Realizing Our Place: Real Southern Women in a Mythologized Land

By Catherine Egley Waggoner and Laura Egley Taylor

What does it mean to be from somewhere? Does place seep into one's very being like roots making their way through rich soil, shaping a sense of self? In particular, what does it mean to be from a place with a storied past, one mythologized as the very best and worst of our nation? Such questions inspired Catherine Egley Waggoner and Laura Egley Taylor, sisters and Delta expatriates themselves, to embark on a trail of conversations through the Mississippi Delta.

Meeting in evocative settings from kitchens and beauty parlors to screened-in porches with fifty-one women--black, Chinese, Lebanese, and white; elderly and young; rich and poor; bisexual and straight--the authors trace the extent to which the historical dimensions of southern womanhood like submissiveness, purity, piety, and domesticity are visible in contemporary Delta women's everyday enactments. Waggoner and Taylor argue that these women do not simply embrace or reject such dimensions, but instead creatively tweak stereotypes in such a way that skillfully legitimizes their authenticity.

Blending academic analysis with colorful excerpts of Delta women's words and including over one hundred striking photographs, Waggoner and Taylor provide an insightful peek into the lives of real southern women living in a deeply mythologized land.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jul 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781496817594

Catherine Egley Waggoner

Catherine Egley Waggoner is professor of communication at Wittenberg University. She is coauthor of Making Camp: Rhetorics of Transgression in U.S. Popular Culture and recipient of Wittenberg's 2014 Alumni Association Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Set in Place

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE FROM SOMEWHERE? AS TWO SISTERS revisiting our native land after years away, we return to this question each time we fly into Memphis and drive down into the endless flat terrain of the Mississippi Delta. These ponderings were echoed by Rosanne Cash, singer/songwriter and daughter of the legendary Johnny Cash, when she noted, speaking about the long way home: I thought the South, and my Southern connections, were something that was, you know, vague and in the distance, adding that she only fully apprehended years later how much she treasured the people and the land of the South, and that she was indeed a part of it. As she poignantly put it: I had left but never went away.¹

Such sentiments are not uncommon among those who feel a keen sense of identity to a particular region, sharpened by a return visit after an absence of many years, confronted with age-old questions of identity: Who are we? What makes us who we are: our cultural roots, geographical home, family history, pivotal experiences? When does our sense of self take shape: in our early childhood, as an ongoing process through adulthood, or only when we hit middle age and are able to gain some perspective? In any case, what constitutes our true or authentic self, if that concept of authenticity is even viable? While these may be timeless questions, they seem to have taken on renewed importance today, in this era of stepped-up globalization. As the Internet continues to bridge distances between vastly different cultures, and as populations become increasingly transient, questions concerning identity formation and authenticity such as Who are we, really? and What makes us that way? are arguably more salient than ever. The search for and confirmation of identity assumes a more urgent, if not anxious, place in our personal, regional, and national consciousness.

Perhaps no region in the US reveals this quandary of identity quite like the South, which has long been at the nexus of questions and apprehensions concerning identities, both regional and national. Characterized in its own intricate history of gentility and brutality, the South has historically served as a touchstone for US national identity, whether it is in a nostalgic calling up of the South’s distinctive characteristics as the epitome of all that is admirable in our nation (e.g., wholesome agrarian values, exemplary models of womanhood, pride in country) or a pointed articulation of Southernness as a neatly contained depository of America’s ills (e.g., ruthless violence, pervasive racism and sexism, abject poverty).² Scores of Southern scholars following in the wake of W. J. Cash’s noteworthy The Mind of the South have explored this relationship between a South defined as white and our national identity, noting the role that the South’s unified regional identity has played in bolstering an American sense of nationalized self.³ In short, we know who we are as Americans, in part, because of the South.

Others counsel us to remember that, although it is tempting to think of being Southern as a relatively unified standpoint with strong historical taproots in antebellum plantation society, we should be mindful that Southern is not such a stable identity, but rather an unresolved identity, unsettled and restless, unsure and defensive … a place of constant movement, struggle, and negotiation.⁴ Further, regions themselves are not simply coherent entities located inside clear lines on a map, but rather are culturally constructed spaces of the collective imagination.⁵ The recognition of this complicated, fluid, and rhetorical nature of regionalism has spawned a New Southern Studies, which urges scholars to turn away from an apparent fixation on discovering and articulating a distinctive nature of the South as an exceptional geographic place, different from the rest of America.⁶ Calling instead for a consideration of the South as a site of imagination rather than a real place, these scholars further note that the South is not a benign construction, but one serving particular interests as it shapes our national identity as Americans. Central to this shift in how we consider the South is its role as our nation’s internal other. Both aligning with and diverging from the United States in a symbiotic ideological juxtaposition—a part of and yet differentiated from the whole—the South has embodied both good and evil, serving to solidify our nation’s wholeness in complicated ways.⁷ The result is that we really know America only by virtue of its juxtaposed other, the abjected regional South.

Mississippi, in particular, has been understood as the ground zero of the imagined South—the South on steroids, in Crespino’s words.⁸ He notes that many factors have contributed to this designation, not the least of which is Mississippi’s position as the poorest, least industrialized Southern state with the highest percentage of African American residents in the nation. Its prominent role in the bloody history of the modern civil rights movement has also helped to secure this identity for the Magnolia State, serving to solidify its reputation as an exception to the rule, a closed society with racist values and attitudes dramatically out of sync with the rest of the country. Crespino explains at least two other related metaphors for Mississippi circulating in our nation’s imagination: Mississippi as synecdoche for America—embodying in distilled form both the racist ills and, ironically, the wholesome promise of the entire nation—and Mississippi as scapegoat, taking on the blame for the sins of the nation for others (i.e., Northern hypocrites) who refuse to acknowledge racism in their own homelands.

Recently, Mississippi has been featured prominently in our popular national consciousness quite visibly in two popular and controversial blockbuster cinematic releases, The Help and The Blind Side. Beyond their entertainment value—both films feature females in Academy Award–winning roles—these films engage critical questions of and underscore tensions within regional identity formation, especially as they relate to gender, race, and class. The fact that both films showcase a Southern identity so predicated on femininity is notable, though not surprising. Gender has historically played a pivotal role in both sentimentalizing and denigrating the South, particularly in presenting it as the exotic other.⁹ We have seen depictions of Southern women on film before (e.g., Steel Magnolias, Fried Green Tomatoes, Gone With the Wind) that have helped to seal in our national imagination the decidedly performative dimensions of Southern femininity of particular types, notably those of white femininity: the coquettish belle, the refined lady, the scrappy poor white trash woman. Yaeger makes the point that white Southern women’s bodies have traditionally served as texts upon which regional identity is inscribed.¹⁰ To be sure, these cinematic representations of Southern white femininity do not stand alone but are bolstered via renditions of very performative but not-so-valorized portrayals of black femininity (i.e., the large-bosomed mammy and the sass mouthin’ maid). In fact, it is this very juxtaposition that constitutes part of the force of white Southern femininity.

We can imagine that such powerful media representations might have an effect on actual Southern women in terms of how they see themselves. McPherson argues that while the most iconic potent ideals of Southern femininity (i.e., the belle and lady) may be perceived as white, they nonetheless have material effects on women’s lives, whether they are black or white, serving as limit figures against which many Southern women define their lives. Dixie, after all, is a woman’s name, she adroitly reminds us.¹¹ But we do not really know the extent to which such representations with strong mythological underpinnings affect identity formation for women, if in fact, they actually do. An examination of how Southern identity is understood, negotiated, and practiced by contemporary Southern women helps to illuminate this complicated symbolic significance of the South. Further, it reveals how fundamental questions regarding identity, culture, and authenticity intersect and play out on the ground in ways that appear to resonate with the broader culture today. Taking seriously Ayers’s admonition to remember that there is no such thing as a fixed Southern identity, as films would have us believe, we seek to track and understand the explicit intersections of issues and questions regarding identity, culture, performance, and authenticity for women living in the Deep South.¹² To this end, we offer Realizing Our Place, an exploration of Southern identity among women of various races, sexualities, and classes living in the legendary region of Mississippi known as the Delta.

The Mississippi Delta, described by Cobb as the most southern place on Earth, is the northwestern corner of the state between the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers, dubbed the distilled essence of the Deep South, a unique world unlike the rest of the United States.¹³ Having somewhat imprecise geographical boundaries, famously described by Cohn as beginning in the posh lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ending on impoverished Catfish Row in Vicksburg, the Delta is marked as much or more by cultural distinctions, notably, extreme economic polarities of wealth and poverty, tenacious racial segregation, ingrained genteel paternalism, an abundance of arts and literature, and colorful residents with beguiling charm.¹⁴ Accentuating these cultural distinctions are evocative performances of race/class/gender, significant in particular for the women who dwell there, and often stand in as symbols for the place itself, as McPherson’s comment regarding the gendering of Dixie attests. Thus, the Delta seems a particularly rich place to pursue questions of Southern women’s identity formation with its attendant issues of authenticity, culture, and performance.

Our decision to situate this study within the Mississippi Delta is born of other reasons as well. We are sisters who grew up in the Delta, leaving in our early twenties for college and subsequent careers. We often are asked to interpret or verify Southernness for outsiders, finding ourselves in the somewhat awkward role of cultural spokespersons. Living as expatriates in Ohio, New York, New Mexico, and Wisconsin for the last thirty years has provided us vantage points from which to observe and consider Southernness. We are of the Delta, but not in the Delta, and this standpoint has facilitated both rich conversations with the women living there and our observations regarding their enactments of regional identity.

Realizing Our Place seeks to understand how contemporary women of the Mississippi Delta construct and perform their Southern identities in a highly mythologized land infused, in particular, with an iconic ideal of white femininity, the Southern lady. Motivated by questions including How does a distinctive sense of place configure in its inhabitants’ identities? In particular, what does it mean to live as a woman in the Deep South when the place itself is symbolically linked to an enduring ideal of white womanhood, the Southern Lady? we interviewed fifty-one Delta women between the ages of twenty and ninety, representing a variety of racial and ethnic heritages (i.e., Lebanese American, Chinese American, African American, and Caucasian), socioeconomic backgrounds, and sexualities (i.e., lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual). We sought and received Institutional Review Board approval from Wittenberg University for the project, and participants reviewed and signed consent forms explaining our process.

In addition to straightforward, open-ended questions about their perceptions of themselves and others as Southern, however defined, we asked participants to respond to prompts—visual images of Southern women readily available in mainstream media, including pop culture celebrities such as Paula Deen, Dolly Parton, and Oprah Winfrey; historical figures such as Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King; and fictional women, including Scarlett O’Hara and Mammy from Gone With the Wind, Tyler Perry’s Madea, and the casts of Steel Magnolias and Designing Women. We interviewed individuals, dyads, and small groups composed of sisters, mothers, daughters, and friends. When possible, we tried to meet the women in their own homes, but in some cases we spoke with them in public spaces (e.g., several restaurants, two beauty parlors, a funeral home, a public library, an art gallery/gift shop, a boutique clothing store, a casino hotel, and a doctor’s office). We then carefully reviewed the transcripts for themes and patterns that addressed the processes of constructing, maintaining, and performing Southern identities, drawing upon relevant literature in several areas of scholarship (i.e., cultural, critical, rhetorical, performance, and Southern studies) to inform our analysis.

On one level, our interest for this project is in simply hearing the women of the Mississippi Delta explicate in their own words the relationship of their sense of self to the mythologized Southern region in which they live. Much has been written about Southern women, most of which concerns fictional women, as seen in popular novels and films. Many people look to the South with expectations of finding these fictional characters frozen in time as indications of some sort of Southern cultural authenticity; this is not our goal. While fictional Southern characters are undoubtedly based in some aspects of reality, as all tropes or stereotypes are, we found it preferable and even necessary for our project to hear from women themselves about how they navigate their own identities in the face of the Southern mythology that takes hold so easily in the American imagination. We presented the women’s words verbatim whenever possible, making changes—shortening and eliminating confusing repetitions—only when necessary for clarity and easier reading. Our goal was to keep the flavor of our conversations intact as much as possible, believing that to be the heart of the project, which we did not want to kill with academic analysis. On another level, however, we were interested in doing more than just reflecting what we encountered. Rather, we wanted to theorize these complicated regional identities, seeking to trace their performative dimensions and understand their relationship to a broader American culture. Our approach to this work, then, is best described as an amalgamation of performance studies, cultural studies, and critical rhetorical studies—what some call in situ rhetoric—in that we seek to understand how logics of power operate via performance in cultures, illuminating their relationships to regional identity.¹⁵ Our intention is not to furnish a critique of Southern mythology per se, but—in the spirit of qualitative research that seeks to describe and understand—we aspire to identify qualitative aspects of lived experiences that provide us with a more substantive understanding of power and social relations in the Mississippi Delta and how these women navigate those relations.

In Realizing Our Place, we take a close look at Southernness as an evolving identity from the perspective of the women themselves. In chapter 2 we begin our exploration of Southern identity with a brief but necessary discussion of the ways in which relevant arenas of scholarship—identity, performance, and authenticity—shape our understanding of this project and serve as assumptions guiding our interpretations. We follow this with an account of long-standing Southern myths, perceiving them to be as much a part of the South as the material conditions (e.g., the river, the land, the houses, the inhabitants) themselves. We note, in particular, those myths foregrounding womanhood, believing, as others have argued, that the face of the South is female and that the iconic white Southern lady ideal continues to hold sway for women of all backgrounds.¹⁶ Through the remaining chapters, we trace the vestiges of the iconic Southern lady, uncovering how contemporary Delta women negotiate that powerful mythology in determined and resourceful ways, not embracing the mythology or rejecting it wholesale, but incorporating aspects of the mythology and then tweaking them in nuanced performances of place.

In chapter 3 we consider one of the most frequently depicted and yet controversial dimensions of the mythical Southern lady: submissiveness. We explore the traditional underpinning of that dimension before noting how it is appropriated via performances of deference in the lives of women we interviewed. We acknowledge the historical meanings of deference for African American women as part of a racial etiquette in the Jim Crow South, and we trace deference’s apparent function for Mississippi Delta women of all races and classes now. Performances of deference not only enable women to navigate trivial, benign social norms but also may serve a transgressive purpose, releasing power from a place of apparent weakness via an altercasting that turns on authenticity. In fulfilling others’ yearning for authenticity, these women set into motion patterns of behavior via the reanimation of past mythologies, bidding particular responses.

In chapter 4 we examine performances of propriety, recognizing the important role that decorum and manners play in the lives of Southern women. We explicate first the dimension of purity traditionally associated with white Southern womanhood and understood in venerated and yet predominantly repressive sexual and racial terms. We note the role that women of color have played traditionally in shoring up white women’s purity. We then trace purity’s contemporary incarnation as propriety—as what is genuine or real in terms of being appropriate to time and place. Purity is thereby refashioned as that which is authentically Southern, giving women more freedom to act within what might otherwise be confining limitations.

Religiosity is our focus in chapter 5, as we recognize the role that religion, discernible as faith in God, serves in the enactments of these women’s Southern identities. Religiosity framed as piety has a long history with womanhood in the Bible Belt; Southern women are often known colloquially as church ladies, and their behaviors as such are tightly curbed. We trace a performance of religiosity in contemporary Delta women that resembles in some respects this age-old concept of piety, but which has been redeployed as the more freeing Christian stewardship. When religiosity is understood as mobilizing one’s God-given talents to take care of place (i.e., God’s world), the result is a revelation of avenues for transgression of social norms in an otherwise restrictive dimension of femininity.

In chapter 6 we hold up for scrutiny a hallmark of Southern womanhood, that ideal historically known as domesticity, the proclivity for creating and sustaining home. We acknowledge the general association of domesticity with women’s relegation to the private sphere (i.e., a woman’s place is in the home), as well as the historical significance of the term for women of color who often worked as domestic maids in white women’s houses. We trace contemporary Delta women’s enactments of domesticity, noting with interest the blurring of private and public spheres that constitutes claiming rather than simply making place. We examine the ways claiming place varies across race and class, featuring place sometimes as geography and sometimes as social position, but in all cases utilizing place markers that mobilize an empowering authenticity or real Southernness.

Our concluding chapter returns to the question of what it means for contemporary women from different walks of life to identify with a highly mythologized region, especially when the region has been understood via a particular icon of white Southern femininity. We address the significance of the ways in which the performances of deference, propriety, religiosity, and domesticity vary across differences of race and class, and we explore the ironic practice of performing authenticity, or realness. Finally, in the Epilogue, we reflect upon our own experiences as Delta women coming home for this project, finding poignancy in T. S. Eliot’s observation that we arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.¹⁷

Cotton is still king in the Delta—if only figuratively; Johnnie Pearl and Greer stop to chat in front of Johnnie Pearl’s house in Greenville; the Mississippi River continues to be the lifeblood of the Delta; an elegant home in Greenville.

A Southern belle on display at the Shack-Up Inn in Clarksdale; the award-winning Doe’s Eat Place, in Greenville, is famous worldwide for its incomparable steaks and tamales; spectators settle in for the Highway 61 Blues Festival in Leland; a sign in downtown Leland harks back to an earlier time.

Chapter 2

Knowing One’s Place

CULTURE AND IDENTITY

I THINK OF MYSELF AS VERY SOUTHERN, ANN L. DRAWLED IN HER warm, resonant voice as we chatted with her, Hester, and Linda around a table in Linda’s A Head of Time beauty salon. Pausing for a moment, she listed some characteristics that mark her as Southern, most revolving around a particular style of interaction: "We [Southerners] are friendly, and we believe in speaking. We have a closeness that we feel for each other; we get insulted when others don’t speak to us. And that’s, I guess, a trait of the South. She added that speech patterns and accents also serve to help others (non-Southerners) classify her: I begin to speak, and people comment, ‘You must be from the South.’ They are so glad to be able to identify me. She concluded, saying reflectively: Yeah, I’m proud to be Southern."

Ann L.’s casual comments provide a peek into the rather complex process of creating and sustaining regional identities—a sense of self connected to a specific place. Each of the Mississippi Delta women with whom we spoke articulated their connection to the region in a manner reflecting an understanding of what place means. Sometimes place referred to the geography itself—the Delta dirt and wide-open flat land, or the Mississippi River, held at bay by the storied levee. Sometimes place referred to one’s place in society, or the social roles enacted by the region’s inhabitants. At other times, place was ephemeral, as in the South articulated in literature and film.

We use this chapter to dig into that complex idea of regional identity formation, sharing what others have noted about this subject in relevant arenas of scholarship: identity, performance, and authenticity. In doing so, we identify the theoretical assumptions guiding the way we approached this project—important for following our arguments in the subsequent chapters. We conclude this chapter with a description of the Southern myths that, no matter their age and the changing times, still have a palpable presence in the the most Southern place on Earth. We turn first to a discussion of identity.

Grounded in Place: Cultivating Regional Identity

Sitting at her kitchen counter in Greenville, Mississippi, we asked Greer about the extent to which she claimed a Southern identity, to which she responded immediately and matter-of-factly as if the question were crazy: Yes, I have that Southern place in my mind. Two aspects of her succinct answer are particularly significant to us in our exploration of what it means to be Southern: first, Greer’s response presents the phenomenon of identity