Excerpts

Chapter One It Never Snows 1 James J. Hill, the railroad builder, studiously governed his investments in accordance with his business maxim that no man upon whom the snow does not fall is ever worth a tinker's dam. Such a conception implies no recommendation for the southern part of the United States. I can remember that during my boyhood in the deep South we used to be able to make snow ice cream once or twice a year. With a large kitchen spoon we would scoop the fresh snow from where it lay banked lightly on a railing of the garden fence and mix it in a bowl with cream, sugar, and vanilla extract. It made our palates tingle with exoticism. Our feeling was that little Rollo, whose fun at ice skating was described in our third-grade reader, would virtually subsist on snow ice cream should he take advantage of his opportunities in the cold North where he lived. But it has been snowing less and less in the South during the past thirty years, and as a consequence the country has no doubt gone to the dogs long since--from the point of view of Mr. Hill's philosophy.     Their English heritage restrains most Americans from thinking of geography except in terms of investments. Even so, there is one respect in which all must agree that the change in the southern climate is not a calamity. A certain kind of southerner can, by nature, be happy with a hole in his pants. Other southerners: have been forced by necessity to cultivate the faculty. So it may be just as well that the climate has been moderating. This lack of concern for frayed trousers is in itself a conspicuous element in southern solidarity. Whether it constitutes a regional virtue is another question, for, as Gertrude Stein says, one may like a view and still prefer to sit with his back to it.     Such a conception inevitably raises the disturbing possibility that southern complacency (another aspect of the regional solidarity) may contain large doses of wishful thinking. A poet from another part of the country, who once surrounded himself with camellias and wistaria in a southern town, was amazed when a native gentleman of parts frankly advised him, for the sake of his career, to get away before it was too late. Southern persons who in their youth have cherished special aspirations experience no difficulty in understanding this advice. Do such persons, after having realized that it is too late for them to take their places in creative activities of the outside world, simply try to compensate in the manner of spinsters who scoff at marriage, or in the vein of the members of the Sew-We-Do Club who are saddened at the immoralities of the Society set, or in the manner of the unsuccessful speculators who attempt to heap scorn upon Wall Street? But that disturbing possibility must be admitted only parenthetically. Too much analysis of it would leave one mentally unbuttoned.     If snow falls infrequently on the southern land, the sun displays no such niggardly tendencies. In Mississippi there is justification for the old saying that only mules and black men can face the sun in July. Summer heat along the middle Atlantic coast and on the middle western plains causes more human prostrations than it does in the South. The difference lies partially in the regularity of high summer temperatures in the South but mainly in the way the southerner takes the heat. A Georgian takes the heat relaxed in a hammock or reclining on the bank of a shaded stream, wherein he has cast a hook for catfish, rather hoping that they will not disturb him too much. Golf in Georgia, Bobby Jones to the contrary notwithstanding, will never become more than measurably popular. It has the defect of not taking enough time. Fishing and hunting are better adapted to the native temperament. The most typical southern business man of my acquaintance is inclined to welcome rainy days because they enable him to get things in order at his real estate office. While the New Yorker or the Chicagoan rushes out into the heat of July and has a sunstroke, the southerner's discretion, which often persists throughout the winter, constitutes one of the conditioning elements of his unified culture. 2     There is no escaping the conviction that fishing in the South is pursued for its own sake, and not as a means of recuperation between business deals. No one is shocked because most of the cockroaches used for bait are obtained from grocery stores. Instead of being filled with alarm at the unsanitary conditions suggested by that fact, representative southerners would hardly demand a more noble service from grocery stores than the furnishing of cockroaches well bred with respect to size and degree of toughness. (They should be just large and tough enough to stay on a hook without being large and tough enough to prove formidable when handled.)     Although I know that it is heresy to suggest such an idea in the midst of an age of progress, it may be that ultimate truth lies in the spiritual attitude of the southerners who are always going fishing. A person who has achieved an immunity from the everlasting inner demand that he improve upon his earthly position must possess an unusual degree of cosmic equilibrium. He must have learned in some way that composure of the human spirit is all that actually matters. He has attained, without conscious effort, the serenity for which all men strive.     Activity, as he perhaps knows through some instinctive realization, is but a confession that peace is unendurable. It is in search of peace that all activity is directed. A parallel may be drawn from music. After a symphony of Brahms, it is the ensuing moment of silence into which the spiritual satisfaction of the hearer is mainly concentrated. One has the impression that all the sounds of the music were contrived in order to produce that single ecstatic moment of profound and complete satisfaction. If this analysis is sensible, one must feel occasionally that the sounds of music are arranged in such a way as to compose the soul and mind for the concentrated joy of a moment of silence, a vacant interval in time made perfectly endurable for the restless spirit of man.     It is much the same way with physical and mental activity. We build a fire in the grate in order that we may sit before it in comfort and ease. The fire in the grate is not the thing we want; it is the comfort and ease. Similarly, the principal joy of intellectual activity is involved in the attainment of a satisfactory conclusion, a moment in which the intellectual struggle gives way to a brief interval of serene comfort of the mind.     What shall we say of the person who is not influenced by the driving force which impels his fellows to improve upon the conditions about them? Shall we say that he is decadent or that he is the possessor of wisdom? Whatever the correct answer may be, the fact remains that no great consciousness of dissatisfaction can be in the minds of southerners who are forever going fishing. Without being under the necessity of forcing themselves through rounds of accomplishment, they can endure peace. Without having the refractory sounds of the universe resolved into a harmony for them, they can endure silence. No one should miss the significance of the fact that the old houses of Charleston have their blind sides turned towards the street.     At any rate, all men and women of consequence in the eastern part of the United States sail for Europe if they can as soon as the summer heat begins. In the South, however, the foreign tourist agencies know that their summer prospects lie chiefly with the school teachers. Persons of consequence in the South are satisfied to go fishing. 3     Upon the ethnic structure of the South the sparsity of snow has exerted a tremendous influence. It brought the Negro and has kept the Scandinavian away. When the first slave ships came three hundred years ago, it was natural for them to drop their African cargoes upon the warm soil of the cotton and rice plantations. During the three centuries of his residence in the southern states the Negro has had almost as much as the sunshine to do with conditioning the lives of the white people of the region. Like the heat of the sun, the Negro has delimited activity among the whites; like the sun, he has given his energy to the growing of crops for the white man. The floods of immigration which overwhelmed most of the United States for a generation after 1890 made little headway in the South, where the native populations, which had not completely succumbed to the doctrine of bigger towns at any cost, insisted that the South already had as many people as the Negroes could support.     When the presence of plenty of slaves allowed southerners to have a decent respect for the summer heat in building their residences, the characteristic form of regional architecture was developed. Wide hallways and high ceilings insured ample ventilation, and the custom of setting the kitchen off at one side relieved the drawing-room guests from the malodorous fumes of boiling cabbage and frying red snapper in August. With the passing of slavery and the arrival of the Spanish bungalow, however, the southerner more than ever began to feel under the compulsion to seek fresh air on the outside. It used to be said that travelers could always tell when they were in Virginia by the accumulation of dust under the hotel beds. Having recently spent a night at one of the immaculate hostelries of Richmond, I am sure that such a statement would be an arrant libel today. But it is true that the genuine southerner harbors a greater concern for his garden than for the inside of his house. It must be agonizing for southern publishers to realize that books cannot be read beside a cape jessamine bush in the moonlight. The New England fireside chair--from which one looks through the window upon the snow and ice of a long winter, and then takes down another volume from the bookshelves--has no counterpart below the Potomac. The southerner reads the morning newspaper because he wants to know about the Society events and the election campaigns, which he regards in somewhat the same light; but he thinks books are suitable only for invalids.     Nor is too much to be expected of air-cooling machines in the way of keeping southerners from spending most of their time out of doors. Air-conditioning cannot be a grand success in the South for the reason that the honest natives of the region recognize the natural summer heat as a welcome ally in that it makes the inside of houses and offices agreeably uninviting, if not actually prohibited territory.     Although it is true that the southern states are remarkable for the high percentage of their native-born population, no one should make the mistake of thinking that the social structure of the South as a whole is homogeneous. In no other part of the United States are class lines so rigidly drawn. One of the delights of my four years of residence in Wisconsin was the custom of going on numerous picnics in the late spring and early summer. Crossing the beautiful pasture lands of that state, we used to notice that the cows invariably faced in the same direction. It became a sort of byword with us. "All facing the same way," we would say to each other every time we sighted a herd of Guernseys. The farmers of that fine state, where the heavy snowfall brings the grass forth in succulent abundance every spring, also give the impression of going in the same direction on a basis closely approaching equality. But in the South it is a scientific fact, if a continuous observation of the phenomenon can be accepted as scientific evidence, that cows in the pasture do not face the same way; and it is an economic fact, so well established as to need no proof, that the farmers themselves are by no means going in the same direction.     The heavy snows of Wisconsin are influential in giving the farmers the kind of ambition which comes from physical vigor; also the snow plays a part in giving the cows plenty of grass to eat, and this results in their having a definite and obvious way of spending their time in the pasture. On the other hand, the long assault of the summer heat in the South is more effectual in baking the grass than the scarce winter snow can be in reviving it. As a consequence, the cows, mulling over the meadows, feel themselves at a loss, and stand aimlessly about, facing in all directions. The weather also affects the farmers of the South in a similar manner. Enervated by the summer heat, they cannot muster a sufficient amount of vitality to pull the weeds from their cotton and demand the rights of free-born American citizens at the same time. They become easy prey for the tenant bosses, the land-sharks, and the money-lenders. The July sun, in other words, has been exerting an influence for generations in determining social and economic classes in the South. One's social status can be loosely measured in terms of the inverse ratio of the number of hours spent at the mercy of the July sun. 4     It remains true, however, that the same southern weather which tends to stratify the population also draws the classes together again in a cohesion of interests in the fortunes of King Cotton. This consuming passion, together with a lamentable common interest in King Cawn (which probably did not decrease with prohibition), is strong enough as a force in southern solidarity to offset whatever influences the lack of snow may exert in direct opposition. Especially since the promulgation of President Roosevelt's new deal, the South has come to recognize more and more its community of interest in the fortunes of cotton as a world commodity. Not even the bearing of General Johnson's industrial codes upon the South, particularly with respect to the wage differentials, has given southerners as much of a feeling of regional consciousness as have the various federal programs relating to cotton.     The climate of the South also has an effect upon the nervous systems of the inhabitants. They like pepper in their food, strong coffee, and the excitement of fights. These tastes are reflected at the dinner table, at lynching bees, and in political campaigns. The southerner, his nerves irritated by the heat, is far more interested in elections than in government; far more concerned over the sporadic eruptions of Red propaganda than over racial or social questions in their broader aspects. At first glance, the transitory and shifting nature of immediate interests in the South appears to be at variance with the region's reputation for traditionalism. But this conflict is only on the surface. Fundamentally the shifting of southern interests--within certain well defined orbits--is in itself one of the most solidly established traditions. In Alabama there is a statue inscribed to "The Man Who Killed Old Abe Lincoln in 1865," and another dedicated to the Boll Weevil in celebration of its contribution to raising the price of cotton by reducing the yield in 1927.     Passing note must also be made of the effect of indigenous diseases in building up a coherent structure of shared experiences in the South. Although malaria is sometimes classified by the natives as being like hookworm and pellagra in implying an unacceptable social status, most southerners in moments of close confidence will admit that they at some time or another have had a touch of malaria, or that they have friends who have had malaria, or at least that they know what a mosquito is like. These experiences, especially when they are treated confidentially, have a way of drawing the people of a region together in a most effective manner. In fact, it might be argued (though not by me) that malaria in the South is almost as potent a factor in the regional solidarity as is the universally shared indignation against the Yankee.     Yet, in final analysis, excellent as are the reasons for southern languor, pleasant as are the relaxations offered by the fields and the streams to the southern mind--sublime as it may be for one to go fishing and invite his soul to search for the secret of the gods in dreamy contemplation--there is much work that ought to be done below the Potomac. The consciences of the southern Bourbons, however, have never held work to be a solemn duty, so far as they themselves have been concerned. Southerners of a less elevated class do labor, of course; they labor hard and long, and, even during the era of the National Recovery Administration, perhaps for fewer cents per unit of energy than do most persons elsewhere in the United States. Nor can one overlook the assiduous application of other southerners, many of whom do not fare so badly in securing adequate returns for their efforts. Among these are the promoters (for their own profit) of such slogans as "Unlimited Natural Resources" and "Cheap Anglo-Saxon Labor." The activities of these gentry--even now, as well as in the 1920's and before that decade--are sufficient, it must be admitted, to threaten the validity of all that I have ever said with reference to southern languor.     But the patterns of the plantation days of long ago still survive in the habits of the privileged classes. Even the operators of gasoline filling stations invariably have black assistants to turn cranks, inflate tires, fill radiators, polish windshields, and perform all the other duties of the establishment--except that of accepting the customers' money. As of old, the climate and the presence of the Negro are the main conditioning elements in southern culture. Copyright © 1983 The University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved.