Spring 2014

 

I am sitting at the dining table at Andalusia with a note-tablet in front of me, trying to stop crying. I keep thinking that Flannery O’Connor sat here, that she regularly ate here. To my left is the doorway to her room, where there’s still a narrow bedstead and a shelf of books, whose titles I strained at the rope to read. The yellowed wallpaper is peeling, the aromas are dust and austere decline.

I have been given a tour of the grounds of Andalusia – dairy barn overgrown with vines, sharecropper cabin caving in to legendary rot, fields bitter with weeds. Everywhere at Andalusia there is ruin, an air of magisterial neglect. One barn-mule stands woeful in the brine of solitude.

The peacocks are gone. Flannery is gone. Her mother is gone. Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman are gone, along with all the good country people. The Bible salesman has come and gone.

My current sadness is my chronic sadness: a way of life is passing, I have watched its passage, it is one I loved, and I am not sure that in my lifetime we will get it back. In fact, I am almost convinced that we won’t. What once rang with calls and bells is silent; what once bloomed has closed shut.

The South is at a crossroads. An old farmer on a tractor is driving along a Southern highway, down a long hill, and he is passed by a log truck, a queue of city bicyclists in skintight spandex, and a young woman with her belongings packed, headed north, or headed west. What do we have to say about it?

Mary Hood, author of How Far She Went and Familiar Heat, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, says about the South, “We are in transit and this is a scene from the rocket window.”

Sitting at the dining table at Andalusia, one can hear the traffic of Milledgeville, close and constant, now that the road is paved and four-laned. A commercial enterprise operates next door, and I can hear its loudspeaker paging an employee to the phone. Because of Andalusia’s acreage and because its trees have not been cut, the farmstead is an anachronism. Even some of that, the curator tells us, may have to go, to help keep up the buildings. Nothing is sacred, I’ve savagely learned. Not history, not landscape, not family, not community, not childhood. It’s all on the market.

“The rural South is largely a fiction to me,” I once heard a Southern academic say. Cuban-born Columbia College professor John Zubizarreta says of his first glimpse of the rural South, “I was terrified. It was an impoverished, dangerous wasteland. I said to myself, ‘There’s no urbanity here.’” African-American novelist John Holman of Atlanta

had a similar experience. “You see fields of something growing. You don’t even know what it is. You might never get out to something you recognize.”

It’s not a myth, it’s not a myth, I want to shout.

For what was I weeping at Andalusia? For the purple skies lost to me because of globalization. For a rural exodus wrought by industrial capitalism. For homogenizing forces, television and the Internet. “Assimilation, once the great fear,” wrote Hal Crowther in his essay “The Tao of Dixie,” “is now the great fact of most Southern lives.”

~*~

I was raised on a junkyard in southern Georgia, in Baxley, a scorching town of 3,000 set in the steamy lowland pinewoods of the coastal plains. Baxley had a Main Street, a post office with a marble floor where our box, number 62, had also belonged to my great-grandfather. My childhood was one of connections, in that everybody was connected to everybody else, usually in multiple ways. The characters in the stories we heard – and we heard stories endlessly — were people we knew, or people connected to people we knew. The settings of the stories were also places we knew. We understood ourselves to be part of a vast literature.

That my sister and brothers gravitated to books made perfect sense. As youngsters we read every book in the children’s section of our one-room public library downtown, located between the dry cleaners and the jail, which was attached to the courthouse and from whose windows detainees, now sober, would yell greetings from the barred windows. Before long we were making our way through the adult section.

Southern writers I loved. They validated my rich, tragic, and singularly isolated life, and pried open my unsophisticated mind. I remember Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, in Cross Creek, two hundred miles south, in north Florida, describing a chameleon, which we now know to be anoles. “They are partial to a warm bed that a human has slept in and expects to sleep in again that night,” she wrote. “They have to be lifted from it by the tail, which surprises you by breaking off in your fingers.” Hawthorne or Bronte never mentioned chameleons, a creature I encountered daily. Cross Creek was my world. Reading Rawlings, I became her.

I devoured Look Homeward Angel and A Good Man is Hard to Find and A Lesson Before Dying. I read Childhood: A Biography of a Place, and yes, Gone with the Wind. On the library bookshelves I would run my hands over names: Joel Chandler Harris, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, William Styron. The years passed. Doris Betts, David Bottoms, Cormac McCarthy. Alice Walker and Shelby Foote.

~*~

In early spring chanterelles emerge like orange chalices through William Faulkner’s woods. I had never seen them until the year we spent in Oxford, Mississippi, when friends one evening brought a basketful. “We cooked some this morning as a test,” Jennie

Lee assured us as she sautéed the mushrooms in butter and fresh thyme. “We’re still alive.”

The next day, when I walked my dogs in Bailey’s Woods, as the woods between Rowan Oak and the University of Mississippi is called, I found chanterelles growing in patches. Theirs is an orange like copper. The bottoms of their bowls fill with dew. Had Faulkner seen these chanterelles? Had he been provoked by them, I wondered. As always I walked Faulkner’s woods thinking of the man himself, with whom I have been intimate in a celestial but rank way for twenty-five years, since one long-ago Georgia summer when I read Light in August.

One day in Bailey’s Woods I came face to face with two deer. They had been running toward me on the trail, but the sight of me turned their eyes to exclamations, and they stopped thirty feet away, then bolted through the trees.

Faulkner is a strange orange chalice from which I drink.

I was in Oxford by the grace of the University of Mississippi. For a year I got to live in the Grisham House, a 1920s bungalow at 908 Old Taylor Road purchased by the university with the help of John Grisham and not to be confused with Grisham’s real mansion out on the highway. The residence situated me half a block from Rowan Oak, where William Faulkner pissed off his balcony, by God, to deter celebrity-seekers and posed in ragged clothes with his horse for photographer Martin Dain. I would go stand in the door of his barn and imagine the life he led.

Oxford was the quintessential Southern town. It was a town like those towns glorified forever in Southern literature and yet a town like you seldom see. Oxford still had a square, a working downtown, and a local hardware. Its mayor then was the immensely literate and progressive Richard Howarth, owner of Square Books, one of the most famous independent bookstores in the South.

The Oxford I saw was not the one Faulkner knew, nor would the one I knew be around long. Change had come, was coming. Townspeople had protested the Super Wal-Mart, which would reroute an entire road. They lost. On the day the bulldozers arrived to fell the trees, my friend, poet Ann Fisher-Wirth, dismissed her class and went and sat down next to a doomed tree, where she was arrested. Later, when she told me the story, her voice broke here. The woods were beautiful, she said. The dogwoods were blooming.

Now, eighty percent of homes sold in Oxford are second homes. The fringes of the town are being eaten away by new upscale developments. Most of the townspeople are heartbroken and for some reason that nobody can understand, are helpless to stop “progress,” which unfortunately is going to destroy the life they knew. Sure, Oxford downtown still looks quaint enough that you can sit in the old wood-paneled courtroom, meeting with the Lafayette County Democratic Party, and you can manage to think that you have stepped miraculously back in time. Faulkner is doing his shift in the boilerroom and the developers have not yet arrived.

Could Oxford still produce a Faulkner? Or has too much that informed him been destroyed? Perhaps his genius too was a product of destruction? By the time he had written his first book, the old-growth forests were gone, so that Faulkner himself witnessed the ravaging of his region. “The Bear” is Faulkner’s grief at the loss of the landscape, his altar call to loss.

In so many ways the South is ruined. Whatever singular essence my region once had is vanishing. When I lived in Vermont, I drove the narrow roads of New England, passing through small villages with white-steepled churches, general stores, historical post offices and grassy commons. I passed old cemeteries, hillsides of trees, farmstands with rows of pumpkins. The air was laden with the smell of haying and speckled rubies hung thick on the jewelweed. Much of rural Vermont had kept its history, its unique character, its local businesses, its culture. Centuries-old stone fences wound through the woods.

The charm and imagination of the region made me ache with a strange sadness — that so much of my homeland looks very different. The South has been whittling down its forests, losing its panthers and bears, polluting its rivers. Chain stores replicate themselves town to town, until now Baxley, Georgia is Selma, Alabama is Bishopville, South Carolina.

Being in New England was like reversing one’s self thirty years, to a time when towns across America weren’t all trying to look the same, when people mattered.

~*~

The South has been hard hit environmentally. The area of natural forest across the South has declined from 356 million acres in colonial times to 182 million acres today. Fifteen percent of this figure is pine plantations, which have been displacing natural forests for the past 60 years. Fourteen ecosystems across the South have declined to occupy only 2% of their original range. By 1995, 99 percent of longleaf pine forests were gone. There are more threatened forested ecosystems in the South than any other region of the country. Half of the forested wetlands – meaning swamps — of the South have been lost.

Southerners long have been typified as being hospitable people, deeply faithful, devoted to family and loyal to home. Their qualities include a reverence for history and a strong sense of place. Yet, that place, that homeland, is vanishing. What will happen to Southerners’ senses of themselves?

As the Southern landscape changes, so too what it means to be Southern – especially a Southern writer – changes. A culture – meaning a set of stories that describe and explain life — is inextricably tied to a landscape. Wallace Stegner said, “Tell me where you’re from and I’ll tell you who you are.” What kind of doom does it spell for our culture if we destroy 99 percent of a landscape that engenders it? Or 98 percent? Does the culture become urban, street-wise, irreverent, disloyal? Does it turn its back on family,

history and place? Does the literature, as Reynolds Price suggested, consist of “bad poems and novels full of neon light on wet asphalt, unshaven chins, scalding coffee at four a.m.?”

Is this the danger, that we lose a culture that has defined us, and so must, through our literature, reinvent ourselves?

~*~ 

We’d been in the Grisham House in Oxford a month when Barry Hannah, the great novelist, rode up the driveway, between two rows of cedars, on his motorcycle.

Imagine that. Barry Hannah just drives up and comes inside to chat. Chat.

Barry Hannah sat at our table for an hour with a cup of tea — he had quit drinking and we didn’t have coffee in the house — until he found out that my husband also drove a motorcycle and suggested we ride out to Sardis Reservoir. First, however, Barry had to feed his dogs and would we come help him? We would. The problem is that one of the dogs is epileptic, he said, and has to have medicine with his food, which sounds easy, but he would rather not eat than have to take a pill. 

As Southern stories go, the first time I met Barry I found myself chasing an epileptic dog around his house and back yard, while five other pound rescuees scattered and howled. Half an hour we screwed around. Once I hemmed the dog in a corner of the back fence and tackled him, but the dog hollered so realistically we were all afraid I was going to be ripped apart, especially me, and I let go.

He’s a sucker for bacon, Barry said. I don’t like using bacon, but it works. 

It did, and we got back on the motorcycles and rode to Sardis. We stood by the reservoir, watching water pour over the spillway, past the corks and sinkers of old men. Standing there, I was reminded of Barry’s story “Water Liars,” in Airships, old fishermen by the lake telling lies and also of Larry Brown’s essay in Billy Ray’s Farm about a reservoir draw-down where people are waist-deep in mud catching barrelfuls of fish by hand. It has to be Sardis. “Fish were still flopping out there behind us, by the hundreds, maybe by the thousands,” Brown wrote.

Now I was standing at Sardis. Two little kids plunked down a red-and-white float in the rocks at water’s edge. Old men shifted in their line of lawn chairs. “You live here in Mississippi, stuff’s just handed to you,” Barry said.

The South is a storied place: kick over any pine log in the forest and find a rakish story to test a writer’s belief and skill. The question is not, What is the story? but, always, Can I do it justice? The South is a place that births its own writers, as canted and magical as the characters it produces, to tell its stories. And it always has: O’Connor and Caldwell and Wolfe would draw their nets across bayous and pine flatwoods and hill country, and shake out books. Southern writers belong by grace of geography and fiber to those people desirous and sometimes able to rake a rich and bizarre humus onto paper. We inherited the treasure of stories layering the forest floor. Can we do them justice?

~*~

But as the South changes, so too what it means to be Southern, especially a Southern writer, changes. As our old-growth writers die, what happens to our literature? Will the New South produce stories to tell, and the scribes to tell those stories? Or are we heading, as Allen G. Breed wrote, toward a “No South?”

First, the region’s population is exploding. By 2030 it is expected to comprise 40 percent of the country’s population. A third of the people who live in the South weren’t born there, and of those born in the South, only 77 percent identify themselves as “Southerners.” Total, 63 percent of the population think of themselves as Southern.

James Cobb, author of Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity, said that the South has become “sort of like a lifestyle, rather than an identity anymore.” As Suzanne Jones wrote in “Who’s Writing about the South and What Does It Mean?”: “in the twenty-first century the South through immigrant eyes looks a lot like America.”

Secondly, in the aftermath of the second carpetbagging, the South has lost its rural character, its agrarian identity. Atlanta, with its urban sprawl, now has the largest footprint of any city in the history of civilization.

What’s true for Mississippi, that stuff’s handed to you, used to be true for the rest of the. South. But the South is disappearing, buried. Native landscapes shrink and the towns that produced authors like Willie Morris become a sham of chain restaurants and box stores, which is to say unrecognizable. The old railroad depots and two-story hotels are bulldozed, the hardware stores close down.

“The natural setting of Southern fiction is not wilderness, nor farm nor city. It is town,” wrote Josephine Humphreys in her brilliant essay, “A Disappearing Subject Called the South.” “Town alone is that community in which community itself is discernible.” Yet towns, the old towns that we knew, are vanishing, along with the forests and the fields.

~*~

Leaving Rowan Oak one day, I paused on the lawn to listen to a bird in privet. A man was walking past.

“What do you see in them bushes?” he asked, in an accent as thickly Tennessean as I’ve ever heard. He was thin and wiry, writ tough. He looked as if he had worked hard all his life, maybe too hard.

“A bird,” I said. “I guess it’s gone.”

He stuck out his hand. “William Gay,” he said.

The novelist William Gay had recently stormed Southern literature with his first novel, The Long Home, published in 1999.

In 1963, when Bill Clinton was a senior in high school, he went to Washington, D.C. with Boys Nation, a group sponsored by the American Legion. At the White House Clinton shook hands with John F. Kennedy. There’s a photograph of it.

Ha, I met William Gay on Faulkner’s lawn.

After we were friends, William and I would telephone each other and talk late into the night between our homes in Hohenwald, Tennessee and Baxley, Georgia. We would talk about our favorite poem, and second favorite poem, and so on. “I read a lot of books when I was young,” said William. “Most of my opinions were formed from books and most of them were right.”

When I visited Gay in Hohenwald, he drove me around the countryside, pointing out where scenes in his novels had taken place: “There’s the hill where the old man wildcrafted ginseng. There’s where the juke was.”

Gay believes that the culture of the rural South has largely vanished. “The urban South has been different for years….” he told reporter Alden Mudge. “The people I’m writing about don’t exist anymore.”

(Once William’s agent was attempting to persuade him to attend some book event or other. “William, this is your career, you know,” she said. William replied, “It sounds like another goddamn limousine ride to me.”)

~*~

If I were filthy rich, I would buy an entire town, and it would be surrounded by farms, which would be circled by wild forest. The downtown would be functional, lined with small businesses. There’d be no McDonald’s, no Wal-Mart, no Home Depot, no chain anything. There’d be no television. We’d be serious about education. The word “global” would disappear from the common lexicon. Everybody would have a library card and the librarians would know every kid by name. At the edge of town, the returning wilderness would set imagination on fire in the minds of the bravest children, some of whom would grow up to win the Pulitzers and the Nobels.