Southern Cultures: Winter 2010

By Harry L. Watson

In the Winter 2010 issue of Southern Cultures:

Hal Crowther takes on H.L. Mencken (and Rush Limbaugh, too);

Southerners battle hornets, rattlesnakes, and bears—so they can pick blackberries;

Cowboy Troy crosses country music with hip-hop and says his belt buckle is bling;

The experts redraw the boundaries of North and South;

The Home of the Double-Headed Eagle rises amidst a line of shotgun shacks;

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: Nov 10, 2010
• ISBN: 9780807899755

Book preview

front porch

About 1917, it seems, just when H. L. Mencken was delivering ‘The Sahara of the Bozart,’ his famously blistering dismissal of ‘Culture’ in the South, somebody down home was buying Victor recordings of famed Italian opera stars Enrico Caruso and Amelita Galli-Curci. Enrico Caruso, examining a bust of himself in 1914, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

I never knew my mother’s mother, a woman so distant from me that I think of her as Miss Lucy rather than Grandmamma. But I do know a lot about her. She was a college graduate, when that was still a rare thing for a country girl, from one of our very early state schools for women. She agonized that her schoolteacher’s job (and then her marriage) had utterly exiled her from childhood and college haunts to the North Carolina boondocks. She fiercely believed in books and late-Victorian High Culture, and passed her creed intact to my mother. One of her legacies was a tiny phonograph collection that Mom saved when the old house had to go.

About 1917, it seems, just when H. L. Mencken was delivering The Sahara of the Bozart, his famously blistering dismissal of Culture in the South, somebody down home was buying Victor recordings of Enrico Caruso and Amelita Galli-Curci, the famed Italian opera stars. It couldn’t have been Granddaddy, whose tastes ran to string bands, so it must have been Miss Lucy, who could only have learned about opera in college. I listened to these records when they went of to an archive, and they were still very impressive, though well-worn. But the collection held other disks as well. The one I remember was Golden Slippers, referring to the footwear of choice in Heaven. The artists were the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, composed of students from one of the South’s oldest black colleges—older, in fact, than my grandmother’s alma mater—and their earnings went to the college treasury.

I don’t want to make too much of my grandmother’s taste in records. I can’t imagine that she ever heard Caruso in person, for just as Mencken said, the nearest bona fide opera house might as well have been on the moon. And at the nadir in southern race relations, a taste for spirituals, and even a modest contribution to black education, could signify a well-intentioned paternalism but no more. After all, the Jubilee Singers performed refined black music for well-paying white audiences, not the gut-wrenching wails of laborers and sharecroppers. All the same, the articles in this issue remind me of Miss Lucy’s diverse compilation. Just when H. L. Mencken was lambasting the South’s dearth of poets, oboe-players, and the like, she and a few other southern audiophiles were attuned to the arias of La Scala and the Met. But unlike Mencken, Miss Lucy and her peers also had some appreciation for the South’s other cultures, especially the spiritual tradition that the Jubilee singers repackaged for their benefit.

To give the devil his due, Mencken did not completely ignore the arts of black southerners. He even said, The only visible esthetic activity in the South is in their hands, a comment he intended as a put-down of whites. On the whole, the Sahara of the Bozart is unambiguous: the South is the white South, culture is European High Culture, and never the twain shall meet. My grandmother’s records offer a minor rebuttal, but they carry an even more important lesson. Contrary to Mencken, the South’s diversity not only has room for High Culture, but even for ladies like her, it also shelters a range of vernacular cultures that Mencken barely recognized. As a result, the meaning of southern cultures is far more fluid and unpredictable than he and many others have recognized. The essays in this issue develop this proposition in detail.

Hal Crowther begins by tackling Mencken’s legacy head-on. He reminds us of Mencken’s painful power to rile regional patriots, entertain naysayers, and demolish deserving targets—along with plenty of undeserving ones as well. Mencken even seems to have left his mark on Crowther, for, like his subject, our essayist is witty, charming, opinionated, and unsparing of his enemies. He also makes a strong case that Mencken’s contempt for southern arts is alive and well in modern metropolitan centers, to the persisting detriment of southern artists. Mencken, it seems, was not the only one who misunderstood the diverse South.

One wonders what H. L. Mencken would have made of Cowboy Troy, the tall, imposing blackneck who dominates the music charts with rap woven through with the distinctive motifs of Nashville. Adam Gussow unfolds the story of Cowboy Troy, demonstrating once again how unreliable stereotypes can be, and how murky and unstable are the lines that divide the South from everywhere else. If you didn’t know about country rap, dig in to Gussow’s piece for a role-bending account of how black artists have long claimed a place in white music, scrambling its categories and certainties in the process, and leaving their indelible mark.

Come to think of it, where is the South anyway? Is it everywhere below the Mason-Dixon Line? That would make H. L. Mencken of Baltimore one of the southerners he unloaded on. Is it the old Confederacy? The former slave states? Or wherever they serve grits for breakfast? Sociologist John Shelton Reed once devised an ingenious way to draw southern boundaries. He counted how many businesses’ names in a place began with the words Southern or Dixie and mapped the results.

In our South Polls feature, Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts, also sociologists, tweak and revisit Reed’s methods to see if the boundaries of the South have changed. No one who knows the contemporary region will be surprised to learn that the South’s boundaries are changing all the time, at least when measured by these scales. By one of Cooper and Knotts’s measures, the most southern states today adjoin the Mississippi River. Texas and the Atlantic Coast are still distinctive but less so. As it turns out, other recent studies show that the Mississippi Valley is the South’s most economically deprived region, and that was before Katrina and the oil spill. Texas and the ocean states have experienced far more economic growth, in-migration, urbanization, and high-tech investment. With far fewer residents with ties to regional history, it’s no wonder they employ the old symbols less often. Does that mean that the South is shrinking? Don’t count on it. If southern boundaries are unstable and ever-changing, your old Dixie cups might be worth something after all. Even in Occupied Northern Virginia.

The outlier in this issue is Bruce Baker’s chatty, charming, and deeply informed rumination on blackberries. Though he lives in England now, Baker grew up picking southern blackberries. He uses that experience as the starting point to introduce us to the role of gathered foods in southern history, from berries to poke salad to rabbits. Long ago, southern people did not feed themselves from stores—not even hog and hominy from the landlord’s shelves, to say nothing of Winn-Dixie. They grew most of what they ate themselves and gathered the rest from common land that belonged to somebody but was open to the public so long as it remained unfenced.

Believe it or not, here’s where cultural mixing comes in. The gathering culture was not limited to poor white people. Slaves and freed people completed their diets the same way, and they all learned their methods from the Indians. Gathering blackberries was work for women and children, putting food on the table and (later) cash in the pocket, relieving dependency on wages for black and white alike. Moreover, people who gathered blackberries together also swapped recipes. And songs. And stories. And cultures. Even when black and white were most at odds, cultural mixing went on, sustained by a common recourse to the land and its bounty. Cowboy Troy, it seems, is only the latest manifestation of a centuriesold tradition.

As usual, our finale is Not Forgotten. This time, Ali Neff reports on the dream castle of the Rev. H.D. Dennis of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Built for his wife, Margaret, Rev. Dennis’s creation sits by a Vicksburg roadside, sporting towering spires of multi-colored brick and adorned with the symbols of royalty, Masonry, and Jesus. Like a medieval keep, it’s a castle, a chapel, and a monument all at once—and a testament to its creator’s eclectic imagination. Who could cross more boundaries than Rev. Dennis? And who could be more southern?

Peter Makuck takes us out with a poem about reconnecting to life on southern back roads, stitching together the worlds of the university and the Outer Banks. Like Bruce Baker’s gatherers, contact with the countryside sustains his life by knitting its diverging tendencies together. Together with a selection of fine book reviews, that’s all for now. We hope we can pull together your divergences as well, from Caruso to Golden Slippers and beyond.

HARRY L. WATSON,Editor

ESSAY The View from Mencken’s Tomb

by Hal Crowther

You’re an ancient mariner if you actually read Mencken [here] hot of the presses—the hottest thing available in its day, now a neglected chapter in American studies. The Sage of Baltimore, as both admirers and sarcastic detractors called him, suffered a debilitating stroke in 1948 and died in 1956, so I can’t even claim that I read Mencken while he was alive. Courtesy of The Baltimore Sun, file photo by Robert F. Kniesche.

Forgive me if I date myself by exhuming H. L. Mencken. He was the patron saint of a certain kind of journalist, and soon the kind of journalism he and I practiced and understood will be consigned to the History department. Or Archaeology. But you’re an ancient mariner if you actually read Mencken hot of the presses—the hottest thing available in its day, now a neglected chapter in American studies. The Sage of Baltimore, as both admirers and sarcastic detractors called him, suffered a debilitating stroke in 1948 and died in 1956, so I can’t even claim that I read Mencken while he was alive. I discovered him when he was barely cold, though, when Eisenhower was president and I was an adolescent contrarian looking for heroes and role models and finding slim pickings among the adults and celebrities on general display. My grandfather gave me that yellow paperback edition of the 1955 Vintage Mencken, edited by Alistair Cooke, and it became, for a season, my bedside bible. I published an essay claiming that I was fourteen when I began to channel H. L. Mencken, which coincidentally made me sound passably precocious, but my mother shook her head when she read it and told me I was closer to sixteen. You can’t exaggerate as much while your mother’s still there to pull the wings of certain flights of fancy, and it’s my mixed fortune, at this advanced age, to have a mother still available to edit my memory.

Why Mencken—why then, why now? What is it that brings a boy, or a man— or, more rarely, a woman—to find common cause with the verbal extravagance and exuberant prejudice of Henry Louis Mencken? None of us over forty accurately remember the way we thought and felt as teenagers—though most memoirists pretend to—but the America of Ed Sullivan, Bishop Fulton Sheen, and John Foster Dulles was very safe and boring, I thought, and Mencken was not. And I immediately recognized that Mencken’s family, German-American burghers with a certain cultural over-confidence and a ferocious streak of independence—my ancestors for 300 years back were all bad citizens, he said—was very much like my own, though the Crowthers preferred to call themselves skeptics and nonconformists. The Fifties, at least for America’s white middle class, were a time of smugness and political and cultural constipation not unlike the Twenties, when Mencken in his boisterous prime rained contempt on everything prim and stuffy and genteel. For a rebellious boy in a very small town, torn between juvenile delinquency and the kind of obsessive, sex-sublimating reading that made medieval monks go blind, Mencken was a voice of sophistication and freedom, and a career in his tradition was an appealing alternative to armed revolution.

I never consciously emulated Mencken, but there’s no doubt that the heroes we acquire from our earliest adult reading shape the way we think and the way we express ourselves. Unquestionably I was pleased to win the Baltimore Sun’s H. L. Mencken Writing Award. I used to like to say that it honored the meanest son of a bitch in American journalism, though in recent years it’s been given to several lackluster right-wingers, and I don’t go to any Mencken Prize reunions. I was honored to be asked to deliver the annual Mencken Lecture a few years ago, although it turned out to be the most intimidating assignment I ever accepted. The audience is the Mencken Society, every Mencken scholar and biographer, every Mencken zealot and self-styled curmudgeon in the United States. I imagined that if I made one obvious mistake I’d be driven from the stage in a barrage of crab legs, or whatever they throw at frauds in Baltimore. So I spent a whole summer reading and rereading Mencken and his biographers. That’s the only reason I’m not even more humble when I stress that I’m neither an authority on Mencken nor his disciple—nor, despite the kind words of some critics, his direct descendant.

But Mencken himself was no authority. Criticism, he liked to say, is prejudice made plausible—and in his case entertaining. He didn’t overburden himself