The Mind of the South. It began as an essay for H. L. Mencken’s magazine, where Cash wrote that the South’s salient characteristic is a magnificent incapacity for the real, a Brobdingnagian talent for the fantastic. The very legend of the Old South, for example, is warp and woof of the Southern mind…. Unpleasant realities were singularly rare, and those which existed, as, for example, slavery, lent themselves to pleasant glorification. Thus fact gave way to amiable fiction…. Everywhere [the Southerner] turns away from reality to a gaudy world of his own making.
