Random Birthright: On Being Southern

Being Southern is not merely a matter of being born in a particular locale but of soaking up the customs and conventions of that place and its people long before you are conscious of doing so.  It is said that we take longer to mature than most animals because we are, in effect, outside the literal womb of our mothers and in the womb of our culture where we learn language, first with our mothers and fathers as caretakers—and, in my case, mostly from my mother since my father was at work in the paper mill nearby, Union Bag (later Union Camp), the largest pulp and paper mill in the world at the time.  He came and went in mysterious patterns of 3 to 11, 11 to 7, and 7 to 3.  And God help you if you woke him when he was sleeping by day for the midnight shift from 11 to 7.  My mother was always there to answer questions—even “Where did God come from?”  (She did her best with that one: “From an egg.” And, of course, I asked, “Where does the egg come from?”  I think she changed the topic at that point so my infantile theological inquiry got pushed off only to re-emerge with a vengeance in my adolescence when I read philosophy and pondered how “God” and “Nature” were related as I struggled with the works of Spinoza which I found in a old bookshop in downtown Savannah.  My mother was very unhappy when I was rash enough and incautious enough to explain to her why I was an “atheist.”  I saw her neck go red and her eyes glaze over and moved quickly toward the back door. I was barely out the screen door when her shoe (alas, one of my father’s heavy work shoes) hit me in the back of the head.  Nurturing an atheist was not part of my Mama’s notions of motherhood.  I had a lump for quite a while to remind me to keep my philosophic inquiries to myself.

       But it is pure memory more than reasoning that marks me as “Southern.” As the words of “Dixie” suggest, the South is the place “where ole’ times are not forgot.”  Tradition was bred into me by virtue of the regional emphasis on the past, just as in Quebec the slogan is <<Je me souviens!>> (“I remember.”)   In both places, one is obliged to remember above all a military defeat—the battlefields of Virginia that led to the surrender of Lee to Grant in a Virginia courthouse or the Plains of Abraham that led to the British conquest of Quebec.  For me the Civil War was not merely past but also present every time it rained and I found new relics of that conflict in the sandy road that ran past my house—from bullets with caps and powder intact to rusty grape shot to clay pipes from the ruins of a plantation destroyed somewhere in the vicinity.  Once a neighbor across the street dug up a skull in his backyard with a grape shot lodged behind a jagged hole in the forehead, someone clearly caught in the crossfire as Sherman’s troop advanced on Savannah after the destruction of Ft. McAlister just south of where we lived. I played in the ruins of that fort when I was growing up before it was restored as a historical monument.  The past was not merely a romantic haze but a vivid presence in those ruins and deadly shards of conflict.  As boys we collected them without much thought for the tragedy they represented, much as some collected baseball cards. In my shoebox collection of Civil War souvenirs I even had a human jaw bone, which I handled as tenderly as Hamlet did the skull of Yorick.  Years later my mother gave my shoeboxes away to younger neighborhood boys who knew of my collection.  She did not realize my collection rivaled that of the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah.

           Perhaps it is the presence of both death and entropy that mark the South most poignantly in my memories.  It seems I was always going to someone’s funeral just as the oppressive heat of the summer sun and the humidity of the air evoked the disorder of the universe with sagging fence posts, rusting roof tops, and even an abundance of abandoned farmhouses, barns with faded Dr. Pepper signs, along the way to my grandfather’s house in Statesboro, just about forty miles northeast of where we lived through the pine barrens (aptly named for the sheer monotony of row after row of tall, thin Loblolly pines along the route). Going to funerals with my father was an ordeal since he drove about forty miles per hour through this bleak landscape with my neck sweating and chaffing under the starched white shirt enveloped by the blue serge suit I wore under protest. But a large family almost always insures an abundance of such solemn occasions. Once there, however, after the church service was finished and the pallbearers had taken the casket to the grave site, children could swap stories and pocket knives and throw acorns just beyond the circle of mourners—much as we did at any family reunion.

          Much later and much farther north in Massachusetts I found that my girl friend at Radcliffe College from the nearby town of Wellesley, avoided the whole topic of death and that her experience of funerals was non-existent. My own relatives contemplated their end with the aplomb that seems a cultural artifact of the South itself.  Eudora Welty in The Optimist’s Daughter and James Agee in A Death in the Family give vivid descriptions of those events from their own experience. Southerners often visit a family graveyard to see their own tombs awaiting occupation.  When I came home for vacations from college, my Uncle Jesse asked me to take him upcountry to see his gravesite, two adjacent tombstones because his wife, my Aunt Gertrude, had pre-deceased him by more than twenty years. He lived with my parents until he joined my aunt in his tomb next to her in his early eighties. I have photographs of my father taken as he walked pensively in that same family cemetery among his ancestors.  Death is not something avoided as a topic of conversation in the South.  I often dream of that same cemetery where most of my family is buried, their homes not so very far down those dusty roads in the silent rural environs just north of Statesboro, a church where my paternal grandfather preached until his death at age seventy-nine, a day of two before we would have had a great family reunion to honor him, which would have been his 80^th birthday celebration.  Instead we attended his funeral. Entropy made it appearance at his previous birthday when he had to be gently persuaded to bring his prayer to a halt, as he repeated several paragraphs and made a few hungry folks a little anxious.

          The feasts—whether for big family reunions, funerals, or church meetings—sometimes called “dinner on the grounds,” were real occasions for rejoicing. At my grandfather’s birthday celebrations, there was a gigantic collection of home-cooked food provided by nearly a hundred relatives spread out on tables and benches both in the house and under the great pecan tree in the backyard. Sweet ice tea, fried chicken, peach pie, okra, sweet potato, chicken and dumplings, fried catfish, turnip greens, potato salad, deviled eggs, rice and butter beans, black-eyes peas, lemon meringue pie, pound cake—and almost always multiple dishes of banana pudding with vanilla wafers that I overindulged. The only comparison I know now is Mrs. Wilke’s Boarding House in Downtown Savannah where tourists wait for hours in long lines to take a turn at a similar feast for a prix fixe of eight dollars, all you can eat. 

WISDOM AND WILDERNESS: la sagesse de la savane

   Wednesday, 2 January 2008 

     The term “wilderness” usually conjures up images of places far removed from ordinary human habitation, great rocky crags in mountainous terrain or desert landscapes or deep swampy lagoons or thick jungle growth barely allowing passage.  Places where “wild things” are found. It is a romantic image of places “far from the madding crowd.” For me the term refers to the more swampy terrain of southeast Georgia, the Ogeechee River area near which I grew up. We lived about ten miles southwest of Savannah after moving out of the city when I was about four years old.  People who only know my scholarly habits, hanging out in libraries and bookstores or cafes with my nose in a book have no idea how much my life is connected to these ‘wild’ places—even now in the middle of my sixth decade.  In fact, the deep woods of Georgia was my favorite place to read.  Nobody could find me there and I never had to worry about being interrupted.

     Even now, more than four decades later, I can see and feel the texture of Loblolly pine bark, remember exactly how it felt to brush stinging nettle with a bare ankle, or notice the distressing sound of snapping tendrils as a huge jungle vine decided to dump me into a swampy pool of brackish water as I was imitating Tarzan swinging across a forest clearing.  I carried a machete or a long WWI bayonette with me most of the time, along with a Bowie hunting knife and a .22 rifle for the possible dangers of meeting unpleasant two-legged characters.  Fortunately, I moved with too much stealth for anyone to hear me.  With a poor sense of direction, I somehow rarely got lost, “feeling” my way instinctively through the labyrinthine byways.  I was tuned to a different frequency when I was in the woods.  Only when I tried to reason my way around the woods, using sun directions or moss on trees, did I ever get lost. Then I had to walk till I came out to a railroad track or highway to find my way home.  Sometimes that required passing through quite a few miles of thorny, insect-plagued territory.

     For my father the rivers and tidal creeks were his places to get away, to commune with the universe, to keep in touch with the God who was as evident in Nature as in the Bible of his preacher father. Not long after taking out cosmic insurance at a local Baptist church during a Revival meeting, I was baptized behind the pulpit in a pool for that purpose. But reading Spinoza somewhat later, I took my father’s path and sought out the God of Nature—“Nature’s God”—in my swamp wandering and reading and notebook scribbling.  I reasoned that if God could not be found outside the walls of churches, then “God” was only an empty term of little interest. I was reading Sir James Jeans and Einstein’s essays and Fred Hoyle and books with titles like The Oscillating Universe. I struggled with Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, even Alfred Tarski’s forays into logical conundrums.  It was “overreaching,” to be sure, but it was utterly intoxicating.  It was my version of what I later encountered in the works of Emerson and Thoreau.  I muddled centuries and authors, lost in time and space then as now.  (I am never quite sure to what century I belong or even whether it matters very much.  How little “the deep down unteachable part” of me has changed!) “Wilderness,” for me, was always a place which included the stars above as well as the microcosmos in the ponds and soil.  “Nature,” for me, included and transcended human beings.  Even as I write I realize how close my thinking still is to the text of Spinoza I first encountered in an old bookshop in downtown Savannah, especially his description of “God.”  It was far more attractive to me than what I discerned in the arrogant speculations of Descartes.  In that way, I suppose, I escaped the point of Toqueville’s famously’) jest about Americans being naïve Cartesians.  If Spinoza was really an atheist, as some geniuses have suggested, it certainly escaped my notice. I’m sure God escapes confinement to Spinoza’s geometrical speculations but I like the ‘poetry’ of Spinoza’s philosophical statements on “divinity.”  God cannot be confined to churches or temples of any sort.  In that way, the “wisdom” that seeks guidance from thoughts of “the highest things” is found in this larger framework of Nature or Wilderness.

Falling Into Grace: Religion in Churches, Swamps, and Tidal Creeks

                     My deepest memories are hopelessly muddled in mystical romanticism with my search for God in church, synagogue, Nature, and books, especially the works of Spinoza.  Nature? Pantheistic mysticism in my first reading of Spinoza at an abstract level.  But down to earth and more concretely?  Well, girls—if you must know.  OK.   Maybe woods and mist and swamps and oceans with giant harvest moons and phosphorescent surf, especially while swimming in the nude with some college girls who picked me up one evening, a shy high school senior, for a ride to the beach.  Pretty innocent, I’m sorry to say.  That’s about as much of a confession as you can get.  I led a pretty celibate life in practice—though not in theory.  If one’s reach should exceed one’s grasp, I did all right.  To be somewhat honest, I never did a lot of grasping even when luscious fruit was within reach.  Too much the Southern gentleman—my Mama’s moral teachings.

           (I exclude band road trips, remembering—suddenly--one where I sat comfortably ensconced with a voluptuous girl—a big girl—in a bus seat, entwined in darkness for the entire trip in delightfully passionate embrace,  a girl I did not know.  I can still recall the warmth of her closeness and those passionate if more or less innocent kisses. “Ah, happy, happy boughs….”  Keats Ode On A Grecian Urn, one of my favorite poems in those hormone rich days.  He should have been in a high school band traveling back from a football game late in the evening.  No “forever out of reach” but forever remembered with gratitude—and longing for what never happened. It could have led—but did not—to a happy, happy marriage perhaps with her Pappy holding a double-barreled shotgun to help us celebrate.)

         Church was a great place for a shy young man to meet young women not always equally shy.  Besides, in the South, churches were—and perhaps still are—a major feature of one’s social life.  Way out on the little dirt road where I lived, a pick-up truck with a loudspeaker announcing “Vacation Bible School” was a welcome sight, despite the dusty cloud it left hanging in the air.  It did not take long for me to convince my Mama.  After all, it was scarcely a half mile walk to the church in question.  And I was already there often enough for church services and Sunday School (with guest appearances by the John Birch Society to warn us about that Communist Eisenhower) . We made What-Not stands in the pattern of a ship’s anchor, sanding, shellacking, and glueing on the little shelf to hold kitchy knick-knacks.  Not much sophisticated carpentry but, as compensation, there were an unusual number of girls in the VBS (Vacation Bible School) class, mostly doing other things more feminine like baking or sewing something—in this pre-feminist era.  More ogling than any real interaction but pleasant enough and better than anything on the TV.

          Church socials for young people were mostly of the picnic variety where you could converse easily with some girl you found attractive, not only over lunch but especially over the sink while washing dishes.  Probably led me to love dawdling over the sink, washing dishes, and socializing for the rest of my life.  (I even washed dishes one summer in Rockport, Massachusetts in The Blacksmith Shop, a resort restaurant with a lot of college girls to talk to and look at.  Looking at pretty girls is a life long pleasure for some of us. Not always with innocent consequences but always with a zest for life—and probably, it is said by some scientists, an activity leading to greater longevity.)

           I remember looking out the kitchen window of one little church somewhere in the backwoods of Georgia at the river nearby and watching as various candidates for baptism walked into to the water for the ritual dunking in a white robe. Just like a similar scene in The Apostle where Robert Duval does the baptizing. I watched with a kind of contemplative detachment, thinking only how much I remembered swimming in that same river.  (I had been taken to this church by a neighbor’s family on a visit to their upcountry relatives. The water was the color of the sandy clay soil that muddied it but it was very clean and brightly reflecting the summer sunlight.  If you opened your eyes while swimming under water you could only see a foot or two.  I never knew until I swam in Bermuda that water could actually be clear for swimming, so muddy are the rivers and creeks near coastal Georgia.  No surprise to me to learn about a blues singer years later called “Muddy Waters.”  Seemed a perfectly good name to me.

          It is impossible to really understand evangelical Christianity, called “fundamentalism” by outsiders, without having been inside it.  (Pentecostal enthusiasm is not an intelligible sport for spectators.)  Even today I just ignore the remarks I hear that betray outsider ignorance of a reality I once knew and still vividly remember.  I touch, even today, a large version of the King James Bible with reverence, remembering my grandfather on a visit to our home in Savannah, sitting in silence and preparing his Sunday sermon—Rev. John Elijah Strickland, pastor of the Lower Mill Creek Primitive Baptist Church near Statesboro, Georgia.  He had come to give a guest sermon at a Savannah church, the one my mother attended when she could and my father only when he could not easily avoid it—his father having subjected him to many such visits.

            My Daddy’s religion was mostly practiced in fishing the tidal creeks around Savannah.  When I went flounder gigging with him one evening, he looked like a country version of Poseidon with his great trident, a 3-pronged fork with barbs on the end of a pipe-extended contraption that resembled an extra long spear.  The Coleman gas lantern in the boat kept attracting jumping mullet who could whack you in the face if you were not careful.  It is not an accident, I’m sure, that the image of Christ is a fish and that many disciples were fishermen.  My Daddy was not as far from his origins as he and others might have thought.

           These were my favorite excursions with my father, in the darkest nights, gliding silently through the marsh looking for the tell-tale gleaming eyes of the flounders on the mud flats at low tide, occasionally coming so close to a startled snipe that you could have plucked it out of the marsh and bagged it without much effort.  I always wondered why college hazings had so many silly young men holding bags in the marsh on a so-called “snipe hunt.”  They were usually left all night in the marsh as an initiation rite.  A good country boy would have surprised them with a bag full of snipe if he had carried along a strong flashlight. I was happy just to see the birds and had no desire to catch them.  That startled face near enough to touch was miracle enough for me in my father’s religious excursions among the labyrinthine marshes of those Georgia tidal creeks.

Sacred Spaces and Southern Transcendentalism

           Only at night have I really experienced the most profound intuitions about the places I remember from the South.  The harsh sunlight seems to wash out into an indistinct haze any real perception of the places

I have visited from my youth—the streets of Savannah, the canopy of live oaks that covers the downtown squares, the architecture that echoes the days of Christopher Wren, the cobblestones that pave the descending street along Factor’s Walk, winding around and down to the edge of the piers where sailing vessels docked in the nineteenth century.  Somewhere in the fifth dimensional blend of centuries, the modern tugboats and ocean going ships meet the canoes of Native Americans paddling at a more leisurely pace along ancient pathways.  My imagination always has me joining these earlier peoples as they look out at the huge sailing vessels of the first Europeans who arrived on this coastline.  No memory can gainsay the impact of that first contact and clash of civilizations.  Yet nothing can compare in melancholia with the arrival of Africans in chains, their skins dark but not as dark as the hearts of the slave catchers and merchants who brought them here. Our history in that moment is cast into “the heart of darkness” from which, even today, escape and enlightenment is a constant struggle.

         Dreams were—and are—so much of my inner landscape that I cannot come near to “the meaning of being Southern” without these oneiric memories that remind me who I am and who we are as human beings.  So much of my life has been so far away from the South that my connection has been through an immersion—an involuntary baptism—in those visions from my past and from our communal past.  When I visit Savannah, I am lost and disoriented in the mundane light of day that sheds no light on these hidden sources of our moral and intellectual consciousness as we walk seemingly familiar streets, altered as they inevitably are by what Marguerite Yourcenar calls “that great sculptor, Time.”  Only driving around the streets of Savannah at night can I begin to get my bearings by the spirit compass, moved as it is by mysterious forces that point from phenomena to noumena, from appearances to underlying realities.

          

Oneiric Ontology: Images, Icons, and Imaginary Places of the South

           At least half of what we remember is probably imaginary.  Not that it isn’t true.  Far from it.  But precision gets shaky after a while—long before we get to what we euphemistically call “senior moments.”   I remember an old illustrated history of World War II that was on my parents’ book shelf, some kind of official account with many, many black and white photographs.  One I thought I recalled quite clearly was a photo of two high-ranking German officers in uniform just after they were captured, sitting down looking very dejected and depressed. When I returned to Savannah to the house where I grew up on Ridge Road, I retrieved that somewhat tattered book—probably damaged from all the page turning I used to do looking at all the vivid pictures of that war in the midst of which I was born in 1943.  I looked up the photo I remembered.  There was only one Nazi officer and, yes, he did look dejected, doubtless even depressed because he was faced with two grinning American GI’s, one of whom was pointing a rifle at his head. So what I remembered was mostly true but just not altogether precise.  Caveat emptor!  Yet those images probably set me on the way to a life as a photographer.  Even today my whole conception of World War II is firmly set by those images—far more vividly a part of me than the text itself.

           I often wonder about the images we recall from our dreams.  Just how accurate is the content?  Merely the effort to recall them seems to alter the dreams, no matter how close we are to waking, imposing a linear logic mostly foreign to oneiric existence, more associational than our proud reason might want to believe, analogical rather than logical.  William James suggested as he reported in Talks to Teachers, that even our waking thought is somewhat chaotic and disorderly, that the “stream of consciousness” requires considerable effort if we want to herd all those unruly images into some semblance of reasonable order.  Does this effort involve some sea-change that renders the truth of our end result a little (or a lot) in doubt?  Sometimes even a directed attempt to imagine something, an exercise which Jung called “active imagination,” produces some strange results.

             Once while perfectly wide awake—not even hypnotized— I was told to go down into an imaginary tunnel and walk through it where I would meet someone with a gift, someone accompanied by an animal important to me—a “totem animal”—and who would carry a gift in his hands in a box which I was to take and open.  I did this as an exercise of pure imagination and free association to see what would come up for me as an aid to my life as a writer.  As I emerged from the tunnel I saw an old black man approaching in a pair of denim overalls, accompanied by a possum walking along like he was tame.  The man had a small ornately carved wooden box in his hand. When he opened it there was an immediate flash of brilliant green light from a crystal in the box.  He gestured for me to take the gift.

           I stopped the exercise, utterly baffled by the dream-like result.  What I did notice was the Southern character of the images—both the man and the animal were powerful icons from my upbringing.  I was in Boston when I did the exercise and had not lived in the South for more than a quarter century.  Yet somehow those images felt “right” and “true” in some deep way I could not easily fathom.

           To this day I puzzle over the paradox of the gift of a beautiful emerald as a symbol of a writing career, a gift offered to me by a figure so humble in the South—yet at another and higher level perhaps a more ancient image of Wisdom itself, despite the equally humble animal that was his companion.  Hardly was I confronted by Athena leaping out of the brain of Zeus accompanied by an owl. For me, though, the imagery remains a profound truth. Though I may wish to read Homer in the original language, I would be foolish to ignore the oracular utterance of that exercise on that day so long ago, far though it was from the Temple at Delphi.  I may call myself  “a Plutarchan conservative”—and I do love and take guidance from Plutarch’s Moralia—but I have to remember where I came from.  I may not ignore my humble origins in the South.  It may be humiliating even to acknowledge where I came from, but somehow the people and animals and landscape in that place are all essential to me. Somehow my origins—and I hear “This Little Light of Mine” sung by Fannie Lou Hamer in the background—are part of the gifts that I have received as a writer.  I can only respond with “Amazing Grace—How Sweet The Sound…!”  It was the only song at my father’s funeral—sung by a beautiful but solitary soprano.  It was the song that came on the television years later in the hospital where my mother spent her last hours, a ‘tele-vision’ right over her bed. If you know the history of that song, then you also know how closely woven into spiritual unity are the two races that predominantly make up the South.