By The Campfire

May 7, 2008

I’ve known genteel Southerners with perfect teeth and beautiful skin. I’ve seen them at the country club (while I was doing manual labor) and read about them in books and magazines. I’ve mowed their yards and painted their houses and skirted the perimeter of their culture on occasion, pretending, sometimes yearning, but seldom fitting. I’ve gone to school with them and watched them party on Fraternity and Sorority Rows at the University of Alabama back in the 1970’s when I delivered the paper around town. I never adjusted or settled in with that group of well-mannered, upper-bred, mint-juliped drawlers who dragged the language out just a little longer and asked just a little too much of their fellow man in the hushed, secret panic of Southern society.

I’ve known minimum wage Southerners who smelled like Redman and bourbon when they sweated. The Southerners I ran with weren’t so refined and inherited and white. They had culture but it was the across-the-tracks culture that spawned fried brim and catfish dinners, family reunions with fights, Hank Williams and drunken uncles who would let you drive them to the state store when you were nine years old.

I can still remember the shock expressed by a group of Birmingham fraternity guys when they saw me use cheap cooking oil as suntan lube on a Destin beach once in the 1970’s. They smelled like coconuts. I smelled like Colonel Sanders after a long day at the pressure cooker. They attracted girls from Florida, Auburn, Georgia, Ole Miss and LSU. I attracted dogs from Highway 98, looking for a crispy leg tossed out a window at 60 mph on the crushed oyster shell.

I never thought that much about class and Southern culture early on but it came looking for me often. The dances at the Am Vet Club were a little more rowdy than the ones at the Sub Deb coming out. A Southern teenager of my economic standing might knock on a front door, dressed in jeans, boots and a faded Bama jersey, only to be greeted by a lawyer/deacon/banker father who treated the young man like he was there to pick up the trash instead of his lovely daughter. Ironically, now and then, they were one and the same.

Religion also separated the sheep and the goats among the magnolias and loblollies. Although its numbers have suffered recently, Southern Baptists held themselves in highest regard with Methodists next and so on and so forth on down the righteous chain of command. If you wanted to see the biggest Easter service in almost any town, take your colorful eggs to the First Baptist Church. If you wanted to eat well at a picnic, find the AME Church. If you wanted to get a good tee time on Sunday, go to the Episcopal Church. I attended most of them at one time or another and looking back, I figured that God was probably somewhere in between them all or just outside the door, feeling a little left out.

Gone are the days when Southerners rooted only for the Atlanta Braves or the St. Louis Cardinals because those were the only two teams we could get on radio or TV. Gone are the textile mills and sewing factories. Gone are genuine, country-cured hams on every table because the local people who knew how to cure them are in cemeteries. Even the once-mighty Piggly Wiggly and Winn-Dixie rivalry isn’t what it used to be.

Even though many have sadly connected the dots between George Wallace and George Bush, the accents are slowly slipping off Southern tongues and people aren’t identifying themselves as Southern as strongly as they once did. The Best Buys, Barnes & Nobles, Starbucks, and Crate & Barrels that have replaced the local stores means that Atlanta and Charlotte could be Denver and Chicago or any other cities across America. Southern weather has migrated as far north as Pennsylvania over the last ten years.

If you get off the interstates and drive through smaller towns, however, you will still see and smell and feel the South in places like Charleston, South Carolina or Staunton, Virginia or Mobile, Alabama. Eat ribs at Dreamland in Tuscaloosa or pulled pork at just about anywhere with a pig dressed as a human on the sign out front. Get a plateful of chicken fried steak at Threadgill’s in Austin, Texas, a sack of boiled peanuts in Dothan, Alabama and some crawdaddies anywhere in southern Louisiana. Then pick up a James Lee Burke book about New Iberia detective, Dave Robicheaux, and find out why the South still has the best writers in the world. If that doesn't butter your grits, grab a copy of Oxford American or Garden & Gun and read every word. Dip fresh, sweet potato fries in a cup of Tobasco mixed with Jim Beam and a side glass of sweet iced tea. When you finish, stroll out in the yard and kick the top off of a fire ant bed and stand within crawling distance. Have your cell phone handy to call 911.

Welcome to the South.

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