The American South? You don’t know the half of it
Stand by. I am going to explain the American South, a subject that makes the quantum theory seem like child’s play. The first thing you must understand is that there is no South — there are two. One is the Upper South of horses, tobacco and Episcopalians; and the other is the Deep South of mules, cotton and Baptists. The second thing is that there is no mid-South. It’s a geographical term with no sociological undercurrents, used by climatologists and weather reporters to locate their own brand of undercurrents.
The Upper South in its purest form consists of Maryland and Virginia. Maryland is now described by weather reporters and political bean counters as ‘mid-Atlantic’ but it wasn’t always thus. She was once a land of huge tobacco plantations, and what Lincoln’s secretary of state called a ‘hot bed of Secesh’ that probably would have seceded had Lincoln not ringed Baltimore with cannon. His action led a Confederate sympathiser to write her state song, ‘Maryland, my Maryland’, played as background music in Gone With the Wind and containing lyrics now unofficially banned, e.g.: ‘From shore to shore, from creek to creek, Potomac calls to Chesapeake/ ’Tis time to give the Rebel shriek/ Maryland, my Maryland!’ Another verse contains a reference to Lincoln and another call to arms: ‘The despot’s heel is on thy shore/ Be the battle queen of yore!’ Topping it all off is the final verse containing the line, ‘Huzzah! She spurns the Northern scum!’ If to be Southern is to be politically incorrect, Maryland beats all other Southern states hands down.
Maryland lost most of her Southern image after the Civil War, and just about all of it when Giant was filmed in 1956. In the Edna Ferber novel, the Liz Taylor heroine was the daughter of an old Virginia family but Hollywood moved them to Maryland, probably because they figured that as Maryland was no longer thought of as a Southern state, Taylor would not be required to do her flawed Southern accent, which in any case was (im)pure Deep South. It was just as well, because placing the sensuous Taylor in Virginia would have distorted the essence of the Upper South: it is not and never has been the South of the Southern belle. Never mind Sally Fairfax. She was said to have been George Washington’s unrequited love, and her name certainly makes her sound like a belle, but she was an older married woman when he met her and, from what little we know about her, not given to flirting or teasing or causing trouble just for the hell of it. The Upper South was formed and developed in the 17th century and it is impossible to extract a belle from the Age of Reason. She is a product of the 19th-century Age of Romanticism and her stamping ground is the Deep South, where she can also set fire to the house and lose her mind.
The Upper South woman is more like the English countrywoman in her preference for four-legged creatures. We have the ‘horsey lady’ and the ‘doggy lady’, who carry gooey, sticky things in the pockets of their ruined jackets. Her idea of a sexy image is not flouncing around in a hoop skirt — which in her case would probably have dried mud on it — but riding a horse through a hotel lobby like mad, bad Sally Ward of Kentucky did in the 1840s. She also tells jokes that unabashedly reveal her priorities, e.g., an elderly woman on her deathbed tells her weeping family, ‘Don’t grieve for me. I’m going to meet General Lee! [trenchant pause] And Jesus.’ Many in the Deep South would find this sacrilegious. Many others would figure the teller had told it wrong, which probably explains why I heard somebody in Mississippi tell it with the names reversed. Incredibly, the audience laughed.
In addition to Maryland and Virginia, South Carolina is considered by many to be part of the Upper South thanks to the social and military primacy of the city of Charleston, its manners and mayhem. Charleston really is a classy burg; in the words of Margaret Mitchell: ‘she had a deeply rooted belief that... most of the gentle blood of the whole continent could be found in that small seaport city, a belief shared largely by Charlestonians.’ Moreover, both state and city are the teacher’s pets of the Civil War. South Carolina was the first state to secede, and Charlestonians fired the first shot at Fort Sumter, the Union garrison in Charleston harbour.
It was fired by the Virginia-born Edmund Ruffin, an impassioned Confederate who, infuriated that Virginia was not the first state to secede, moved himself and his loyalties to South Carolina. The ever-polite Charlestonians invited him to man the first cannon and he let fly with a vengeance. Four years later, when he learned that Lee had surrendered, Ruffin wrapped himself in a Confederate flag and put a bullet through his head. We haven’t heard the last of him. Civil War buffs in the Upper South are still arguing over whether he is a Virginian or a South Carolinian. The writer who identifies him as the former will be bombarded by mail from readers who object, and vice versa. It never ends.
Lost in this shuffle is the state of North Carolina, much larger than South Carolina and contiguous to Virginia but singularly unblessed by membership in the Upper South. It has plenty of tobacco but not a lot of horses or Episcopalians; it doesn’t grow cotton, is not famous for mules, but it has Baptists galore. North Carolina simply fell between the slats and, there being no such thing as the mid-South, had to be called something else. The name that Virginia and South Carolina came up with is ‘a desert between two oases’.
All of these distinctions are fading. The Deep South has the best novels and movies, so that is the South that the rest of America and the whole world knows best and wants more of. The horsey lady and the doggy lady are fun but they can’t compare to James Dickey’s barbaric hillbillies, Truman Capote’s creepy kids, or androgynes (like Tennessee Williams’s Sebastian Venable) who are so sensitive that they have to be carried around on a velvet pillow and fed with an eye-dropper.
We are all Deep South Southerners now. Simple, friendly America needs somebody to be gothic, so tag! We’re it. I discovered just what is expected of me as a Southerner when I took part in one of those weekend seminars that colleges love to sponsor. The topic was: ‘The Gothic Mall: Conflict and Duality in the New South’. I detected a whiff of attraction-repulsion hanging in the air that emerged full force in the question period, when a New York graduate student in sociology asked me: ‘Are you presently tormented by anything, and if so, what?’