Reading About The New South
What is The New South? Hey, we’re building airliners in Charleston, refine most of the nation’s oil, are becoming the preferred location for global auto companies, and are bedding down retirees from everywhere with our year round golf courses and agreeable tax structures. There’s all that activity, and yet, there’s still that magnolia, with those big fragrant flowers, and the air is soft, and the people are…well, that’s why we read about the South.
So, what are the roots of Southern Fiction? Read this:
“General Hood and his staff came galloping up, dismounted and joined us. Mary gave him a bouquet. He unwrapped a Bible which he wore in his pocket carefully–he said his mother gave it to him–and he pressed a flower in it.
She stood somewhat apart, rather as a spectator of this scene. She had refused to appear the night Hood came to tea. Now as they passed, Dr. Darby introduced the general. After he had mounted his horse–before he rode away–he looked at her, turning his horse as he did so, and he said something to the doctor which caused the latter to smile. The surgeon came back for more adieus, and she walked up. She asked eagerly, ‘What was that he said to you? About me?’
Only a horse compliment–he is a Kentuckian, you know. He says, ‘You stand on your feet like a thoroughbred.’”
Southern Romance fiction? A bodice ripper from Southern Historical fiction? No. That’s an eyewitness account of General John Bell Hood’s regiment riding through Richmond in 1863 to meet a Federal advance across the Rappahannock. It’s in Mary Chestnut’s Civil War, a diary that contains a daily account of her life as the wife of a plantation owner who became a colonel in the Confederacy and eventually a general. Her diary is the basis of most of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, and many other Southern Fiction stories. I think it the foundation of Southern Fiction because it has so many stories, so much dialogue and place description. It sets a certain flavor and tone.
We Southerners don’t wish the South had won the Civil War, and we for sure wouldn’t want to do it again. Mr. Lincoln taught us that lesson well. But, there was a gallantry there that we still admire. People in the north have forgotten the Civil War. There are people in the South who can take you to a spot and tell you what their great great grandfather did when he wore the butternut and grey uniform.
Faulkner wrote of decay, and Robert Penn Warren wrote of corruption in government, and James Dickey wrote of grotesque characters. We new authors of the New South are over all that; there’s action here, and optimism. And, that magnolia still smells so sweet it darn near makes you sick.
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