Southern Cultures: Volume 20: Number 2 – Summer 2014 Issue

By Harry L. Watson

Southern Cultures Volume 20: Number 1 – Summer 2014

Table of Contents

Front Porch
by Jocelyn R. Neal
"One of the challenges—and, simultaneously, deep pleasures—of studying the South is that the disciplinary walls of the academy neither contain nor constrain the work."

Rewriting Elizabeth
A Life Lost (and Found) in the Annals of Bryce Mental Hospital
by Lindsay Byron
"Her name was never to be spoken. Even upon the lips and within the hearts of her own children, remembrance was forbidden. Silence nearly erased her from history."

Ghosts, Wreckers, and Rotten Ties
The 1891 Train Wreck at Bostian's Bridge
by Scott Huffard
"When train number nine on the Western North Carolina Railroad tumbled off Bostian's Bridge in 1891, it ignited a media frenzy, as well as a firestorm of outrage, a detailed investigation, a compelling mystery, and a series of unanswered questions."

Photo Essay
Teenage Pastime
by Natalie Minik
"When the unlimited energy of adolescence comes to bear on the limited experience of childhood, the results often swing toward one of two poles—an enthusiastic confirmation of the culture a child grew into or a bold rejection of the culture they grew out of."

"The Best Notes Made the Most Votes"
W. C. Handy, E. H. Crump, and Black Music as Politics
by Mark A. Johnson
"'Feet commenced to pat. A moment later there was dancing on the sidewalks below. Hands went into the air, bodies swayed like the reeds on the banks of the Congo.'"

Taking Strong Drink
by Bill Koon
"Some devout Baptists complained that there was too much booze in a mini bottle for one drink; the rest of us complained that there wasn't enough."

South Polls
Partisan Change in Southern State Legislatures, 1953–2013
by Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts
"At mid-century, the South had no Republican senators and only two Republicans in the 105-person southern House delegation. By 2000, [both] delegations were majority Republican."

Beyond Grits and Gravy
Maggie and Buck
Coal Camps, Cabbage Rolls, and Community in Appalachia
by Donna Tolley Corriher
"Maggie's neighbor-women saw a young woman just like themselves, with children to feed, trying to build a life, and so they helped her, unquestioning in recognition that she would help them in return. This was so."

Not Forgotten
Winning Friends and Influencing Dead People
by JL Strickland
"Joe cackled fiendishly, addressing Vernon through the closed lid. 'Who's got the last laugh now, big boy?'"

Mason–Dixon Lines
Apple Slices
poetry by Todd Boss
". . . flavored of tin from
the lip of the cup
of a dented thermos
passed between us—"

Books
Elaine Neil Orr
A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa
reviewed by Fred Hobson

Jennifer Rae Greeson
Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature
reviewed by Michael McCollum

Angela C. Halfacre
A Delicate Balance: Constructing a Conservation Culture in the South Carolina Lowcountry
reviewed by Brian Grabbatin

About the Contributors

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781469615943

Book preview

front porch

In this issue’s South Polls, we witness the transformation of southern legislatures over the last half-century. Radical members of the first legislature after the war, South Carolina, ca. 1876, copyright Mercer Brown, Library of Congress.

What makes the South a region distinct from its surroundings, and what makes it tick? These sorts of questions are at the heart of Southern Studies, an enterprise unbounded by academic discipline and only debatably bounded by geography. For this issue of Southern Cultures, we cast a wide net and pulled together articles, essays, poetry, and photographs that were not constrained by an editor’s choice of theme or topic, but rather that range across the scope of the current discourse on the South, what it is and how it works. Perhaps it is unsurprising that, either because of or in spite of this approach, the writing in this issue delves into the blues, train wrecks, disasters morphing into ghost stories, ghastly institutions for the mentally ill, coal mines in Appalachia, colorful politics, and, of course, food and booze: boiled cabbage rolls, pickles with roast beef sandwiches, and whiskey. New South or not, the substance of the conversation appears to be old, familiar territory. The Gothic South rears up in the tales of death, drunkenness, stoicism, perseverance in the face of potential despair, and politics within politics.

But those subjects serve at best as a preamble to the real insight of this issue: the people at the heart of these stories, their relationships, and the lines of demarcation within and among them—old and young, parent and child, white and black, male and female, northerner and southerner. It is within these character sketches and relationships, revealed amidst the chatter of everyday life, lunch breaks and midnight conversations, that we might enrich our understanding of the South.

The most poignant writing here engages with the relationships between parents and children. Rewriting Elizabeth: A Life Lost (and Found) in the Annals of Bryce Mental Hospital, by Lindsay Byron, is almost unbearable in its account of a non-southerner mother wrenched from her children and ultimately destroyed by an involuntary commitment to an asylum. In novels ranging from Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain to Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone or Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, it is the scenes of mothers torn from children on which my friends and I ruminate in water-cooler conversations; here is an account more heartbreaking yet. Donna Tolley Corriher’s account of her grandmother Maggie’s cabbage rolls gives us some insight into the pragmatism of a young wife with eight children to feed, while the synchronicity of her impoverished coal camp existence and her viewing of Elvis Presley on television reminds us of how the South compresses time, the glitz of modernity overlaid with an isolated and poverty-riddled existence of yesteryear.

Natalie Minik’s photographs—mesmerizing and inviting in their everyday-settings—call to mind the perspective of the children in these essays; in her work, are they bored? Pensive? Contemplative? In many, the subject’s position is framed by the South’s weather: blankets in the stadium, sweat and a cold drink under the sun. These are the same children of the South who might, in four decades, reminisce fondly, like Todd Boss in his Apple Slices, about eating lunch while on break with his dad’s construction crew.

Bill Koon on strong drink: As bizarre as the tiff might sound to New Yorkers, it’s not so strange to old southerners like me. My own Palmetto State has had its share of peculiar booze laws. We have been committed to selling and drinking alcohol since we got statehood, but single servings were forbidden for the first half of my life—the length of which I’ll keep to myself. From An Illustrated Guide to Cocktails, by Elizabeth Graeber. © 2013 by Elizabeth Graeber and Orr Shtuhl. Reprinted with permission from Elizabeth Graeber (elizabethgraeber.com).

The bonds and tensions that arise in culturally prescribed gender roles, especially between spouses, is another area of focus here. Wives phone the local grocery or service station to check on their husbands (who are tucked up in the establishment’s bar enjoying the camaraderie of other similarly hooky-playing husbands out to buy a loaf of bread), as Bill Koon describes in Taking Strong Drink. The husband-wife relationship is most harrowing in Byron’s Rewriting Elizabeth, and most sustaining in Corriher’s Maggie and Buck. The humor of such a life comes burbling through in JL Strickland’s Winning Friends and Influencing Dead People, which recounts the time-worn tale of two men fighting over the same woman, except one of the men is already dead, and the other wakes up the sixty-year-old widow with the drunken commotion. Both Strickland and Koon remind us that bourbon or whiskey (especially if stored in a Maytag washer) frees up the most colorful tales about spouses.

Cooper and Knotts’s South Polls essay temporarily pulls us back from our focus on personal relationships to explore the loyalties and political leanings of southerners as citizens, acting both as individuals and as collectives, in the New South—the newer New South, that is; namely, the past sixty years. They systematically document the shift in the political make-up of the South through a study of state legislatures. The findings offer a compelling background narrative and framework into which one can position particular stories and anecdotes of southern identity.

Politics becomes personal again, however, in Mark A. Johnson’s essay, ‘The Best Notes Made the Most Votes’: W. C. Handy, E. H. Crump, and Black Music as Politics, in which Johnson documents the maneuverings of two mayoral candidates in Memphis. How one of them hires an African American musician to play for his stump speeches, and how that bandleader weaves in insurgent lyrics as an act of racial rebellion, shows the very individual nature of an individual campaign, echoes of which resonate in Cooper and Knotts’s findings decades later.

Finally, Scott Huffard’s insights in Ghosts, Wreckers, and Rotten Ties: The 1891 Train Wreck at Bostian’s Bridge, reveal not only the media-hungry attention to disasters but also the political machinations based on race, money, and outsider-status that took place in the rush to point a finger for both accountability and liability purposes. A larger picture of the tensions, fears, and excitement that accompanied the New South’s industrial modernization emerges in the sum of the specific accounts on which Huffard drew.

One of the challenges—and, simultaneously, deep pleasures—of studying the South is that the disciplinary walls of the academy neither contain nor constrain the work. When searching for a methodology, the sky is the limit, but fortunately southerners are known for telling stories, for filling them with personal details, and for collecting and sharing them. Those practices clearly underpin the writings contained in this issue and suggest that we are all really engaging in southerner studies. From these stories, one can extract the threads of continuity, and in their totality, those threads weave a portrait of a South that is endlessly intriguing. May you also find it so.

JOCELYN R. NEAL, Editor

Essay

Rewriting Elizabeth

A Life Lost (and Found) in the Annals of Bryce Mental Hospital

by Lindsay Byron

Elizabeth Glynn Griffitts’s is the story of an inconvenient woman conveniently named insane in the 1920s Deep South, sentenced to complete her life within the walls of an insane asylum that reflected in microcosm the fears and desires of the larger culture it occupied. Elizabeth Glynn, ca. 1905, in Cairo, Illinois, courtesy of Susan Dickson.

For most of my youth, Elizabeth Glynn Griffitts (my paternal grandmother) was a hushed subject. I distinctly remember a gathering at my Aunt Janet’s home when I was about thirteen. It was the first time I had ever seen a photograph of Elizabeth. She was regal, dressed in turn-of-the-century finery: long lace dress and hat. She was driving a one-horse decorated carriage, whip and reins in hand. I looked at her confident face, with her proud expression, and realized a connection that speaks to me to this very day, almost a half century later.

For much of my adult life I have felt a desire—no, a compulsion—to tell Elizabeth’s story. I simply feel I owe it to her. I think about all of the women like Elizabeth who may have had unusual personalities or unresolved marital issues. Often confined in institutions against their will, taken from their children . . . I am so sorry for my grandmother. I wish I could go back in time and rescue her.

—Shelley Griffitts¹

Her name was never to be spoken. Even upon the lips and within the hearts of her own children, remembrance was forbidden. Silence nearly erased her from history. For almost a century, Elizabeth Glynn Griffitts remained little more than a skeleton in the closet of a proud and prominent southern family, a woman, much like the mad women of novels and history, shut away and supposedly forgotten forever—until her granddaughters, armed with little more than a captivating photograph and whispered rumors, dedicated decades to the recovery of Elizabeth’s existence.

A woman, dragged from her home on the arms of her husband and two police officers while her five children watched on, glimpsing their mother for the final time; a woman, forcibly institutionalized at Alabama’s infamous Bryce Hospital in 1924 and abandoned there for the remaining thirty years of her life; a woman, once bright and beautiful, left to deteriorate until she possessed only one eye, five teeth, and mere rags to wear, a lonely broken shell of her former elegance; a woman, perhaps eccentric, perhaps outspoken, and likely unhappy, but nonetheless lucid and capable, sent away to disappear at the injunction of her nationally renowned physician husband: this is her story, pieced together from medical records, case histories, letters on hospital file, and long-repressed family remembrances. Unwilling or unable to perform the brand of femininity compulsory for a woman of her class and race, a northern transplant living in a region holding tenuously to social rules changing with frightening rapidity, Elizabeth’s life in Alabama offered her more restrictions than opportunities. Her story, then, proves not simply individual, nor merely personal. Instead, hers is the story of an inconvenient woman conveniently named insane in the 1920s Deep South, sentenced to complete her life within the walls of an insane asylum that reflected in microcosm the fears and desires of the larger culture it occupied.

She was not alone in this fate.

BRYCE HOSPITAL

When it first opened in Tuscaloosa in 1861, Bryce Hospital—then known as Alabama State Hospital for the Insane—modeled the moral treatment philosophy characteristic of the era. This philosophy, championed most famously by Dorothea Dix, eschewed shackles and straightjackets in favor of therapeutically wholesome domestic environments. Built on the famous moral architecture plan devised by Thomas Kirkbride, the hospital, a sprawling Victorian-style estate with rolling hills outside and home-like settings within, originated as a paragon of psychiatric reform. However, by the early 1900s, moral treatment had been discredited and such vast buildings were nearly impossible to heat, cool, clean, or adequately staff. These deficiencies, paired with Bryce Hospital’s location within an impoverished region unable to match northern standards of psychiatric care,