Yellowhammer Press

“Reading the South” will be an ongoing series about beginning an understanding of the South through literature, music, and art.

A reader wrote me this week inquiring about a number of things, and where to find good Southern writing was at the top of his list.  My answer was long and, I admit, a bit of a tirade.  However, he brings up a good point: where does one go to find good Southern writing?  And what qualifies as Southern writing, anyway?

The first thing one has to do is shake off the idea of “The South” as a monolith.  There are an infinite number of Souths, and we each experience them differently.  The man who operates a shrimp boat in Bayou le Batre has a specific South.  The dentist in the suburbs of Alpharetta has a South of his own, too.  A chemistry teacher in Chattanooga, a lawyer in Gulfport — all varied existenses in a mulitude of subcultures, but united by something we call the South.  But what is it?

In his seminal Mind of the South (stay with me now — this is where it gets deep), WJ Cash opens by asserting that there is “a profound coviction that the South is another land, sharply differentiated from the rest of the American nation, and exhibiting within itself a remarkable homogeneity.”  Simply, when Southerners identify themselves as Southerners, they are setting themselves in opposition to everything un-Southern.  We assume that the description alone carries with it a description of our values and even hints at our personalities.  Of course, Cash puts it better:

Nevertheless, if it can be said there are many Souths, the fact remains that there is also one South.  That is to say, it is easy to trace throughout the region…a fairly definite mental pattern, associated with a fairly definite social pattern — a complex of established relationships and habits of thought, sentiments, prejudices, standards and values, and associations of ideas.

In short, we are bound less by a common experience than a common idea of the South, and that idea is changing rapidly.  The South changes and is changing, and we change with it, if only imperceptibly.

So how do we meet Southerness head on?  How do we engage with it, grapple with it, and ultimately claim some understanding of it?  The answer is that we probably can’t, but we can damn well try.  We are an expressive and expansive people, and our art is the best place to start.  Here are a few places to begin reading the South as it stands, alive and breathing:

The Chattahoochee Review: a great journal with varied content, much of which is available online.  Of note is their “Podcasts” section, which contains interviews with authors, as well as lectures if you feel like making your commute educational.

Black Warrior Review: Experimental and definitely not just regional, BWR contains some highly innovative work.  Well worth checking out.

StorySouth: Self-Explanatory.  A great online hub for reading current authors.

The Louisiana Review: A much more regional thing.  Online content is scarce, but back issues are cheap.

Reading the South is an experiment.  It’s about working through what it means to be Southern and to be engaged with Southern arts and letters.  Let’s talk it out.  Tell me what you think.  We’re just getting warmed up.

Much of the work we discuss here isn’t new.   We’re not solely concerned with new books, new authors, or new artists.  I learned firsthand that educating oneself about actual Southern art — more than just ceramic roosters — is a process that requires some digging.  Investigate on your own, teach yourself about what Southern art was and is and maybe ought to be.  Discover writers you’ve never read and artists you’ve never considered.  “New” is great but it’s a precarious place to start.

Ron Rash’s Chemistry and Other Stories isn’t new.  It’s a couple of years old, but it wears them well.  Rash is a professsor of Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University, and his title should give you some indication of his subject matter.  He is a prolific writer of poetry (poetry, of course, is always dicey and never having read it, can’t comment either way) and fiction.  You might know the name from more successful novels like Saints at the River and The World Made Straight.

The short form style of Chemistry gives Rash the chance to explore a broader Appalachia and populate it with figures who are equal parts tragic, exuberant, and  punishingly honest.  The titular story depicts a family struggling with a father’s terminal illness and his patiently abiding interest in a remote, evangelical church.  Other gems like “Speckled Trout,” (winner of the 2005 O. Henry prize) “The Projectionist’s Wife” and the seemingly out-of-place “Honesty” are well worth the effort.  Rash works in an Appalachia whose traditions and struggles aren’t dying or dead but are very much alive, despite the soft fatalism of his oeuvre.

Chemistry is also exceptional in the way it deftly avoids cliche, which the Appalachians are particularly full of.  Martin Amis once said a writer’s primary work is to do battle with cliche, and Rash has succeeded where scores have failed.  Though the characters are familiar — old men gossip about a legendary fish, an abusive husband consoles his recently-assaulted wife — they aren’t tired, trite, or predictable.  His characters share a sort of fatalistic resignation, and it may be just that soft note of defeat that resonates so familiarly with those of us who know Appalachia intimately.

Gregory Donovan’s “Is There a Dead Mule in It,” is a wonderful piece of poetry and an homage to Jerry Leath Mills’ now-famous essay Equine Gothic: The Dead Mule as Generic Signifier in Southern Literature of the Twentieth Century.Don’t let the academic title fool you — it’s a delightful analysis of Southern Lit and the preponderance of dead mules therein.  Shake off the title and enjoy.

• Columbus, MS photographer Birney Imes has made a career out of capturing elements of life and vibrancy in the impoverished Mississippi countryside.  Perhaps most famous are his series of Juke Joint photos.  One of his pieces graced the cover of a Lucinda Williams record. My personal favorite is a photo called “Blume With Chicken,” but I can’t find it anywhere at the moment.  Ah well.

• Trailer Bride, a Chapel Hill band whose mordant, serpentine hillbilly gothic sound has a firm place in my heart, hasn’t released a record since 2003, but lest we forget their exquisitely bleak portrayal of rurality, here’s a damn fine reminder:

When I was a child, my grandfather sang me odd, halting songs, seemingly atonal and operating within a structure I could scarcely remember, let alone master. Lyrically they were very simple and very much about the Crucifixion and its attendant imagery.  The lyrics were preceded by syllables more akin to shouts than notes, and though I had no idea what he was trying to teach me, I was completely fascinated by the performance.

He called it “Fa So La,” so named for the musical syllables sang before the lyrics began.  This was done so that members of the congregation could get an idea of the melody before the lyrics began on the second time through.  Later, I learned that this was called “Shape Note Singing” or, more commonly, “Sacred Harp,” so named for the song book in which the music was found (my mother has my grandfather’s tattered copy, an heirloom from the late 1880s — multiple attempts to smuggle it out of the house during holiday visits have failed).

Sacred Harp, such as it is, is a dying thing.  Even when my grandfather was a child in the 1920s, it was falling out of fashion, in favor of more structured congregational singing.  It was viewed as backward and rustic by many, even crude and unsavory by others.  What it ultimately was was an utterly unique form of music, complete with a historical pedigree dating back to the 17th century and producing a wall of wailing, shack-shaking noise that still reverberates through the piney North Alabama foothills where I was born.

Anthropological context aside, Sacred Harp, when performed correctly, is a wonder to behold.  Matt and Erica Hinton, Georgia natives and Emory grads, have produced what is easily the definitive documentary on the subject.  Awake, My Soul! is marvelous, and it makes me indescribably homesick.  The trailer is something to behold, but the music itself can’t be missed.  Once on the film’s website, the song “Idumea” will begin to play automatically, and they could hardly have chosen a better introduction to the art form.

What’s ultimately reflected in Awake, My Soul! is both defiance and deference.  At best, mainstream America (what few who are aware) will look at these singers as a curiosity; at worst, they will be painted broadly as rustics and unschooled zealots tucked away in remote corners of the South.  They are accustomed to both and are bothered by neither.  They venerate their dying art where they may, and I suspect you are welcome to join.

The enemy of every Southern historian is sentimentality.  It and its louche cousin, romanticism, are seductive enough to derail any attempt at actual scholarship.  Few undertake to tell some fragment of the Southern narrative without being suckered in by marauding Union cavalrymen or the tale of some poor-but-proud widow scratching an existence from a rocky plot, etc, etc.  Such is the price of picking around the collapsing columns of porticoes and underneath sharecroppers’ shacks.

But there are rare successes. 

Silent in the Land, Chip Cooper’s collection of photographs documenting the  antebellum architecture of Alabama is as intimidating as it is delightful.  Visually, the book is a pleasure to behold.  The work is exceptionally well done, the colors are rich and the houses provoke a visceral reaction that may range from awe at the architectural splendor to distaste (I recognize the understatement) for the socio-economic conditions that made their construction and the class who built them possible.

Cooper, Director of Photography at the University of Alabama, along with architectural interpretations by Robert Gamble and essays by Harry Knopke, documents the ruins of a class and of a lifestyle with unabashed honesty.  The homes, some well maintained, others in lamentable states of delapidation, reflect either nostalgia or revulsion in the reader.  It’s precisely that semiotic weight that Silent in the Land evokes so masterfully.  Just don’t call it a coffee table book.

Flannery, Flannery, Suits, and Whiskey

Paul Elie at Commonweal sheds some light on Flannery  O’Connor’s tumultuous personal intersection of intellectualism, Southernism, and Catholicism and just how difficult it is to keep all 3 balls in the air without letting at least one drop.

• Christopher Benfrey reviews Brad Gooch’s new Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. Typical TNR — lengthy but well worth it.

• Well into June, Florence, AL designer Billy Reid gives us a suit for the season. This is the best kind of attire — the sort best paired with a whiskey, a rocking chair, and a well dressed woman.  Speaking of which…

• The Old Fashioned, the aptly named cocktail all but extinct in contemporary watering holes, is making a comeback. Well, it’s not — but it deserves to. The Cocktail Spirit shows us how to drink like a gentleman.

Shown here as the Lord intended

And that’s William Alexander Percy’s recipe. From his incomparable memoir Lanterns on the Levee comes the only recipe one will ever need for that perennial summertime cocktail:

Father and General Catchings and Captain McNeilly and Captain Wat Stone and Mr. Everman would forgather every so often on our front gallery. These meeting must habitually have taken place in summer, because I remember Mother would be in white, looking very pretty, and would immediately set about making a mint julep for the gentlemen — no hors d’oeuvres, no sandwiches, no cocktails, just a mint julep. After the first long swallow — really a slow and noiseless suck, because the thick crushed ice comes against your teeth and the ice must be kept out and the liquor let in — Cap Mac would say: “Very fine, Camille, you make the best julep in the world.”

She probably did. Certainly her juleps had nothing in common with those hybrid concoctions one buys in bars the world over under that name. It would have been sacrilege to add lemon, or a slice of orange or of pineapple, or one of those wretched maraschino cherries. first you needed excellent bourbon whisky; rye or Scotch would not do at all. Then you put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampened it with water. Next, very quickly — here was the trick in the procedure — you crushed your ice, actually powdered it, preferably in a towel with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remained dry, and, slipping two sprigs of mint against the side of the glass, you crammed the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand. Last you filled the glass, which apparently had no room left for anything else, with bourbon, the older the better, and grated a bit of nutmeg on the top. The glass immediately frosted and you settled back in your chair for half an hour of sedate cumulative bliss. Although you stirred the sugar at the bottom, it never all melted, therefore at the end of the half hour there was left a delicious mess of ice and mint and whisky which a small boy was allowed to consume with calm rapture. Probably the anticipation of this phase of a julep was what held me on the outskirts of these meetings rather than the excitement of the discussion, which often I did not understand.

In short, you don’t make them with syrup, they don’t resemble a damned mojito, and no self respecting Southerner-with-a-capital-S would drink one out of those godforsaken silver goblets they show at the races. Get yourself a highball glass, some mint, and for God’s sake, some bourbon, and enjoy an afternoon as your forebears intended.

Take Me to the Water from Dust-to-Digital on Vimeo.

Take Me to the Water is, above all else, a book about spectatorship. Largely without text, the photographs are without any sort of context and are in no certain order. After all, you’re looking at photos that, as collector Jim Linderman says, were “found in flea markets, auctions, antique shows, and such.” That the baptismal participants, each undergoing a potentially life-altering event, are nameless and without history can make the book frustrating. The baptisms in Take Me to Water are dynamic things, full of characters and action, and seem hardly content to be confined to a static photograph. These were people who believed actively, whose religious faith was inextricably tied to the land they lived on, and whose belief spilled out of the primitive wooden-frame buildings in which they likely worshiped into the land around them.

The lookers-on, present in almost all the photographs in numbers ranging from twos and threes to seemingly hundreds, are engaging in a sort of voyeurism — they are watching the baptismal candidates experience a formative moment in their lives, one that many recall as equal to marriage or the birth of a child.

But they’re not just watching — there’s an air of solemnity, almost as though the spectators are supervising this ritual. After all, being baptized in the old Protestant tradition is often accompanied by the act of formally “joining” a church, the moment where an individual signs a document and the members hold a vote on whether to accept said individual into their church (these votes are almost always merely symbolic). The lookers-on in this case are witnessing the induction of a new member into their community, and if the crowd size is any indication, the communities range from tiny backwoods churches to large urban congregations.

Luc Sante’s essay, one of only two sizable pieces of text in the book, centers around his own voyeurism of the baptismal moment. As what a friend of mine refers to as a “casual Catholic,” Sante seems to feel cheated that he didn’t get to participate in such a baptism, and laments that his own took place at an age before he could really remember it. He offers, in the simplest of terms, a brief explanation of what exactly a baptism is, as though the reader is primarily curious as to why all these people wanted to get their clothes all wet.

The accompanying CD, along with Lance Ledbetter’s notes on each track, is a real treasure. If you’re familiar with Ledbetter’s Athens-based label Dust to Digital, you’ll probably recognize several of the artists like Washington Phillips and his odd homemade harp. The CD works as a kind of soundtrack to the book itself, but it’s also a good introduction to early recording and American primitive music (I know, I know — the term rankles). Ledbetter’s first work and certainly his masterpiece so far, Goodbye Babylon, explores this music in exhaustive detail and is well worth the $100 price tag (it’s hand packed in a cedar box with raw Georgia cotton — sometimes I take it out just to smell it).

Take Me to the Water is wonderfully primitive and jagged. The photos are mostly amateurish, the participants mostly rough and rural, and the book itself is without order or context. (Linderman does, however, try to offer clues where available — the back of one photo reads: “Baptism at Rockville, W.VA;” another: “Baptising in the Schoharie River near Sloansville, 1917″). It’s a frustrating thing, but invaluable as a collection of moments from America’s rural past. You can find it here.