The South

Maybe we travel through the world with nothing but preconceived notions and even as those are overturned we just fabricate new ones. Maybe those new ones are post-conceived notions that are just preconceived notions in disguise. My words echo thus, disturbing the dust on a bowl of magnolia leaves. 

Anyway, I have long mistrusted anything to do with The South. I'm a Yankee, born in Buffalo, raised in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (urbane Pennsylvania, not the Alabama in the middle). I got stuffed full of anti-South propaganda as a lad. While the Civil War is still called The War of Northern Aggression by some people in the South, we were repeatedly taught the standard story, which of course is largely true, about just how cursed the South was, especially because it was irredeemably stained by the blood of slaves and the lynchings of supposedly free human beings. 

What wasn't taught or at least what made no impression on me was the history of black genocide in the supposedly pure-as-snow North. The narrative back then (and maybe it has shifted) was that the South was evil and the North was noble and that was the end of it. Of course, when you compound this with the Northern attitude of cultural and intellectual superiority, everything below that old sharp or slightly newer squiggly bright red line is backward, uneducated, bigoted and benighted. 

There's so much to say about this history of tension post-Civil War between the North and South, and a history of lies and denial, and a history of migrations and cultural melts and all of it, that it only ever really begins to settle over me when I actually go to the South. I moved to Durham, NC to live with my girlfriend when I was 18. She was a Yankee at Duke, not Greek and in the hard sciences. So we didn't mix much. I hardly even remember the city of Durham, except that the air was always full of the slightly sickly sweet smell of cured tobacco. I started smoking in Durham, because the Pall Mall straights were deliciously fresh out of the factory and only 50 cents out of a cigarette machine in the Duke music building, where I spent a lot of time. 

This was my job: going door-to-door with a clipboard and several sheets of paper about the evil utility company, called Duke Energy, like something out of a movie, explaining how I was fundraising for a citizen's lobby group that was fighting increasing utility rates and opposing the construction of a new nuclear power plant.  (Which, as you can see, inevitably got built anyway). 

A cold-calling, smooth talking, long haired bespectacled hippie freak-looking (though full of anti-hippie snobbery) fresh faced Yankee kid, knocking on doors out of nowhere in whatever neighborhood my supervisor left me. "Good afternoon, ma'am! (because back in those days, it was always the woman who was home at 3, when we started-- and when I went in for the donation, sometimes she would say 'well, I'll have to ask my husband when he gets home,' and I'd make a note of the address so I could return at 6 or 6:30, before my 7 o'clock pickup)-- My name is Peter and I'm with Carolina Action, a citizen funded consumer lobby. We're out here in your neighborhood this evening raising money to fight Duke Energy's constant rate increases. Did you know they had $80 million in profits last year alone thanks to you and yet here they are at the utility commission, their hands out again, begging for more money. And what can you do about it? Nothing! They've got a monopoly-- if you want power, you have to go through Duke. That's where we come in. We're the only citizen's lobby group with boots on the ground fighting to protect your pocketbook. But we can't do it without support. Please give $5, $10 or even $20 by cash or check to keep us in the ring, giving you a voice against big money!" Asking for $5, $10 or *even* $20 was bold back then-- $5 had as much purchasing power in 1979 as $18 dollars does now. "Think of it this way-- if their rate increase goes through, it will cost you about $120 next year. If you support Carolina Action, keeping us in the ring with Duke, with a donation of only $20, that's less than $2 a month!" The Holy Grail was always those $20 or greater checks. That was the real target.

The pitch above was only one of many. That was my basic rap for middle class or even upper middle class neighborhoods. I knew how to talk to those people, even though I was a Yankee kid. My quota for the night was $50, and I always at least tripled that in more wealthy areas. I especially loved getting donations from wealthier people who were shareholders in Duke Energy. It was tougher when my supervisor, a squat, fierce little man who was always talking about "social change," and who drove a beat to shit Dodge Dart and had an MSW from Duke, would drop the crew off in backwater rural and far flung, poor neighborhoods. 

Almost every time I knocked on any door, even on the weirdest of Faulknerian porches or in the most overgrown Blanche Dubois yards in the strangest neighborhoods, whoever answered was kind. I started to notice that. Hardly anyone of any social station would be rude. They might be firm and say, in response to my usual persistence, "Now, look here. We're just not interested. Thank you kindly." But I don't remember anyone slamming a door in my face, or calling me out on my obvious Yankee intellectual persona, or being rude in any way, really. I realized this was in marked contrast to the Northern style and I appreciated it. 

As my girlfriend and I (basically a miserable dry drunk at the time through lack of funds) lived out some kind of hair-raising karmic catastrophe from January 1980 to June in our converted motel room apartment that became a mausoleum for whatever mutual affection we had, the only thing that provided any kind of ground under my feet was going out and talking to Southerners. I knew that Carolina Action was a sham, that the entire anti-utility rate increase rap was just a sales pitch, that what the earnest leadership in the group wanted was a socialist revolution and a complete dismantling of the existing power structure, and I thought that was charming somehow. I was already pretty cynical about "social change" at 18. 

All of these memories rose in me through Arkansas and into Tennessee. And a trip from Annapolis to Santa Fe during my senior essay writing period at St. John's, in a drive-away Datsun 280Z that involved a fierce blizzard in Tennessee that made I-40 impassable. In case you didn't know, the Datsun 280Z is NOT a car you want to be driving in a blizzard. My friend and I were forced to stay at a motel in Memphis, which was my friend's hometown and where his parents lived, but he didn't want to interact with them-- they knew nothing about our jaunt. 

The power went out so that, in the morning, the flimsy hollow core door to our room was frozen shut. We managed to get it open, eventually, and many of the other guests were out on the balcony walkway, trying to find someone with a car that would start so they could get a jump. We headed down to our fancy sports car mostly to warm up in it and when people saw us getting into it and heard it rev to life they congregated around. We opened up the hood, ready to jump start every last car in the lot if necessary, but the battery was encased in a locked metal cage and the terminals were covered. "Sorry folks," we said, and slid off into the icy day, with everyone friendly and smiling with lips turning blue, not really worried about much of anything it seemed. 

I also remembered a weird trip with this same friend, in the height of summer, from Memphis to Oxford, Mississippi in an attempt to find Rowan Oak, Faulkner's house. At the rest stops along I-55 in Mississippi, Coca Cola was free. It must have been some kind of promotion or something but it seemed like the coolest thing. I guess Coca Cola is pretty big down there.  When my friend and I got to Oxford, we couldn't find anything about Rowan Oak at all. 

It looks like it is being operated as a tourist attraction now, but in the mid-1980s, it seemed like no one anywhere in Oxfrod knew anything about it. The University was closed because it was a Sunday. Eventually, a clerk at a convenience store told us it was just off the town square a little south. We did manage to find it-- my memory is that it was in disrepair. Maybe I made up all of this after the fact. Old Count No 'Count would have loved the fact that no one in Oxford knew where the hell his house was.

Time and times tumbled in all directions as the car nosed east, like when you pick up a drawer full of socks and tip it. The old road trips were starting to come back. I crossed from Annapolis to Santa Fe or vice versa, or from the East to the West and back in general, probably a dozen times from 1983 to 1990. On all of those trips, always in spring or summer, the South was how I knew I was in the Other. The desert on one side and the familiar farmland of Pennsylvania to the east, but the weird South, always in the middle.