by Caroline Todd
If there were some sort of test to determine Southern-ness I would pass with flying colors. My qualifications are almost laughably appropriate: I learned how to drive my dad’s truck in elementary school – in Meriwether County pastures, no less. I enjoy visiting New York, but I could never picture myself living there. I eat an egg salad sandwich for lunch every day and I go by my middle name. And if all that weren’t enough, my grandmother lives in a one-stoplight town known for its twice-yearly “Cotton Pickin’ Fair.”
Joking aside, I certainly don’t claim to be an expert on Southern studies, especially not from an academic standpoint. There’s a world of scholarship out there that I haven’t even begun to crack the surface of, but my own experiences have taught me a lot about the way things work around here. My hometown is small enough that everybody knows just about everyone else, yet big enough to hold a fairly wide variety of classes and races. Growing up with that exposure has been a privilege; I’ve heard and responded to many different points of view my whole life, and I’ve come to find that there’s not just one kind of “South.” And as a voracious reader I adore literature that gets to the heart of Southern life, whatever that might mean.
The South is rich in stories and I was raised on them. I grew up hearing about my great-grandfather’s mill, my father’s summer job at a local peach stand, and the horse my aunt somehow managed to keep near downtown Atlanta. Some are nostalgic, others are funny, but most are a combination of the two. I have my own stories now, and even though I’m tempted to cry rosy retrospection at the days when my grandmother pulled my cousins and me around in a Radio Flyer wagon, that really is the way I spent my childhood. Recently, though, I’ve begun to understand some of the tragedy behind the stories told with less frequency, and though ignoring it can be tempting confronting it is the only way to make sense of it. That’s where literature comes in. There’s something to say for authors like Harper Lee who understand the nuances of where I come from and manage to turn that experience into words on a page. Lee, whose passing last Friday is an enormous blow to the American literary community, was my hero for a host of reasons, and I’ve learned from experience that Flannery O’Connor doesn’t exaggerate (remember the grandmother I’ve mentioned a couple of times? Rumor has it there’s a snakehandling church down the road from her house). These authors have a difficult job. Representing the South is a hard thing to do and it’s even harder to do well.
That’s because it’s not pretty. I might joke about my stereotypical experiences, but I’ve fought misogyny, racism, and small-mindedness, all hallmarks of Southern dysfunction, tooth and nail for as long as I remember. It’s an unpleasant legacy we bear for pretty obvious reasons. We have to acknowledge that we live in a region whose entire infrastructure depended on owning other people for far too long, and those scars remain very visible. Racial boundaries aside, too many people live below the poverty line and the cycle keeping them there is incredibly aggressive. But authors who aren’t from here like to either attack or romanticize the South, with nothing in between, and I’m convinced the only ones who approach the issue moderately are the locals. You have to be close to an experience to represent it well; “writing what you know” really is important. Some people just don’t get the South, and I’m of the opinion that they should quit trying while they’re ahead.
Over the summer, I read Marja Mills’ The Mockingbird Next Door, an incredible account of her friendship with Harper Lee and her sister Alice. Mills, a journalist from Chicago, was charged with interviewing Lee for an article in the Chicago Tribune and eventually became close friends with the Lee sisters. Quite tastefully, I thought, Mills withheld information about the Lees’ private lives while presenting an otherwise effective portrait of the two sisters. But writing about the South was a difficult process for Mills, which she learned the hard way. In writing one of her first articles for the Tribune, she made the mistake of writing the way Alice pronounced “Nelle Harper” – Harper Lee’s given name, by the way, is her mother Ellen’s name spelled backwards – as “Nail Hah-puh” and mentioning something about her soft drawl. Alice, of course, was incredibly offended by this diminutive representation, and I was a little more than miffed. It’s kitschy and belittling, and it feeds into the romanticized notion of slow-talking Southern do-gooders – what Flannery O’Connor calls “good country people.” Though Mills’ book is generally more respectful than this, she makes a point to call out other figures in the Lees’ social circle for what she deems irregular speech or behavior even after the Alice incident. Sure, peppering dialogue with a “somethin’” every now and then isn’t a problem, but calling people out for speaking in an accent traditionally associated with lack of intelligence is completely unnecessary. And I promise that two octogenarians drinking iced tea on their porch isn’t an occurrence atypical enough to merit a full-out anthropological investigation.
On the opposite end of the spectrum I hear many a belittling comment, often accompanied by an eyeroll, about the nature of Southern life. In an election year this comes out in full force. Yes, an embarrassing number of lower-class Southerners have come out in support of candidates like Donald Trump, but there’s got to be a reason why that no one feels compelled to investigate. One of Trump’s largest support bases happens to be high school dropouts. Is no one going to ask why so many Southerners choose not to pursue higher education, instead of mocking those who live a lifestyle that is incredibly hard to break out of?
As proud as I am to be Southern, I admit I live in a small-minded culture. It would be naïve to ignore the still pervasive racial tensions that mark Southern experiences across the board. Bigotry and ignorance, the worst kind of family heirlooms, get passed on from generation to generation and they’re incredibly hard to eradicate. Segregation was our grandparents’ reality and their parents saw days when women couldn’t vote. He’s ashamed to admit it, but my own father remembers a segregated waiting room in his doctor’s office years after the Civil Rights Act was passed.
The South isn’t all magnolia trees and Atticus Finch, but it’s not all fire and brimstone either. As Flannery O’Connor poignantly illustrates, the myth of “good country people” is just that. More often than not, people aren’t as “simple,” to put it the way O’Connor does, as they seem and if we’re too quick to judge or point and laugh we deny them their humanity. Life in the South is just as complicated as it is everywhere else, and only through understanding that can we move forward to achieve true progress.