The New Mind of the South - Couverture rigide

Thompson, Tracy

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1439158037 ISBN 13 : 9781439158036

Editeur : Simon & Schuster, 2013

Synopsis

Book by Thompson Tracy

A propos du livre

Extrait :

The New Mind of the South 1.

It’s Complicated

Being a Southerner is a lot like being a Jew, and every bit as complicated. For starters, this means there is no such thing as “Southern culture”—only “cultures,” plural, which range from the equivalent of the militantly Zionist (the neo-Confederate crowd) to the Hassidic (regular attendees of the Ole Miss–Alabama game, perhaps) and all shades in between. Jews and Southerners are both self-anointed chosen people—Jews in a religious sense, Southerners in a cultural sense. Both identities substantially overlap with a specific type of religion (evangelical Protestantanism, in the case of Southerners), though within those parameters there’s lots of room for variation. Both identities are voluntary affiliations that can be either adopted or forsworn, even if the natal imprint is tough to erase completely. Jews and Southerners alike know what it is to be a kind of invisible minority in the culture at large, forced to smile politely as they hear themselves referred to in unflattering, one-dimensional stereotypes: I’ll see your Jewish American Princess or Shylock, and raise you one Alabama hick plus a Bible-totin’, evolution-denyin’ school board member from Dogpatch.

Jews have Ashkenazi and Sephardic ethnic subgroups; Southerners come in two basic ethnic varieties—African American and Caucasian. Jews have their Diaspora; likewise, millions of Southerners have been forced to hit the road bound for the lettuce fields of California or the steel mills of Chicago. The Jews have their Babylonian captivity; Southerners have—well, slavery. Both groups have ample experience with poverty and deprivation, yet from this poor soil both groups have produced a disproportionate number of authentic and utterly idiosyncratic geniuses. Jewish culture has always placed an extraordinary value on intellectual achievement and scholarly pursuits; Southerners . . .

Well, okay. No analogy is perfect.

I am a Southerner. The Thompson family roots go at least six generations deep in the soil of Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee (though a few hardy adventurers have made it as far west as Oklahoma). A Southern identity is something I can’t imagine myself without, and yet I’ve spent much of my life trying to come up with a definition of exactly what that is. Southerners are Americans with an extra layer of identity—yet “no Southerner, so far as I know, has yet seen fit to write about the ‘two-ness’ of Southerners,” historian Carl Degler wrote a few years back, referring to W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous remark about the “double consciousness” of being both black and American.1 This seems incredible, given the lavish generosity Southerners have shown over the years in sharing their thoughts about their Southern-ness with the world—but it’s true. Why? For one thing, because for much of the twentieth century Southerners themselves laid down such strict rules about what was and was not authentically “Southern”—and anyone tempted to tamper or find fault with those rules found that social ostracism was just the start of the punishments awaiting him. For another, it’s been hard to lay down the burden of Southern history long enough to get a word in edgewise. Until quite recently, black people whose families had roots in the South as deep as mine were viewed one-dimensionally as just “black,” not “Southern”—as if skin color made them magically immune to feeling affection for the place they called home; white Southerners were either racist Confederate flag-wavers, redneck comic relief, or apologetic liberals. If none of those roles appealed, you could try for Resident Southern Genius, but that was a very exclusive club to get into, or you could go into academia. Or you could just shove the whole thing into a mental drawer and get on with your life.

Most of us did just that, saving this subject for idle moments spent in the company of other Southerners when there was nothing better to talk about, a kind of intellectual Rubik’s Cube. Then two things happened that made it newly relevant to me.

The first was an interesting story unearthed by a cousin in the course researching a Thompson family history. Among the nuggets of information he came up with was a set of papers on file at the National Archives referring to our common ancestor as a Union sympathizer during the Civil War. Thomas Thompson was a tenant farmer working a piece of land near the Chattahoochee River in what are now the southwest suburbs of Atlanta—in other words, deep in slave country, not in a border state or any well-known Southern pocket of pro-Union sentiment. According to his sworn testimony before a government commission in 1872, he had refused to support the Confederacy despite repeated harassment, imprisonment, and death threats. Toward the end of the war, he had been forced to leave the state in fear for his life, leaving his wife and children behind to make that year’s crop, meaning they were on hand to greet General Sherman in August of 1864 when his army arrived to relieve them of their harvest, along with virtually all their other worldly goods.

All these years, this story had been sitting in the files of the National Archives; for all these years, no one in my extended family had ever heard of it—or if anyone had, had never spoken of it. My paternal grandmother, who had been born in Alabama just after the end of Reconstruction and thus had grown up with people who would have been eyewitnesses to these events, had never so much as hinted about any of this. Why would that be? Because nobody in my family wanted to believe it. The consensus was that Thomas Thompson had been trying to pull a fast one, posing as a Union loyalist in an attempt to get reimbursed for his lost property. Intrigued by the realization that most of my relatives would rather be related to a con artist than a Civil War–era Union supporter, I went down to the National Archives and did some more research. With very little effort, I turned up roughly two dozen similar cases just from the small county where these events had taken place. The documents were faded and hard to read, but the contents were vivid—stories of neighbor turned against neighbor, of entire networks of men hiding in the woods and farm wives who secretly fed them, of people who refused to fight for the Confederacy despite social ostracism, beatings, death threats, even being disowned by their relatives. And for what? The basic answer came in my ancestor’s own words, carefully noted in a faded handwritten transcript preserved on microfiche: “I always was, am now and expect to be while I live, a Union man.”

My family, anti-Confederates? I’d always wondered why, unlike every other Southern family I knew, ours had no Civil War stories. It didn’t surprise me that history had not noticed us, but how could we have not noticed history? Now it seemed clear that we had—and the family silence about it actually made sense, too: in the haze of nostalgia that burnished the decades following the war, claiming a connection with relatives who had opposed the sacred Lost Cause would have been claiming kinship with a traitor. Your kids would have been shunned; you might have gotten death threats.

This discovery was both fascinating and unsettling—like learning that some old family keepsake painting you’d had for decades had, in fact, been hanging upside down. These events had happened within a ten-mile radius of where I’d grown up. The people in these stories had stood on their porches in July 1864 and watched as a vast Union army appeared on the horizon—first a trickle of men and wagons, then more, until the landscape was a sea of men and tents and campfires and livestock stretching from one horizon to the other. “The field was plumb full of soldiers picking peas,” one said. “The woods was perfectly blue with soldiers,” said another.2 I knew the road they had lived on; I’d passed the sites of those old homesteads hundreds of times. What I hadn’t known was what had happened there. My keepsake painting wasn’t just hanging upside down; it had been painted over. Now a different and more complicated painting was beginning to emerge.

And here’s the interesting thing: when your past changes, your identity changes. People have an instinctive need to reconcile their image of themselves with their image of where they came from, and if necessary they will invent a past to make that happen. But for me, past and present had never quite lined up. I had known for a long time that the history I’d picked up from the adults around me was a confusing jumble of truth and hearsay and propaganda: Sherman’s men came right down this railroad . . . The war was about states’ rights . . . The Yankees took everything we had and then some . . . They buried him out under the muscadine vines . . . Slavery wasn’t all that awful. I’d figured it didn’t really matter; I’d leave the arguments about why the Civil War happened and what it all meant to the historians and the wingnuts who were still mad about it. Now it occurred to me that maybe the reason my identity had never completely made sense was that the history attached to it had never made sense, either.

The second thing that happened was the realization that my past was disappearing. I’d left Georgia for Washington, D.C., in 1989, an ambitious, single, career-minded newspaper reporter eager to start a new job at the Washington Post. Now I was middle-aged, married, and living in the Maryland suburbs, a mom who juggled the occasional freelance writing gig with household chores and schlepping kids to play dates and swim meets. Georgia was six hundred miles and two decades away. Yet at some deep level, it was still home. My earliest memories were of the grove of towering red oaks that stood across the cornfield from my bedroom window, right outside my grandparents’ farm near Red Oak. My father was buried in Georgia; my sister still lived there; my mother spent her entire life within a twenty-mile radius of East Point. She died of heart failure in December 2005—and by some malign coincidence, about the same time bulldozers came and destroyed those amazing, century-old red oaks. The cornfield had long ago succumbed to pine trees and briars; after the bulldozers came through, it was cleared and paved. The place where I had grown up was now the site of a nondescript warehouse. But the past was still there. Under that asphalt lay the vestiges of my grandfather’s muscadine vines and crab apple trees, the tar paper shack where his tenants had lived, the henhouse where my grandmother had tended her chickens. And not far away, an ancestor I’d never heard of had planted his own crops and feuded bitterly with his neighbors over the practical import of a constitutional question that, in one form or another, vexes our political discourse to this day.

I started out, then, with the idea of writing about this mismatch of history and identity that so many Southerners up through my generation have had, this vague sense of cognitive dissonance that comes with growing up in a world where nothing you see around you quite fits with the picture of history made available to you. When we said, “I am a Southerner,” what did we mean? Specifically, what did it mean to be a product of a region so largely defined by race in a so-called post-racial era, when the nation had just elected its first African American president? And did it even matter? After all, writers and historians have been lamenting the death of Southern identity for fifty or sixty years now, though nobody can seem to get it to stay in its coffin. Polls consistently show a decline in the number of people who identify themselves as “Southern.” But is that the slow death of a regional identity, or just a disinclination to be stereotyped? For something that’s supposedly on its last legs—still—again—Southern identity seems remarkably spry: it keeps showing up at political rallies, in films, in literature, at NASCAR races and in music, to name just a few places. The media throws around the terms “Southerners” and “Southern” as if everybody knows what they mean; at the same time, those of us who actually are Southerners have made an enduring industry out of the search for a definition. Yes, I decided, it matters.

But the inquiry was an audacious undertaking, to put it mildly. In any generalizations about collective character “the possibilities for embarrassment are numerous,” Southern historian C. Vann Woodward once wrote, and this is especially true of the South.3 Without fully realizing what I was doing, I’d set out on a path littered with the bones of those who had gone before me—many of them famous, many of whom had never reached their destination. And so, to begin with, I started with a simple idea: a box labeled “Southern identity.” The existence of this box dates from the earliest days of our nation, when the definition of “American” was still struggling for consensus, and in the beginning its contents were defined in opposition: the South was whatever the rest of the country was not. Some of those early distinctions were true and some were imaginary, but—as happens in families where one child is labeled “the smart one” while another is “the rebellious one”—they soon passed out of the realm of debate into the realm of perception and, to an unquantifiable extent, the realm of reality. Southerners were just different.

Okay, you ask; different how? What is in the box? That depends; the contents are always changing. The only constants are two great institutions that have defined the limits of the available contents: evangelical religion and slavery. The history of slavery in the South is like the tracks of an ancient river, clearly visible from a distance long after human habitation has made its outlines hard to discern up close. “The law may abolish slavery,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1832, “[but] God alone can obliterate the traces of its existence.”4 Two hundred years later, God still hasn’t gotten around to it. It’s in the band of black poverty that curves up through the Deep South from New Orleans through South Carolina; it’s in the black and white families united today by genealogical discoveries of century-old acts of rape and forbidden love affairs; it’s in urban residential patterns that still bear the traces of decades of laws which sorted out neighborhoods according to the skin color of their residents.

“The South” was a concept born of the increasingly urgent need Southerners had to explain themselves, both to themselves and to everyone else, as the early-nineteenth-century Southern economy became entwined with and heavily dependent on the institution of slavery. In turn, “the South” as a concept birthed the Confederacy and an assertion of separate nationhood. The Civil War that resulted sent hundreds of thousands of farmers marching across disparate regions and transformed a collection of mountaineers, Virginians, Arkansans, and Georgians, among many others, into a group of people who adopted a common regional and political identity. Individually, they fought for a variety of reasons; collectively, they fought to preserve and expand an economic system based on slavery.

The Jim Crow system that arose after the Civil War was an effort to codify the social assumption of white superiority, which was the underpinning of the rationale for slavery. In turn, the civil rights movement was an effort by blacks to break free of the chains imposed on them by the Jim Crow era. The emergence of the Republican South in the 1960s was based on the need of Southern whites to assert the primacy of property rights and freedom from government intervention, which was a reaction to residential integration and school busing, which was born of...

Revue de presse :

“Thompson, a writer who lopes easily from the dispensing of statistics to shoe-leather reporting to touching autobiography to impressive flights of moral reflection, makes an ideal guide to this landscape....For this outsider it offered illumination on every page.” (Laura Miller, Salon)

“[Thompson] displays a splendid cynicism toward establishment politicians of all kinds, and her passion for the truth about forgotten wrongs will inspire all but the most hidebound Southerner.” (The Wall Street Journal)

“[An] able blend of reportage, travelogue, and memoir....The New Mind of the South is a lucid and inspired endeavor that gracefully handles the Southern paradoxes and polishes away rusted typecasts.” (Boston Globe)

"[B]rilliant. . . . On this diagnostic tour of the South's kudzu-lined highways, Thompson's cartographic eye is keen. . . . Southern roads, Thompson shows us, are haunted by the heat shimmers of the past and potholed by uncertainties in the present-and we must grapple with both if we're ever going to get anywhere. . . . If we heed Thompson's plea, if we can try together to finally detoxify those battlefields of the heart and mind, then maybe the South can actually be 'new'-not merely rise again, but truly bloom." (Slate)

"A narrative that pulls on new data, interviews, historic archives and plain old observation.....I'm thinking The New Mind of the South has come along at just the right time." (Garden & Gun Magazine)

“The New Mind of the South is a clear-eyed, deeply considered look at the evolution of a part of the country that, more than a century after the end of the Civil War, continues to remain something of a foreign entity to rest of the nation.” (DailyBeast.com)

“A nuanced—and sometimes astringently humorous—portrait of a multifaceted, often misunderstood region that overturns stereotypes.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review))

“[A] splendid new book....The New Mind of the South does its namesake proud. Thoroughly researched and beautifully written, it suggests that if Dixie can make peace with the hellish parts of its legacy while fostering its inherent strengths, it just might achieve a real breakthrough.” (Los Angeles Times)

“Thompson yearns to define 'Southern identity' in the twenty-first century. . . .[I]t's high time that we're given an unflinching and accurate characterization of this place that has grown so different in even the last thirty years, despite sometimes clamoring to remain the same.” (The Oxford American)

“The more that's written about the American South—as a region and as a mindset—the more confused people seem to be. Tracy Thompson helps clear up the myths and the outdated stereotypes. She correctly portrays the South and its people not as stubborn but as always changing. This is a knowing and sensitive book.” (Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin)

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Simon & Schuster
• Date d'édition: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1439158037
• ISBN 13: 9781439158036
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 272