We Gotta Read More, Ya’ll

                                            We Gotta Read More, Ya’ll

                                                   Published in Marietta Daily Journal May 22, 2016

You know how the saying goes: “Southerners can’t read, but they sure can write.”  Well, we can and do read, though not many of us care to write.  Those who do write have done a fair to middling job of representing the rest of us.

            Don’t apply that last sentence to every Southern writer.  We are certainly not all white trash as Georgia’s Erskine Caldwell portrayed us, nor are we all angry, moody blacks as Richard Wright indicated.  We are, though, a people with an identity still different from other sections of the country.

            So you don’t think so?  Then get outside – way outside – of 285.  I mean, Atlanta is a great place, but Atlanta ain’t the South.  It’s kinda the South, but anyone who thinks it’s The South needs to drive somewhere, but not on the interstates.  I love the interstates, but to ride on them is like looking at a picture of something instead of the real thing. 

            Anyhow, the South is still there, and its literature is one of the reasons.  The South is vast.  It’s a place.  I use the word place deliberately instead of region.  Not all regions of the country possess a sense of place as native Southerners do. 

Please don’t go getting offended by the word “native.”  It merely means “belonging to.”  For my part, I like belonging.  I also still love the word Dixie.  I’ve been told not to use either word.  To which I say, “You need a nap.”

To illustrate that the South is still a place, I would ask if you’ve ever heard anybody refer to “northern literature.”  The answer is no, because the North doesn’t have any literature that holds up the North as a distinct place.  The South does.

Place shapes us far more than we realize.  Americans are moving around so much these days, but I still believe that buried in every human heart, except that of the eternal motorcyclist, is the desire to settle down and call something home.  How many times have Southerners with rural backgrounds referred to “the old home place” where they grew up?

It’s mainly because of a “sense of place” that Southern writers birthed and cradled what we now call Southern literature.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love and have learned much from New England and Midwest writers.  No writer, or poet, inspires me more than Maine’s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  Walking in his house in Portland a few years ago was a spiritual experience.  Massachusetts poet Robert Frost, with the help of an 11^th grade teacher, convinced me that poetry wasn’t just for girls or for the boys who lived in town.

But in spite of so much good literature from Yankee land, no place or ethos was described or heralded by it.  It is Southern literature that has represented and given portrait to a place. 

Southerner Elvis Presley didn’t set out to change the face of music.  He simply did his thing, and his thing did the changing.  As with music, so with literature.  I doubt that Georgia’s Flannery O’Conner, North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe, Alabama’s Harper Lee, or Mississippi’s Eudora Welty set out to produce a body of “Southern literature,” yet their common themes did just that.

How could they not?  They all deal with life’s everyday realities, large and small, as experienced by a people whose history has included loss, defeat, poverty, and a cursed earth that demanded toil and sweat.  Harper Lee bravely broached the subject of race.  Flannery O’Conner, a Catholic in the early 20^th century protestant South, bravely heralded Christian values and Southern ways.  Thomas Wolfe deals more with relationships, showing how Southern families fuss, fight, and love still.  Wolfe got it wrong, of course, when he famously proclaimed “you can’t go home again.”

And Eudora Welty, whether describing Jitney Jungle or her hairdresser, has kept us laughing through it all.   

Not that Flannery O’Conner couldn’t be funny.  Who but Flannery O’Conner would even think of training a chicken to walk backwards?  At a writer’s conference in New York, she was asked, “Why do Southern writers write so much about freaks?” (the village drunk, the village “idiot,” the “40-year-old whose daddy still calls her ‘Baby’,” etc).  Georgia’s unpretentious First Lady of Letters answered, “Because we still know one when we see one.”

Southern or not, don’t ever think that today’s youth can’t be “reached” by literature.  Not only is it true that the world loves a story.  It’s also true that everybody has a story.  And certainly everybody desires a place.

As Eudora Welty put it, “One place comprehended helps us understand all places better.”

Roger Hines

5/18/16