Southern Cultures: Southern Lives Issue: Summer 2010 Issue

By Harry L. Watson

In this special Southern Lives issue:

* Billy Carter dresses for all occasions.

* Virginia Foster Durr opens her home to recently released inmates.

* Michael McFee tours the Billy Graham Library.

* Septima Poinsette Clark celebrates fellow Civil Rights pioneers.

* Albert Murray goes on the record about Ralph Ellison's style.

* Margaret Walker Alexander reveals her takes on Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker.

... and much more.

Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: May 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780807899731

Book preview

Southern cultures

Summer 2010: Southern Lives

Published by the

The University of North Carolina Press

for the

Center for the Study of the American South

at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Founding EditorJohn Shelton Reed

Center for the Study of the American South

Harry L. Watson, director

Editorial Board

Edward L. Ayers University of Richmond

E. M. Beck Sociology, Emeritus, University of Georgia

Catherine W. Bishir North Carolina State University Libraries

Merle Black Political Science, Emory University

James C. Cobb History, University of Georgia

Peter A. Coclanis History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Thadious Davis English, University of Pennsylvania

Pam Durban English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

William R. Ferris History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Wayne Flynt History, Emeritus, Auburn University

Thavolia Glymph History, Duke University

Rayna Green National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Larry J. Griffin Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Ferrel Guillory The Program on Public Life, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Peggy Hargis Sociology, Georgia Southern University

Trudier Harris English, Emerita, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Fred Hobson English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Lisa Howorth Square Books, Oxford, Mississippi

Anne Goodwyn Jones English, University of Florida

Michael Kreyling English, Vanderbilt University

Louis Kyriakoudes History, University of Southern Mississippi

Malinda Maynor Lowery History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Michael O’Brien History, University of Cambridge

Ted M. Ownby Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi

James L. Peacock Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Theda Perdue History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

C. David Perry University of North Carolina Press

John Shelton Reed Sociology, Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Louis D. Rubin English, Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Anne Firor Scott History, Emerita, Duke University

Bland Simpson English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Vincas P. Steponaitis Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Steven Stowe History, Indiana University

John M. Vlach American Studies, George Washington University

David Wilkins American Indian Studies, University of Minnesota

Charles R. Wilson History, University of Mississippi

Southern Cultures Copyright © 2010 Center for the Study of the American South

Indexed in Humanities International Complete.

CONTENTS

Front Porch,

by Harry L. Watson

Stereotypes from Dixie crowd American fiction, film, music, and consciousness, and we all know people who seem to fit one of the molds.

Becoming Billy Carter

Clothes Make the Man (and His Many Characters),

by José Blanco F.

The regulars at the station had great fun with the press. The station was home to some of the greatest liars and bullshit artists in the history of the world, and tabloid reporters were nothing more than a light snack before lunch for them.

Voices from the Southern Oral History Program

I train the people to do their own talking:

Septima Clark and Women in the Civil Rights Movement,

from interviews by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and Eugene P. Walker

compiled by Katherine Mellen Charron and David P. Cline

introduced by Katherine Mellen Charron

They don’t give the women any of the glory.

My Idol Was Langston Hughes

The Poet, the Renaissance, and Their Enduring Influence,

from a talk delivered by Margaret Walker Alexander

edited and introduced by William R. Ferris

As a small child in the 1920s, I was very much affected by the Harlem Renaissance. As early as age eleven, I had read poetry by Langston Hughes.

Voices from the Southern Oral History Program

Learning from the Long Civil Rights Movement’s First Generation: Virginia Foster Durr,

from interviews by M. Sue Thrasher, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, and Bob Hall compiled and introduced by Sarah Thuesen

So I took each in turn, and they told me why they hated white folks. This took quite a while, because they were extremely articulate about why they hated white folks.

Just As I Am Not

A Poet Visits the Billy Graham Library,

by Michael McFee

Do they keep an eye out for the possible wayward soul (like, say, a middle-aged guy with scraggly graying hair who stays at the margins of the group and keeps scribbling in a little black book) and hope—no, pray—that the cheerful performance of their duties and the powerful unfolding of Billy Graham’s life and message might lead this poor lost person to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior?

Mason-Dixon Lines So Then,

poetry by Murray B. Shugars

"So, you get up and pilfer a cigarette

from your lover’s pack, smoke it in blue

moonlight pushing through the bare

kitchen window. Someone is listening."

Not Forgotten Albert Murray’s Magical Youth,

by David A. Taylor

‘In America they get away from race by saying ‘minority.’ But who the hell’s the best minority in the world? The hero! You know what I’m saying? That’s always a minority.’

About the Contributors

front porch

I once saw Jimmy Carter [here] face-to-face. It must have been in 1975, when his presidential campaign was getting started and he was trying to stir up student interest at a Chicago-area university. At brother Billy’s famous service station during a campaign stop in Plains, Georgia, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

If there are truly many Souths, there must be many kinds of southerners. To be various they must be individuals, but as recognizable southerners, they must also fit some generalizations. Stereotypes from Dixie crowd American fiction, film, music, and consciousness, and we all know people who seem to fit one of the molds: lady, gentleman, belle, frat boy, bigot, church lady, hell-raiser, bad man, maybe even Uncle Tom. The stereotypes all can echo a reality, yet the South is as famous for its eccentrics and individualists as for its off-the-shelf conformists. And beneath the surface of conventionality, even the most predictable exemplar of a stereotype will surprise you with variations and peculiarities. The endless interplay between culture and personality, the role and its player, always keeps us guessing, making all of us distinct individuals and also recognizable members of overlapping tribes: family, community, class, occupation, religion, region, nationality, and on and on.

This issue of Southern Cultures is about southern lives—individual southerners who are or were uniquely themselves and also reflections of something larger. We have a clown, a preacher, two activists, and three writers. They’re all different, but they all embody something about the modern South or its recent past. As we get to know each of them, we learn a bit more about the region and the people they come from.

I once saw Jimmy Carter face-to-face. It must have been in 1975, when his presidential campaign was getting started and he was trying to stir up student interest at a Chicago-area university. There must have been a short speech with questions, which I don’t recall, but I did remember a comment I overheard as the audience filed out. What did you think? one student asked his buddy. He was O.K., I guess, came the reply, "but I couldn’t get used to the ACK-see-unt." They both laughed. I gritted my teeth.

Many nonsoutherners never did get used to the way Jimmy Carter talked, but the president’s First Brother Billy became a media sensation by flaunting some of the regional stereotypes that the president had to surmount. Billy Carter drank beer, grew peanuts, drove a truck, and spent four corny years as America’s class clown, coming to us live from his filling station in Plains, Georgia. It’s more than likely that Billy’s antics made his strait-laced brother wince, and also his redoubtable mother, Miss Lillian. No matter. Until he finally crossed a line with overtures to the outlawed government of Libya, the irrepressible Billy was family and could not be disowned.

José Blanco F. brings us a careful exploration of Billy Carter and his public face. He tells us that Billy was very conscious of playing multiple roles—father and farmer as well as deliberate buffoon. The author is a specialist in costume, and he pays special attention to the wardrobe Billy selected for performing the role he called good ole boy in preference to redneck. Why did this upstanding citizen embrace the public persona of a Hee Haw yokel? Why did he taunt Miss Lillian’s model son by reveling in clownish stereotypes, repelling voters like my fellow students in Chicago as much as he entertained them? José Blanco F. does not probe the rivalries that drove Billy Carter to bring a little chaos to his brother’s tightly wrapped presidency, but he does show how Billy pulled it off.

In ‘My Idol Was Langston Hughes’: The Poet, the Renaissance, and Their Enduring Influence, Margaret Walker Alexander (here, with admirers at a book signing) tells us about a generation of writers who struggled to escape the South and find their voices in the Harlem Renaissance. Photograph courtesy of the William R. Ferris Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

We also present here four first-hand accounts, two from activists from the archives of the Southern Oral History Program and two from writers. Each gives us the voice of a distinguished twentieth-century southerner recounting his or her own life and the lives of those around them. The first is Septima Clark, a lifelong teacher who founded the Citizenship Schools to teach black adults reading and writing to prepare them for their perilous efforts to register and vote. Author Katherine Mellen Charron used SOHP interviews in preparing Clark’s biography, Freedom’s Teacher (UNC Press, 2009), and Charron and SOHP associate director David P. Cline bring us portions of those interviews. Clark describes her harsh childhood, her own struggle for education in early-twentieth-century Charleston, her battles for racial equality through the Movement, and for gender equality in the Movement. Long the only female board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Clark never sought the spotlight and worked behind the scenes, but her dignity and fierce determination shine throughout her interview. And along the way she brings us powerful vignettes of Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Ella Baker, and Stokely Carmichael.

In Just As I Am Not, poet Michael McFee reports on his visit to the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina. Billy Graham, during a revival in Duisburg, Germany, 1954, courtesy of the German Federal Archive and Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license.

Virginia Durr was a white Alabama socialite who rejected the racial conventions of Birmingham for the fight against segregation, beginning in the 1940s. Third-party political candidate, crusader for equal suffrage, target of Mississippi’s Senator James Eastland, Durr and her husband Clifford sheltered Civil Rights workers and defied racist opinion, even as she held on to old habits of noblesse oblige and aristocratic entitlement. Another jewel from the Southern Oral History Program, her story takes us from the political advice of her brother-in-law, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, to a firm lesson in lady-like behavior from her African American domestic worker, Mary Harris, to a priceless encounter with folksinger Joan Baez. Durr makes fun of her finishing school lessons in graceful deportment, but her tart wit and dramatic flair demonstrate that those early lessons in self-presentation were carefully put to use.

Our writers are poet and novelist Margaret Walker Alexander, introduced here by her longtime friend William R. Ferris, and critic and novelist Albert Murray, interviewed by David A. Taylor for our Not Forgotten. Both artists choose to tell about themselves through stories about others, especially Langston Hughes for Walker, and Ralph Ellison for Murray. Deeply indebted to the southern African American world where they were born, they both tell us about a generation of writers who struggled to escape the South and find their voices in the Harlem Renaissance and the literary communities it inspired. Alexander and Murray are masters of a southern storytelling tradition, and as they paint vivid portraits of friends like Hughes and Ellison they also reveal themselves as lively and sensitive judges of character. Like an entire generation of African American artists, they left the