The South is vast. Depending on how you draw the boundaries, it can stretch clear up from Florida to Maryland, and all the way over to Texas, and can include everything from the Appalachians to the Pineywoods. No wonder that the literary output of the place contains multitudes.
And yet there is something about writers from the South. There is a certain flavor to Southern literature that distinguishes it from other regional writing, a ferocity about it, which is why William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and Richard Wright and Harper Lee and so many others are not known just as American writers, but Southern writers. There is no popular category known as Northern literature. And thus the perennial interview question for fiction writers who grapple with characters below the Mason-Dixon: What is it about the place that inspires so many? What makes the South different?
There are stock answers, ones about storytelling traditions and the defeat and alienation of the Civil War and small-town customs, yarns about grits and ghosts. They all brush the truth, but never quite grasp it. There’s a line in Absalom, Absalom! that acts partially as Faulkner’s reply to that question. Mississippian Quentin Compson finds himself unable to answer his Harvard roommate Shreve when pestered to talk about his home. “What is it?” Shreve asks. “Something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago?” Quentin, exasperated, eventually replies: “You can’t understand it. You would have to be born there.”
It’s a good line, but it’s not true. The best writers of Southern fiction prove that, by conveying exactly what the place is like to the people who aren’t born there. Southern writing at its loftiest is a literature of opposition. It is a rebuff, in equal measure, to those who imagine the region as a place full of shoeless yokels, and those who mythologize it as one where sweet-faced, big-haired debutantes in hoop skirts dole out petits fours, mind their manners, and maintain deep roots to their family elders. The popular image of the South is of a monolithic, defeated country, some melee of swamps, magnolia trees, and antebellum houses populated by rifle-toting, camouflage-wearing fundamentalists and sneering good ole boys scored to menacing banjo music, something like H. L. Mencken’s 1917 essay “The Sahara of the Bozart,” in which he declared the South to be “almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally” as the famous desert (“Bozart” was a play on the Southern pronunciation of “beaux arts”). Often these clichés, what Barry Hannah described as the “canned dream of the South,” are blamed on Northerners with a faint idea of the South. (As Flannery O’Connor complained, “I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it’s going to be called realistic.”) But really, these clichés are manufactured and perpetuated by Southerners and Northerners alike. That’s why boutiques in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina all carry signs with some variation on the saying “In the South we don’t hide crazy: We sit it on the porch and bring it sweet tea!” The aim of these writers’ work is to dismantle the stereotypes of what it means to be from Alabama or Mississippi or Louisiana, what it’s like to live there at a certain time, in certain social circumstances.
Books like Richard Wright’s Black Boy or Harry Crews’s A Childhood counter the sweeping generalizations about the South by being unrelentingly specific about one place. Faulkner did not write about the South generally; he wrote about Oxford, Mississippi, particularly. Ditto Eudora Welty and Jackson, John Kennedy Toole and New Orleans, and so on. Their writing is also an act of preservation, to document what it is, exactly, that distinguishes the two-gas-station hamlets in Alabama from the rest of America. What makes a Southern writer a Southern writer is not just the circumstances of his or her birth but a fierce attachment to a particular place, and a commitment to exploring its limits in his or her work. These explorations are not universally flattering; in fact, they are mostly ambivalent. Sometimes, despite these unflattering portraits, the residents of these places came to be equally as devoted to the writers as the writers were to the place. By focusing on the minutiae of a town, the writer’s work becomes a part of the well of local lore they draw from.
It’s this smattering of towns across the Deep South that inspired this book, a pilgrimage to the places that a group of Southern writers described in their fiction. I was not born in the South, but I grew up there, and came to understand my identity as an Alabamian from people like O’Connor, Faulkner, and Welty. I wanted to see the places they had lived in and written about, to breathe the same air, to hear the same accents and meet the same people. I wanted to see if there were physical traces of the locations that these writers drew from, and how much they had changed, how much the actual place matched the idea I had from their fiction. Plenty of these writers cite preservation as one of the motives for keeping their fiction contained locally, an urge to document the unique proclivities of a place as it was before the forces of global capitalism take over, replacing the mom-and-pop stores with big-box chains. But every American city is subject to those same forces, and it isn’t as if the South was some Eden recently ruined by McDonald’s and Denny’s. Part of this journey was to see what was missing, to have some sense of what parts of the South as described were worth keeping and what better to let go.
My selection of writers to cover is a personal one. There are, of course, many other excellent and worthy scribes who populate the South, and still more who had to relocate in order to further or even start their careers. There is Yazoo City, Mississippi, denizen Willie Morris, whose warm, evocative memoir about his childhood and eventual move to New York City, North Toward Home, served as inspiration for this book’s title. There is Carson McCullers, whose Columbus, Georgia, childhood home now annually houses writers in residence. There is Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Anne Porter, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Ellen Douglas, Shelby Foote, Margaret Walker Alexander, and James Agee, to name a few from a long list. And those are just the dead ones.
But this book is not meant to be an encyclopedia of Southern literature, nor is it a travel guide. It is an odyssey of sorts through a pocket of the South that I grew up in and learned to understand through reading. Other writers would have drawn a different map, taken different pit stops, sought out different roadside shrines. The ten writers on this journey are an idiosyncratic group, but they are the ones who spoke to me most insistently as I tried to figure out what it meant to be from the South, to answer that echoing question, What is it about this place, exactly? They each appealed to me because of their relationship to their homes, the truth of a place that is sometimes only available through fiction. All rejected the visions of the South presented to them, the costume shop version of Southern-ness that didn’t jibe with their understanding of their surroundings. I decided to borrow the same liberty. These writers, from Welty to Hannah, are all telling about their own corner of the South, and I set off to listen.