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.