The South shows its many colors
By Ari Kaufman (02/24/06)
Driving through a 30-minute blizzard in Western Alabama last week, I mentioned to ! my traveling companion that I didn’t think that this area received this kind of snowfall. She nodded in concurrence, and I then went on a controlled tirade about how weather is just another large misconception many American have pertaining to the South. My investigation was already in full throttle, but this simply added to the intrigue and validity of my endeavors.
Growing up in coastal cities, like most of the sheltered folks that lived near me, we never ventured “south” unless it was to Florida or the beach communities of Virginia and the Carolinas. Thus, like them, I had the usual stereotypes of Southern culture. And while Thomas Sowell’s recent book, “Black Rednecks and White Liberals” does not necessary dispel the basis of these views, a few lengthy trips through this part of the country has shown me the erroneousness of many northerners’ assumptions, particularly their blatant hatred of southerners' religiosity and apathy toward any issues concerning the South.
How often they muse, especially recently, “I hear it so backwards down there. Why would anyone want to live there?" These people can seemingly be forgiven as when they turn on MSNBC each evening, post Hardball, it is a regular occurrence to see journalists like White House Press Corps member and Washington Post writer, Dana Milbank, on Keith Olbermann's show donning hunting gear and affecting a redneck accent to make a cheesy joke of the recent Dick Cheney hunting accident. Their intellectual superiority over the rest of us goes no farther than above the fold of the NY Times fraudulent front page or the Ted Turner family of networks, whereupon their views are neatly articulated each day.
A friend of mine who used to work in Americorps spent nine months in various southern areas from the Gulf Coast to Southern Tennessee to Western Georgia. Although a hard-core Berkeley liberal, he often elucidated to me how we wrongly portray southerners (black or white) as uneducated, poor, racist or homophobic. After spending a week last March in Mississippi and Louisiana with him, driving cross country twice in the past year (hitting many roads through this portion of our country), and just last week spending four days traversing the interstates and back roads of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and North Florida, this man was basically correct.
I cannot honestly say that I never witnessed so-called “cracker culture” at its finest. My girlfriend and I dined in some local establishments, spent a great deal of time off the interstate walking and driving through the chill of small towns, and stayed in hotels that were occupied by people that most coastal elites ha! ve never encountered. And I am not saying I could see myself living in Reform, Alabama; Perry, Georgia: or Booneville, Mississippi anytime soon, but I can also tell you that these people, as I so often opine, serve as a better example of what the backbone of America truly is, than the lawyer in Boston or the businessman in San Francisco.
Patriotic displays are evident every few miles, and those, along with religious displays, surely (and wrongly) make my secular Jewish friends more furious that when radical leftists laud Islam or when a suicide bomber detonates himself in a Tel Aviv nightclub. Isn’t that odd, yet typical?
And while most university professors spend the bulk of their travel and charity time in Africa and Cuba, you rarely hear of anyone of note (sans Katrina) spending serious time improving the impoverished south, even though they know the reality. Of course, as soon as their beloved New Orleans was ravaged and CNN started rolling the footage of blacks dying in the streets, the support was immense. That was about as genuine as a modern Hollywood-type, aside from the magnanimous Denzel Washington, entertaining our troops overseas. Witness Al Franken's half-hearted trip to the Middle East last year.
As for the exact geography of the sojourn, we left South Florida and traveled up vapid I-95 until we hit the Georgia state lines and eventually dinner in the charming city of Savannah. Few people dining on the river walk or shopping in the artsy market square seemed to notice the horrific ghetto just a block outside the city center, aside from us. Afterwards, through the nighttime drizzle, we prodded all the way up to Atlanta and then west through the Talladega National Forest to a hotel in Birmingham. The day’s toll on my Nissan was 840 miles. But all was worth it, as Birmingham would prove a perfect jumping off point for the wonders of Northern Mississippi and Alabama over the next day and a half. It wasn’t exactly Cape Cod or Malibu, but we’d somehow manage.
One of the reasons I was eager to see southern towns like Columbus, Mississippi and Selma, Alabama, was because they had been praised as “splendid little towns” by travel writer, Bill Bryson, in his 1988 book, “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America.”
While in Columbus, and later Selma, I was prepared to compare my visions to what Bryson had seen and chronicled 18 years earlier in his book. To say that Bryson and I are on opposite sides of the socio-political spectrum would be an understatement. While Bill and I both enjoyed the city’s edifices and charm, we saw much else differently. I noticed people strolling about in Columbus, trying to get home from work, and so on. Some were black, some white, some old, some young, some poor and some middle class. And, as much as I enjoy analyzing the quirks and backgrounds of individuals, nothing about the people struck me as noteworthy enough to write about. B! ryson, a Caucasian apologist to the hardest core, who spent his formative years in London after leaving Iowa, saw things in classic elitist fashion:
“With so much poverty everywhere, Columbus came as a welcome surprise…the people looked prosperous. The first person I saw was obviously a well-educated black man in a three piece suit carrying a Wall Street Journal. It was all deeply pleasing and encouraging…I could live here,! I thought. But then the waitress came over and said, “Yew honestly a breast menu, honey?” I couldn’t understand a word these people said to me…The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence. Living there would drive me crazy. Slowly.”
And there you have it. Encapsulated into two small experiences, Bryson relays his condescension and feelings about the South. He does so quite o! ften, through this portion of his book.
While I was in towns like Columbus and others (some bigger, some smaller), the accents were hardly torturous. Some people spoke slowly, some fast. Most of them, if not all, I could understand perfectly. With the aid of Bryson, this is how many of us along the blue coasts get our misconceptions of the South, and lord knows few northerners would ever visit to find out the truth for themselves.
The racial-dividing Bryson spews is clearly evident in Columbus and elsewhere. I simply have no idea why people like him make race an issue in everything, but I saw it as a public schoolteacher and I obviously see it in the modern political landscape from Democrats like Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson all too often. Bryson's necessity to mention the skin color of the man in the three piece suit with the Wall Street Journal is totally insignificant to his tale, but totally vital to his agenda. Can you imagine him saying, “I saw an obviously well-educated WHITE man”? No, because not only would that cease to acquiesce with his audience's apologist personas, but he does not believe they (well-educated whites) exist in the South, as I learned over and over while reading this book.
After Columbus, we rummaged through the blizzard I mentioned at the onset of the piece, then had dinner in Tuscaloosa, eventually back at the hotel in Birmingham at a reasonable hour.
A desolate, chilly, Sunday mor! ning was spent in Birmingham, looking at all the Civil Rights exhibits: churches, parks, museums, buildings, shops, etc. I half-jokingly mused to Maria that the Birmingham should be a dream to a Caucasian balkanizer from the coasts: “They could apologize for themselves and be condescending all day, every day!” We drove up some hills atop Birmingham and peered down at the city. It was eerily reminiscent of Pittsburgh’s Mount Washington, sans the three rivers. I’ll take Pittsburgh over Birmingham due to that tragic omission.
Heading down I-65, and eventually I-22 toward Selma, we found ourselves once again within the parameters of the wondrous Talladega National Forest; this just being a separate portion of it from what we saw on Friday night. Then we criss-crossed jagged hills on the small roads into Selma. The joy of any and every road trip cannot be maximized without spending a bulk of time off the interstate. It has always discouraged me how many people drive cross country “in a hurry to get there” in three days, never leaving the interstate. And that so many of these people, consider themselves so culturally enlightened, perturbs me even more.
Selma, a town I visited due to the recommendations of Bryson again, was mediocre at best. It had a few nice shops, some historic buildings, but it was Sunday, and most of the town was closed on a sunny 40 degree day. As I walked toward the Edmund Pettis Bridge, I quickly recalled why Bryson liked this town. It was not solely because of “the benches on the waterfront where the city ended in a sharp bluff overlooking the Alabama River” as he notes, which are very serene, but rather due to the town's history.
For it was here that Martin Luther King, some forty years ago, began forty mile marches to the state capital, registering blacks to vote. This was a tidy bit of history, and upon reading that when the first few marches King led were met at the bridge by the Alabama National Guard, whence King peacefully turned away in “protest,” I knew why a peacenik like Bryson loved this town and King. I often do wonder how totally naïve it is that liberals believe that “peace” can resolve matters in the re! al world of Osama, Saddam, Hitler and the Ayatollahs, but I naturally digress. Instead, here is Bryson, in his own placating words:
“At the tourist information office I picked up some pamphlets extolling the town, including one boasting of its black heritage. I was heartened by this. I had seen nothing even faintly praiseworthy of blacks in Mississippi. Moreover, blacks and whites here seemed to be ! on far better terms. I could see them chatting at bus stops, and I even saw a black nurse and white nurse traveling together in a car, looking like old friends.”
Oh, dear. Bill Bryson wrote this book in 1988, not 1968. I don’t know if he was attempting to be a forerunner in the Politically Correct movement that engulfed us in the 1990s (and surely still does today), but can we really believe what he is writing? “Heartened by the mention of black heritage,” “Nothing praiseworthy of blacks in Mississippi,” “Being on far better terms, chatting at bus stops, traveling together like old friends.” This man must live in a bubble. I spent way more time in Mississippi and Alabama than he did, and I can unequivocally say that I saw no racism, plenty of praise and monuments to “black history” in Mississippi, and, hold the presses, I even saw a white waiter serving a black couple in a restaurant. Truly, racial relations are only stalling because people like Bryson notice these things, and publicly make every issue a racial one.
Bryson truly hit an apologist’s rock bottom while driving through Eastern Alabama later on, near the Tuskegee/Auburn area. He opined:
“Occasionally, there were nicer houses – white people’s houses – with big station wagons in the driveways and a basketball hoop over the garage and large, well-mowed lawns. Often these houses were remarkably close – sometimes right next door – to a shack. You would never see that in the North. It struck me as ironic that Southerners could des! pise blacks so bitterly and yet live comfortably alongside them, while in the North people by and large did not mind blacks, even respected them as humans and wished them every success, just so long as they didn’t have to mingle with them too freely.”
This would be a concrete example of Bryson's (and many liberals) inherent racism. Firstly, how does he know the nice houses belong to white people? And then he claims that northerners, "even respected blacks as human beings?" If I were a southerner, I would want to sue Bryson for libel, as he essentially says that no southerners see blacks...as humans! I know for certain that friends of mine and other websites will say I am reading too much into this, and that Bryson, like the despicable Bill Maher, is a “satirist,” but this paragraph is undoubtedly his genuine view.
The most revealing part is that Bryson, perhaps unintentionally walked himself right into my overarching theme of the hypocrisy of northern elites, where he decreed, “…while in the North people by and large did not mind blacks, even respected them as humans and w! ished them every success, just so long as they didn’t have to mingle with them too freely.” Thanks, Bill.
I couldn’t take much more of Bill’s views on the South, especially after he noted how, Tuskegee was “poor, boarded up” and that “every person in every car, every pedestrian, storekeeper, fireman, postman, every last soul was black. Except me. I had never felt so conscious, so visible. I stopped at a Burger King for coffee. There must have been fifty people in there. I was the only per! son who wasn’t black, but no one seemed to notice or care. It was an odd sensation – and rather a relief…”
Earlier in the book, while in Georgia, Bryson was very quick to note that a bunch of Caucasian rednecks had their guns loaded when he walked into a diner due to his shaggy, hippie-like appearance; but in the all-black BK, it was so refreshing to see no one cared about such things. Being the coward he is, Bill felt! visible and conscious enough to jet off to lily-white Auburn, whereupon he bemoaned how rich and clean the white people were in their fancy cars, yet so close to downtrodden Tuskegee, which he seemingly only visited to pass judgment and see the Tuskegee Institute, American’s premier black college, founded by Booker T. Washington. Washington, a noble man, vehemently opposed to the creation of victicratic organizations like the NAACP, would have surely castigated Bryson for his elucidations.
After Selma, it was on to our first of two state capitals along the final two days of the trip. (We saw Tallahassee the following day.) Montgomery was an extremely charming city. On a chilly, but warmer, late Sunday afternoon, the city was a veritable ghost town, and Maria and I thoroughly enjoyed the city’s entrance, down a steep hill after a turn from Interstate 65. The capital area is grandiose and steeped in history.
The Southern White House, an original center of the Southern Confederacy, pre-Richmond, was still pleasantly perched adjacent to the capital area, which sits on a hill, ala Washington DC, as you approach from the south. Various white government buildings shroud all sides! of a tastefully-done and maintained circle, replete with state flags, statues and an eternal flame to remember all of Alabama’s fallen soldiers. People in this state fight wars.
If any of the northern coastal elites spent considerable time in the south, I feel comfortable that they would come to the same general conclusions I did, rectifying their uninformed conjectures. They may not proclaim “the South will rise again!” or wave the Confederate flag with Southern Pride, but their goggles may cease to be so tainted. More importantly, they would at least be able to give a smidgeon of respect for those who have never been to Martha's Vineyard or have never had the pleasure of spending $12 for a wheatgrass sandwich at Wild Oats Market, and a double frappucino at Starbucks after their mid-day yoga/pilates class.
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