South and particularly the Southern tradition of racism -- that history so tied to slavery -- is the fundamental organizing principle of society and identity.

I am most moved by the African American writers.  It's what they write that sticks.

Anne-Marie and I were discussing Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.  A Room of One's Own?  These black women writers didn't even have a body they could call their own.  The fact that someone like Harriet Jacobs rose out of this time as an enslaved person, taught herself to read and write, and then was a damn fine writer on top of it is amazing to me.  She exhibits voice, irony, satire, a good deal of journalistic neutrality, and scene-based storytelling as engaging as any in creative nonfiction.

I admired Eudora Welty for finding and using the very particular detail; the precise way she describes her family so that they seem original and real, not a roughly-drawn stereotype.  And yes, Dorothy Allison and Kaye Gibbons for their humor and examination of gender stereotypes or family misfortune with a discerning, wry eye.

Something in Florence King and Evelyn Scott reminded me of Anne-Marie's mother.  The way the writer slid into a sentence's payoff, tucked at the end, so that a joke is mostly undercut by tone but still zings.  (Anne-Marie, you can read those, especially Scott, and tell me if you hear your mother there in that subtle, sly humor.)  Zora Neale Hurston was the only Florida writer among the bunch.  True to form as a folklorist, her autobiography is made up of other people stories, folk tales of the town, legends that were passed around at the general store.  She is also unique in this group for writing in dialect, which I see as another folklorist turn.

Du Pre Lumpkin raises an important point to take with us:  she believes Southerners aren't born, but made, programmed in the ways of being a Southerner.  Of course, that's true of all cultures, yet it struck me when she said it.  Good to keep in mind as we go forward.

Southern Selves

Received the new Southern Selves book yesterday from Amazon.  A note on the back matter/metatext of this book featuring various southern authors writing about identity:

The publisher writes:

"Whether slave or master, intellectual or 'redneck,' each voice in this collection..."

Apparently these are the choices in the realm of southern selves who wrote here or might be purchasing this book.

It continues:

"... southern literature richly deserves its reputation for irreverent humor, exquisite language, a feeling for place, and an undying, often heartbreaking sense of the past."

Here we have the hallmarks (some might say the stereotypes) of southern lit laid out before us:  the sad sack, make-the-best-of-it antebellum humor; rich poetic language; sense of place (geography?); and nostalgia for the lost past.  Are these really the way we would describe varying voices of Southern writers, such as African American voices?  A nostalgia for the past?  Humor?

I'm thinking of Alice Walker's quote about Southern women writers, that all of them write so eloquently, beautifully, poetically about the South.  But none of them live there.

Washington Post Article

Michael,

Thanks for this excellent article!

I love that the author included Florida in "the deep South" category, while Tennessee was "Greater Appalachia".  When I told AM about this, she balked and immediately accused the author/researcher of being a "Yankee who had never visited Memphis."

Well, at this point, I don't think we know - she certainly didn't know - if the author was a Yankee or not.  I pointed out to her that one of the characteristics of Greater Appalachia was residents that are  "intensely suspicious of lowland aristocrats and Yankee social engineers."  I've never heard someone react so intensely to "Yankees" in my whole life until I met AM.  I don't remember many people in Florida saying "Yankees" although I do remember many a rebel flag.

True enough, the "Deep South" is described as:  "Dixie still traces its roots to the caste system established by masters who tried to duplicate West Indies-style slave society... The Old South values states' rights [check!] and fights the expansion of federal powers [also check!]."

I confess that in order to complete this blog, I had to consult the map of the U.S. to determine exactly where Tennessee is.  I thought part of it touched the Atlantic Ocean; my mistake.  Did I mention they dropped Geography as a core requirement in the 70's and 80's when I went to school?

As for the concept of 11 nations in 1, in my Intro to Cultural Analysis class my teacher, who seems generally fascinated by our IS, pointed out that there are often two acknowledged concepts of America.  One being the Balkan, many states, many identities.  The other being the generalized America any European might pick out in a grocery store.  We have similarities and differences.  And so many micro-cultures, it may be difficult to discern only 11.  But overall, I tended to agree with most of his assessments, having lived now in various parts of the U.S.