Back to Maryland

Current t-shirt: white cashmere T (Trying to channel them fifties movie stars)
Current music: Tilly and the Wall "Night of the Living Dead" (Love that song).

Heading back to Maryland today - didn't go yesterday.

Recently read the NYTimes review of the new Gone with the Wind sequel. And it came to me again, like a hammer to the head, followed by a sigh—because it's always a hammer to the head—that the North still doesn't get the South. They write about it as if it's a cartoon.

I remember my mother, who's from Georgia, telling me about the first time she read Gone with the Wind. She was on a train for fourteen hours, and she read it in one go, ten hours of reading. (Her great-grandmother, who lived to be 102, attended that ball Scarlett attends right as war breaks out.)

Thing is, Mom got that it was hokum. Blarney. A sweet dream. Integration was underway. All the propaganda from everywhere was all about how awful the South was. That it was a place where no human kindness could seep through the cracks of racism, feudalism, and awful men who, like the owner of the town store in Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, enjoyed their sadistic hold on their small portion of civilization.

And here was a book that gave an image of heroes and lovely women. Of course people loved it. But outside of the Junior League, St. Cecelia's Society (Charleston) and other such groups, I'm not sure people exactly believed it. Or rather, they did that very human thing, and held two realities in their head.

Who hasn't done that?

Can't Southerners be complex enough to be conflicted?

***

A few thoughts:

I've found far more kindness—black and white—among people who live below DC than among people who live above it. Especially among strangers.

I don't find the institutionalized racism in the North and the South to be different in quantity. The main difference is that upper-class people in the North tend to be less racist in word than upper-class people in the South, but in the South, people are more likely to actually know people across class and color lines. (Up here, when rich people know poor people, it's through college, and through college only.) Old money in the North doesn't realize how much their privilege buys immunity from racial tension, while old money in the South does. On the other hand, old Southern money and old white Southern families (rich and poor) will speak openly about problems with 'coloreds' at the dinner table. (I can never tell how much this is normal or how much it's to annoy the cousin (me) who's gone Yankee on them.)

My granddaddy was horrendously angry at the North. Not because of the war, but because of the economic sanctions that kept him and his brothers and sisters in extreme poverty, living off the land. I believe he knew people who starved and may have amost starved himself. But though he didn't agree with the economic sanctions and other laws, including integration, he believed in the rule of law. When integration came to the high school where he was principal, he informed the teachers that the law was the law, and any law-breakers could consider themselves fired. The school integrated peacefully.

Never, when looking at sanctions at Iraq, Iran, or Cuba do people bring up the close to home example of sanctions against the South. If you want a lesson in how to bring about feudalism, ethnic violence, and endemic starvation, I can think of no better classroom. And the accounts are all in English.

Men are far nicer to women in the South, at least in casual relations. (I imagine the same percentage of bastards exists everywhere.) It wasn't until I went to school in Vermont that I heard men flagrantly bragging about how many women they'd bagged. Many of the profoundly accomplished and often pretty women I know in New York who can't get a date would be mobbed with admirers in any city below the Potomac.

The South isn't all one place. It's a lot of different places. The Appalachians, the coast and the plains have different issues. Virginia is way different from northwest Georgia. No one above Baltimore gets this.

When actors want to put on a Southern accent, they rely on some standard cornball that isn't really spoken anywhere. There are many, many different accents, from the Scots-influenced areas to the heavily African-influenced ways of speaking in parts of Georgia and Alabama. And whites and blacks speak differently in the cities, but their accents are far closer in the small towns, and can be indistinguishable in the countryside, especially in the deep South away from the coasts.

***

Finally, I find many people in New York who have extremely strong opinions about the South without really having spent much time there. Or any time there. I sometimes feel the place gets grouped with Saudi for civil rights violations.

Love and grits,
(which, by the way, aren't cooked with cheese)

The Red Pooka!