I’ve been on a Southern Literature kick for about two years now, because I love the Deep South. I’ve been other places and let me just tell you that there’s nothing like it. Nothing like Georgia or Alabama. Nothing compares to our history or our culture. If you’re thinking of something that just might, then you’re wrong. We’ve got the food everyone wants, the music everyone listens to, the heat everyone craves and the Jesus everyone needs. We’ve even got our own way of saying things and words that no one else has ("y’all" and "ain’t"). Our accent is, “soft and slurring, liquid of vowels, kind to consonants.” Sounds beautiful, right? God, I really do love it here.
Even more, I love reading about it. Particularly, I like reading about it from the point of view of someone who feels the same way I do. Other people seem to be so much better with words than I am.
I’ve tried everyone: Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Dorothy Allison, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, Harper Lee, etc.
A few have really stayed with me. I love Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner, and who doesn’t love "To Kill a Mockingbird"? But, my Lord, they’re all so dark. Every author listed above has some Southern negative they bring to the light. Now, I know this is a twisted, backwards place that is swelling with the same pride that fueled their daddy’s daddy’s daddy in the “War of Northern Aggression.” I’m not saying we’re perfect. I’m just saying I would like to read something positive about the South. Something that doesn’t make me feel ashamed of where I come from.
There is one man…Rick Bragg
His stories aren’t dark. They are light that is bright as the sun and hot as Hell. He glorifies the south with pretty passages like, “This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.” In a world that is trying to shame us southerners out of our own culture, I find Rick Bragg to be a massive breath of fresh air.
Every other author listed above makes it seem as if the very meat in a southerner’s bones grows black. Which it does, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful.
With his writing, Bragg shows me this. He doesn’t ignore who and what we are, he just takes it all and makes it glow. I haven’t quite found that quality in any other author’s writing.
In his book "All Over but the Shoutin'" he says of racism:
"I know I grew up in the time when a young man in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair stood spraddle-legged in the crossroads of history and talked hot and mean about the colored, giving my poor and desperate people a reason to feel superior to somebody, to anybody. I know that even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama, the black family who lived down the dirt road from our house sent fresh-picked corn and other food to the poor white lady and her three sons, because they knew their daddy had run off, because hungry does not have a color."
About the Depression he says in "Ava's Man":
"It is true that almost everyone in the foothills farmed and hunted, so there were no breadlines, no men holding signs that begged for work and food, no children going door to door, as they did in Atlanta, asking for table scraps. Here, deep in the woods, was a different agony. Babies, the most tenuous, died from poor diet and simple things, like fevers and dehydration. In Georgia, one in seven babies died before their first birthday, and in Alabama it was worse."
"You could feed your family catfish and jack salmon, poke salad and possum, but medicine took cash money, and the poorest of the poor, blacks and whites, did not have it. Women, black and white, really did smother their babies to save them from slow death, to give a stronger, sounder child a little more, and stories of it swirled round and round until it became myth, because who can live with that much truth."
He offers words to live by that make so much sense,
“Don’t worry about what people think, because once it’s all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who don’t love you will too,” he says in "Prince of Frogtown."
The man knows what he is about. As evident in "My Southern Journey,"
“[As a Southerner] I am an imperfect citizen of an imperfect, odd, beautiful, dysfunctional, delicious place.”
There are so many more quotes I could include but he has written a few books…
I recommend "All Over but the Shoutin’," "Ava’s Man," "Prince of Frogtown" and "My Southern Journey." They are all genuine stories about true southerners who live in a real Deep South. And they all make me proud to live in this imperfect, odd, beautiful, dysfunctional, delicious place.
