U.S. South: Southern Grace and Cultures of Grievance

Since a small child, I have been mystified by Southern U.S. culture and its contradictions.  I have continually sought to make sense of it all.  This attempt to understand began when I was five years old.  That year my family lived in North Carolina while my father went to chaplaincy training.  He served a small Baptist parish in King, NC and I remember this good Midwesterner shake his head over the juxtaposition of the pietistic congregation of farmers who raised tobacco.  It is this religious pietism in juxtaposition to realities of southern life and history—violence, racism, whiskey running, guns—that have led to scholars like John Shelton Reed to attempt to provide some interpretation.  He has pointed out that southern culture tends to particularize rather than generalize for example.  Great novels that are written by southerners often focus on the peculiarities of a particular place.  The South has also produced great historians and lawyers but very few sociologists.  Reed speculates on whether this allows for living within the contradiction of saying that your particular black maid is good person without generalizing or analyzing structures of racism. And Reed has pointed out that while southern culture exhibits violence, it is violence grounded in issues surrounding honor rather than random violence.  Of course, historically this has played out in violence against Black men who have supposedly defiled the honor of White women.

I visited a friend who had moved to North Carolina a few years ago.  While I was there we visited a bourbon distillery, Southern Grace Distilleries.  The whole experience embodied the mystifying elements of southern culture--even the name of the distillery, reflecting pietistic religion and whisky.  The distillery was located in an old prison and the tour began in the chapel of the prison.  The structure of the prison with its bars was maintained.  We were told about the shed in the middle of the yard and how prisoners were kept there for days in the heat in solitary confinement.  Of course, they were happy to let us go look at the shed. The distillery even had the stereotypical southern bloodhound on site.  As part of the process, the barrels of bourbon had to be cured.  It turns out that loud rock and roll music is perfect for vibrating the barrels in the process. The most famous bourbon coming from the distillery is call Conviction.  Prisons, bloodhounds, chapels, grace, and whisky coming together in all one place.  If you want to connect this to yet another element of southern culture, NASCAR racing, you only need to about the history of this type of racing originating in locals trying to evade federal agents who were searching for illegal whiskey distilleries. 

I continue to struggle with this juxtaposition of “religiosity” and glorifying of violence in the South.  I recently read two books about South Africa and was struck by the parallels.  Dominique Lapierre, in A Rainbow in the Night and Adam Hochschild’s A Mirror at Midnight, draw out the historical intertwining of Afrikaner (Dutch) South African’s religiosity, conquest, and Apartheid.  I was particularly struck by Hochschild’s description of the Afrikaner culture of grievance that also underlay everything—loss of culture with British conquest; loss of life from Boer War with British and wars with Natives; loss of coherence culture group with integration; loss of economic power due to English dominance in economic ownership and ending of slavery.  This has parallels with the White Southern U.S.—loss of life and honor with the Civil War; loss of culture with the end of slavery and/or integration; imposition of federal law on local authorities; infrastructure destroyed during Civil War and economic power moved to outside the region.

Is a culture of White grievance the key to Southern culture?  Has this evolved into a living contradiction between extreme religiosity and guns, violence, and honor?  Is it the justification for individuals being able to live with these contradictions?  As the saying goes:  for every simple question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.   After all, right now I am only referring to White southern culture and certainly Black Americans have grievances, but I am not sure it plays out in the same way and I’m unwilling to identify Southern culture as White only Southern culture.  For example, Black American writer James Baldwin said he found that he had more in common with a White southerner than an African.  Somehow the struggle of trying to figure out how to live together—Black and White—has shaped all.

So I come back to the issue of trying to understand Southern culture.  I should be able to understand it or have some insight into its structure, but I don’t.  Adam Hochschild says at the end of his book on South Africa, something that I do believe is true when applied to the South.  He begins to wonder if his journey to write a book about South Africa has really been a journey to understand us (Americans). Perhaps my desire to understand the South is really my journey to try to understand America.  The South is a part of the whole of my culture.  As Hochschild quotes:

“Looking at South Africa,” writes Breyten Breytenbach, “is like looking into a mirror at midnight…A horrible face, but one’s own.” (pg. 244).