Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South - Couverture souple

Blount, Roy

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1582434581 ISBN 13 : 9781582434582

Editeur : Counterpoint LLC, 2009

Synopsis

Book by Blount Jr Roy

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Bringing in the Sheaves

This was written before the midterm elections of 2006, in which, as we now know, America—even as far South as Virginia—began to take my advice. Much remains to be seen.
Down South recently I read a letter to the editor that sought a middle ground on glossolalia. Apparently controversy has been high among Southern Baptists as to whether speaking in tongues should be embraced doctrinally. The writer began as follows:

“I have never, as far as I am aware, been inspired to speak in tongues myself, but . . .”

As far as I am aware.

Aw, man, I miss that stuff.

Best I recollect, I have not personally been swallowed by a whale, as such, but . . .

I moved to the Northeast thirty-eight years ago. By now, you’d think I would have left the South. But I keep needing to get back down there. As long as I can get back out again.

In October 2001, an American flag was stolen in Massachusetts and another one in North Carolina. I know of the first from a photograph in the Berkshire Eagle, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in which a reproachful-looking elderly couple are holding up a hand-lettered cardboard sign that says PLEASE RETURN OUR FLAG. SHAME ON YOU. I know of the second from a photograph in the Independent Weekly of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in which an angry-looking middle-aged man is standing beneath professional plastic-letter signage, bolted onto the front of his house and floodlit, that says, I HOPE THE SORRY PIECE OF SHIT WHO STOLE MY U.S. FLAG DISPLAYS IT WITH PRIDE.

The thinking is clearer in the Northern sign. There is more going on in the Southern one. And it’s more flagrant. “Her lyricism can be flagrant,” writes Margo Jefferson (about Carson McCullers), in The New York Times. “But what Southern writer isn’t flagrant about something?”

Generalizations about the South, unless I am making them, usually put me off, but that one is mannerly enough, for one thing, to be couched as a question. And I don’t know where Margo Jefferson grew up, but I know she is African American and a Jefferson, therefore at least somewhat Southern rooted, therefore not a writer whom I suspect of retaining, autonomically, as a chicken does a piece of gizzard grit, this calcified given: “My cultural hegemony may be pretty well played out [or on the verge of succumbing to barbarism], but at least I’m not Southern.”

Anyway, I like flagrant. As we used to say in the army, with regard to the First Infantry Division, vaunting itself as “the Big Red One”: if you’re going to be one, you might as well be a big red one. I am an émigré from a region that tried, a century and a half ago, to emigrate from the United States en masse. It may be that you can’t love America (or Cuba, say, or Nature or the Promised Land) flagrantly until you and it have split.

Then, too, part of being an American is feeling like the child of a broken home. There is always some kind of schism going on, with an overlap that is rich and strange. For instance, you’d think hog wild and bird-watching would have nothing in common, but the ivory-billed woodpecker was sighted in a state that roots for the Razorbacks.

I root for the overlap. I keep trying to tell people in the Northeast that you can’t be part of the solution until you accept that you’re part of the problem. Thinking right is not enough. Different people hold different truths to be self-evident.

Speaking of evidence, right after 9/11, when citizens were asking what they could do to help, President Bush came up with this response:

“People need to be logical. If you find a person that you’ve never seen before getting into a crop duster that doesn’t belong to you, report it.”

Hello, FBI? I was driving down Route 183 here and saw somebody I never saw in my life. I’ve seen a lot of people in my time, but not this one. And sure enough he was getting into a crop-duster plane—and it wasn’t mine!

The difference between the president and the would-be glossolalia mediator is that the latter’s suggestions just might work. Between the president and the North Carolina flag man, it’s the difference between someone who has got where he is by not quite knowing what he means, and someone who has such a tight grip on what he means that it squooshes out in more than one direction.

I prefer the latter effect. It achieves a certain emotional balance. Me, I hover between Southern and Northern. Maybe I have a yen to prolong the transition, like the old boy who bought his wife five yards of material for her to make a new nightgown.

“This is going to make an awful long nightgown,” said the storekeeper.

“Yep,” said the old boy.

“I mean,” said the storekeeper, “real long.”

“Well,” the old boy confided, “I just so enjoy pulling it up.”

At any rate, I have sought to turn my regional ambivalence into a philosophical position (or dance). Trying to get Aunt Dixie and Uncle Sam on speaking terms.

When I was in high school, back in Decatur, Georgia, in the fifties, a select group of the girls would take a field trip every year to New York City. And the issue arose: If a boy tried to talk to a girl in that foreign city whose standards of decency were heaven knew how warped and minimal, how could a girl decide whether she should talk to him? How, in short, could she tell that he was nice?

This field trip was always chaperoned by the teacher of home economics. She was demure, elderly (as she seemed to me then), diminutive: a little old lady. Mrs. Clive Folger. And the rule for the girls was, when you meet a boy, tell him you want him to meet Miz Folger.

If he doesn’t want to meet Miz Folger, he is not a nice boy.

One day my girlfriend told me, casually, about this rule. And . . . I don’t want to overdramatize this—let’s just say my blood ran cold. Because I was young, full of beans, and planning to become a rather worldly writer. And yet . . . the rule rang true.

It would have been different, had Mrs. Folger been like you may be thinking she was. No. She wasn’t. Mrs. Folger looked at you straight. And she had a twinkle in her eye. She was, in fact, in a duly insulated sort of way, a live wire. I liked Mrs. Folger. I respected Mrs. Folger’s opinion.

William Faulkner, on the other hand, once said, “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”

A little old lady once asked Faulkner, “Mr. Faulkner, I understand that authors always write themselves into their books. In Sanctuary, which character are you?”

“Madam,” said Faulkner, “I was the corncob.”

He wouldn’t have said that to Mrs. Folger. Then, too, she wouldn’t have asked such a question. Mrs. Folger was a little old lady with sense.

Faulkner, when his daughter begged him to sober up so he could attend her graduation, responded to her as follows: “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s child.”

Faulkner never knew Miz Folger, so he felt entitled not to be nice. He stayed home, and created Yoknapatawpha County, where hell broke loose in all directions. I had to find a milieu in which I could be nice and think at the same time.

My tenth-grade teacher, a remarkable young lady named Ann Lewis, lent me a stack of New Yorker magazines. It was a revelation. As far as I could tell, there had never been a damn Civil War in there. Or a Crucifixion. Nobody even seemed to go to church. People drank a lot and made cutting remarks, but they were civilized, funny, even high-minded in a cerebral sort of way. My teetotal, faith-based mother wouldn’t have liked them, but you could imagine them passing muster with Miz Folger.

In those old New Yorkers I smelled a secular heaven. Well, no, there was scant emphasis on smells, except when Joseph Mitchell, a Southerner, was writing about the fish market, so let’s say I glimpsed it. First chance I got, I went off up to New York. In 1968 I became a resident. Fatherhood, divorce, joint custody, and going freelance brought me further north to semirural Massachusetts, which looks a lot like north Georgia, and I like it (except in February and March), but I’ll never entirely settle in.

Here’s what happened when I moved to New York. I hadn’t unpacked my bag before people started telling me, “You’re not from around here.” Didn’t I know that? “I see you haven’t lost the accent,” they would say severely, as if I were willfully convicting myself of narrow-mindedness with every syllable I uttered.

That was awkward but interesting. As a white Southerner, I had come to terms, on my own recognizance, with being a heartily recovering Mr. Charlie. It kind of tickled me, as we say back home, to suddenly be an object of prejudice. Since I couldn’t see that it would keep me from doing anything I really wanted to do, it even gave me a kind of edge. Years ago at a New York cocktail party, I was chatting with George “Jerry” Goodman, who wrote and spoke trenchantly about money matters under the name of Adam Smith. Nice guy. Evidently I said something that struck him as halfway cogent (so it couldn’t have been about money), because he gave me a sincerely startled look and said, “You’re not so dumb.” I have to admit, I was surprised. Not so much by his surprise, as by how unselfconsciously he expressed it. He seemed to have been caught more off-guard than I was, so I was able to think to myself, “You’re not so broad-minded.”

It wasn’t a matter o...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

“I left the South in search of the Enlightenment. I’m pro-choice, in favor of gay marriage, and against creationism and the war in Iraq. But both my parents’ people are deep Southern from many generations, and I spent a little over a third of my life, including the presumably most formative years (toilet training through college), living in the South. Mathematically, that makes me just about exactly as Southern as the American people, 34 percent of whom are Southern residents. But it goes deeper than math—my roots are Southern, I sound Southern, I love a lot of Southern stuff, and when my [Northern] local paper announces a festival to ‘celebrate the spirit of differently abled dogs,’ I react as a Southerner. I believe I care as much about dogs’ feelings as anybody. It is hard for me to imagine that a dog with three legs minds being called a three-legged dog.”

A sly, dry, hilarious collection of essays—his first in more than ten years—from the writer who, according to The New York Times Book Review, is “in serious contention for the title of America’s most cherished humorist.”

This time Blount focuses on his own dueling loyalties across the great American divide, North vs. South. Scholarly, raunchy, biting and affable, ol’ Roy takes on topics ranging from chicken fingers to yellow-dog Democrats to Elvis’s toes. And he shares experiences: chatting with Ray Charles, rounding up rattlesnakes, watching George and Tammy record, meeting an Okefenokee alligator (also named George, or Georgette), imagining Faulkner’s tennis game, and being swept up, sort of, in the filming of Nashville. His yarns, analyses, and flights of fancy transcend all standard shades of Red, Blue, and in between.

Roy on language: “Remember when there was lots of agitated discussion of Ebonics, pro and con? I kept waiting for someone to say that if you acquire white English, you can become Clarence Thomas, whereas if you acquire black English, you can become Quentin Tarantino.”

Roy on eating: “The way folks were meant to eat is the way my family ate when I was growing up in Georgia. We ate till we got tired. Then we went “Whoo!” and leaned back and wholeheartedly expressed how much we regretted that we couldn’t summon up the strength, right then, to eat some more.”

Roy on racism: “Anybody who claims . . . not to have ‘a racist bone’ in his or her body is, at best, preracist and has a longer way to go than the rest of us.”

Blount’s previous books have included reflections on a Southern president (Jimmy Carter), a novel about a Southern president (Clementine Fox), a biography of Robert E. Lee, a celebration of New Orleans, a memoir of growing up in Georgia, and the definitive anthology of Southern humor. Long Time Leaving is the capper. Maybe it won’t end the Civil War at last, but it does clarify, or aptly complicate, divisive delusions on both sides of the longstanding national rift. It’s a comic ode to American variety and also a droll assault on complacency North and South—a glorious union of diverse pieces reshaped and expanded into an American classic, from one of the most definitive and esteemed humorists of our time.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Counterpoint LLC
• Date d'édition: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1582434581
• ISBN 13: 9781582434582
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 400