With the full knowledge that I still owe the world a final installment in my deep history of the night series, I am going to embark on another multi-part essay, this time attempting to thread the needle between autobiography and historical exploration as both relate to the history, current identity, and potential futures of the American South. My subject is not at all original to me, and I hesitate to even take it up given the ease with which these sorts of ruminations fall into clichés and ruts, intellectual paths that have over the last century and more turned into veritable erosional gullies.
But if the relationship of the Southern intellectual to his native land is as worn out as much of our agricultural soils have become over the last two centuries, it is still salient, and figuring out my relationship to my own familial and regional past has, for better and worse, been a major feature of my life, from childhood forward. For a little over a decade I lived outside of the South (in the fullest sense—my interregnum was in Missouri and then primarily Maryland, states that are very much hybrid places between South and non-South, albeit in very different fashion); as is often the case, I think, that time away sharpened both my own sense of regional identity as well as my critical eye, with both aspects potenital pitfalls if not well balanced.
In this series of essays- I’ll aim for at least a couple, maybe more- I’m going to approach the question of my own relationship to the American South, how I envision the South as a place- geographically, ecologically, historically, culturally, even politically- and my own personal vision for this land that I call home and which has effected its own call upon me my entire life, a region by turns beautiful and bloody, frustrating and comforting.
I don’t have any hard and fast answers to any of the questions I’ll raise over the coming weeks (even the question of what the South is geographically is a fraught and probably unanswerable one), but I do hope to offer some fresh perspectives and approaches, with the caveat that I am writing not so much as a professional historian- I’m decently well read in the literature of Southern historiography, ecology, and so forth, but on a for-pleasure basis- but rather as the descendant of what are now several centuries of white American Southerners, as someone who deeply loves the South and has made his proverbial stand here (I’m tempted to say ‘by choice’ but I don’t think that’s entirely true, we have far less choice in these matters than we like to think), while maintaining a steady eye on everything that Southern history has encompassed and indeed consists of, the good, the bad, and the ugly. The failure—and that is what it has proven to be—of earlier generations of white Southernerns’ stand-taking was largely, if not entirely, predicated on a failure to earnestly grapple with our sins and dysnfunctions ancestral and present-day; but taking the past seriously and honestly does not preclude love and celebration, rather, it is a first step towards healing and liberation and realization. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
My ancestor are buried along an extensive arc through the American South (roughly for our purposes, the states that made up the Confederacy, with extensive zones of ambiguity along the borders—not just the actual Border States but also discrete internal regions such as the Southern Appalachians), from the head of the Chesapeake Bay, down the line of the Appalachian Mountains and into the central part of Mississippi, a geography of settlement largely determined by the Paleozoic uplift and erosional history of the Appalachians and, much later, the fluctations of the Salisbury Embayment, the sediments of which now underlie the Chesapeake region. Like so many others of their time and place, many of my ancestors had the Chesapeake as their first destination upon arriving in America, crossing the Atlantic from, primarily, various points in the British Isles and settling during the mid-sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries up and down the bay, dying and being buried in the then colonies of Maryland and Virginia. At different points in the eighteenth century they began to shift southward, following the marching line of the Appalachians to the Carolinas; still later, taking advantage of the Federal government’s recent de facto ethnic cleansing of native nations and the ensuing glut of land, they made their way further south and west, down to the edges of the long-distant Cretaceous sea north of the modern Gulf of Mexico, now a mixture of prairie land and pine-clad hill country. My wife’s family history is somewhat different—there are some more recent, as in nineteenth century, additions—but overall following a similar arc from Maryland south along and through the mountains, at times fanning out onto the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain.
My own life’s trajectory has more or less followed, albeit in much erratic fashion, that of my ancestors. With the exception of a two-year sojourn in St. Louis, Missouri (a city with its own interesting relationship to the cultural South—starting way back in the Mississippian culture period in fact), I have lived at some point on or near that north-to-south arc traced from the Chesapeake down to the tail end of the Southern Appalachians. My rationales of movement and settlement have been generally quite different, shaped by exigencies of educational institutions mostly, though as of this year they have coalesced somewhat: we relocated to northwest Georgia because land (and everything else) is more readily accessible to those of more modest means than in Maryland, or, at least, in the part of Maryland we inhabited (the lower reaches of the Eastern Shore are quite affordable, it is worth noting, given their distance from the imperial metropole).
Of course this brief history of movement and settlement on the part of ‘my people’ is only part of the story. As time went by, chattel slavery became more and more prominent in Southern life, whether individual families and households practiced it themselves or not. Every white Southern may not have owned slaves—and in fact the majority never did, with a quite small minority owning the greatest number of enslaved human beings—but by the outbreak of the American Civil War slavery and its system of life and political culture owned in one way or another the vast majority of white Southerners to no small degree. At the same time, and this is something that I do not think we collectively have really grasped or owned, whatever our underlying politics, the increased dominance and prevalence of slavery meant that white Southern culture and identity grew increasingly distant from its points of origin in Europe, in addition to all the other factors of life in America that drove a sort of indigenization (often despite ourselves!). Contra the breathless paeans to ‘Western civilization’ one often sees among white Southern apologists and advocates these days, a great deal of the distinctiveness of Southern American culture has long been the product of the close proximity and frequent inter-mixing of Euro-American peoples with peoples of African descent, the traces and memories and lingering presence of native peoples rounding out the recipe as it were. If white Southerners enslaved Africans, and built an apparatus of racism to justify and give meaning to that enslavement, they themselves—we ourselves, I am a part of this story—were transformed, were brought close to Africa, in a way that I think has fueled racial anxieties and fears for generations. We as white Southerners know deep down that we are not fully truly ‘white,’ that if we do not literally have ‘African blood’ in our veins we carry Africa in our speech patterns, in the food we eat, in the way we prefer to live, in our literature and our religion and our music. One of the primary psychic engines of white Southern life has long been the attempt to deal with or outright displace that heritage, with violence—legal and otherwise—against black Southerners the most pernicious and destructive outlet of that attempted displacement.
More than perhaps any other region of North America, the South’s history has been one of a long and bitter tension between emplacement and displacement literal and metaphorical, of a struggle to belong to the land coupled with the push and pull of historical and personal forces tearing our selves away from place and belonging. The roots of this dynamic of displacement go back to early modernity, as a subset of the global forces that, arguably, were unleashed by the Mongol invasions and the ensuing cycle of empire and globalization that followed and which so mark the early modern period well before the advent of the mechanization and industrialization of modernity. The blows of early modern displacement and fragmentation and globalization fell early in the American South, arriving in rather spectacular and precisely datable fashion with the coming of Hernando de Soto. To make a long story perilously short, the disruption caused by his expedition—primarily in the form of novel biotic agents—saw the effective collapse of a half a millenium of coherent civilization, the indigenous nations of the South, the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and others, arising out of the ensuing collapse and flux. From that time forward the South has been the setting of continual contestation, dislocation, settlement, and mixing, all integrated with increasing intensity into the global economic and political orders that began in the sixteenth century and only gathered pace in the centuries following.
For some of the peoples of the South, dislocation and displacement were fundamental and severe in a way that would never be true for white Southerners, even those most marginal and forcibly dislocated themselves: enslaved Africans experienced the most brutal and dehumanizing effects of early modern globalizing dynamics (the terminology itself a lesson in the unfortunate tendency of careful historical language to disguise awful violence and cruelty), being literally wrested from their homelands across the Atlantic and deposited and sold on a foreign shore. For native peoples physical displacement was initially rather more sporadic, with native ‘nations’ holding their own for some time and often adapting to the new political, social, and cultural modalities from across the Atlantic; up into the early years of the nineteenth century the possibility of accommodation and even integration perhaps remained viable at some level, if, perhaps, more unlikely than not. As it in fact happened, within the space of a decade virtually all native peoples were forcibly expelled from the American South east of the Mississippi; if there was relatively little introspection about the forced displacement of Africans in order to enslave them, white Southern culture has been much more haunted by the expulsion of the native peoples, with various sorts of attempted re-emplacement running through Southern life from the time of the Trail of Tears down to the present.
Yet alongside the many stories of displacement—which entails the rending of ties between an inhabited place, a place of human relationships and patterns, familial, ecological, agricultural, and so forth—the American South has also been marked by dogged attempts at emplacement, at inhabiting and belonging and making a place for one’s self and one’s kith and kin. In the self-mythology of white Southerners connection to the land has been paramount; it is probably why the forced displacement of native peoples (who themselves, it is worth noting, were in many cases inhabiting land opened up for them and their political units by the disruptions of early modernity) has for a very long time been an open wound on the Southern psyche. At a level conscious and unconscious, I think, we have long wanted to be them (and vice versa, the native peoples modeled many new aspects of their lives on emergent white Southern cultural models, including the adoption of slavery), to inherit the connection with the land, to belong and to not be further displaced. This is not just a Southern American habit, I imagine, though it is particularly strong here and has been a fixture of many folk genealogies and ascriptions (one of the bitter disappointments for many of us in the age of genetic ancestry tracing has been the vitiation of claims to native ancestry). Some of it is guilt, some of it is a desire for a past and a belonging more substantial, less ephemeral, than we feel we have here, a feeling that has only grown more pronounced over the last seventy or so years of rapid industrial and infrastructural transformation across the region.
It might be a bit of an aside, but it struck me recently that the (historical, though still I think quite salient) ‘ideal’ form of rural Southern life—white but also to a similar degree black, and, in recent years, hispanic—is very much on the model of pre-contact native peoples: a balanced mixture of cultivation around family-centered farmsteads, strung out in little clusters in proximity to but not hard adjacent to a chieftancy-dominated town, with frequent hunting and gathering expeditions out into the deeper forested lands, be they the swamps, the pinewoods, or the mountains. Truth be told, while I certainly do not think anyone would mistake me for a stereotypical ‘redneck,’ such a life is pretty attractive to me, and wanting to stay in contact with it has certainly driven my own life choices, which have been shaped by global forces unique to the time but in overall continuity with those going back to those first sixteenth century contacts. Such an ideal is not unique to us, of course, but arguably reflects deep human currents, often however as deeply submerged from the high Neolithic on. Native peoples of the South, so the evidence suggests, did a remarkably good job of balance on the whole; the nature of their traces on the landscape today suggests as much.
While there are sprawling stone ritual features and the ruins of ceremonial complexes and urban life, perhaps more ‘typical’ are the place names that blanket so much of the South, particularly my native state of Mississippi, where almost every single river and creek carries the memory of the Choctaw and Chickasaw languages. The grand collectively-built structures and centralized polities were minor compared to the cultural landscapes that stretched along the rivers and streams and over mountain ridges and into the depths of the earth. No doubt there are many other layers of cultural meaning that once existed across the Southern landscape which are now lost, expressed in those place-names perhaps but in a way now irrecoverable, effaced in the various waves of decimation and dispossession following European contact. Holy places sacred to native peoples clearly existed at many points in Southern topography, as evidenced by rock art, for instance; but unlike much of Afro-Eurasia, where holy places going back to—at least—the Neolithic have often continued into Christian and Islamic and Buddhistic iterations in the present, the largely Protestant legacy of the South has meant a disruption to holy place-making, with sporadic exceptions. Perhaps in the future our land will be marked by the tombs of saints, though such a day remains well in the future. We must make do with the landscape we have and the scattered and often contested and antagonistic memories and traces already in existence, building off of the memories and traces and resonances we have now, adding to them over time.
Finally, one of the first steps towards a culture of emplacement, of reconciliation, and of healthy growth and restoration, Southern or otherwise, must surely be a coming to terms with the past, or, even more fundamentally, a recognizing, a making visible and legible, of the whole gamut of the past, and not just particular parts. Such has been the tendency of both progressive and conservative Southerners, and is a danger of any project of historical memory and identity-making. It might sound rather abstract, hopelessly so in the face of the very real illnesses and dysfunctions that have become endemic among the peoples of the South, but the work of memory and of regional and local identity and meaning have real-world effects, are crucial for sustained healing and genuine growth. And it is work, with a range of choices and possibilities: there is no single ‘true’ South, no hard and fast lines, any more than any culture or region or land (even islands) are marked by such. For a land with such a charged and often violent history, multiple groups now inhabiting it who remember (or forget) its past in sharply different ways, such work is a real challenge, to put it mildly.
In the weeks and months to come I’d like to explore that work some more and what we collectively might do and how we might do it. In my next essay in this series, however, I am simply going to reflect on some formative places and moments in my own life in the American South, places and experiences intersecting with the history of the region and with its ecologies and landscapes, the living worlds and their substrates in which we are all embedded, making us and we making them. In a second autobiographical installment I will relate and reflect on something I have long promised to write about but have hitherto never quite managed, my personal religious history, one of formation in a pretty typical Southern evangelical setting, converting to Eastern Orthodoxy as an adult, and the extra layers—and possibilities—Orthodoxy brings to the table of Southern identity and futures.