White Masculinity in the Recent South

A Real Man’s Place: Attitudes and Environment at a Southern Deer Camp

A Real Man’s Place Attitudes and Environment at a Southern Deer Camp adam watts It is the humidity, not the heat—so the cliché goes—that makes summers in the Deep South so famously oppressive. But when August’s dog days and autumn’s pleasant weather are gone, the region’s moist climate is also responsible for wet, uncomfortable winters. The fields and forests, framed by flat gray skies and seemingly ceaseless rains, are muted, no longer thick with riotous vegetation and the hum of cicadas. Even when temperatures are well above freezing, this “wet cold” can make July seem appealing again. Standing in the chill air of a cut-over southwest Mississippi pine plantation, one might wonder why so many people choose to spend so much time outdoors in the region’s most miserable weather. But for thousands of white southern men, the deep baying of a pack of hounds, the reverberating concussion of a shotgun, and the pursuit of whitetail deer (Odocoileus virginianus) mark an essential, natural rhythm of the year. “The guns, the bedding, the dogs, the food, the whiskey,” wrote Faulkner in “Delta Autumn,” providing a succinct description of the seasonal southern malady known as “buck fever,” “the keen heart-lifting anticipation of hunting.”1 Place your thumb over any blank, unlabeled portion of a map of the southeastern United States, and there is a fair chance that you have found the location of a hunting camp (often better known in the South as a deer camp). On maps or aerial photographs, and generally in the minds of the uninitiated, the deer camp is merely a speck, lost in the woods. However, to those people—mostly white men— who leave home, family, and work to spend hours or days ostensibly in pursuit of whitetail deer, the deer camp is a cultural institution, in fact if not in name. Mention “hunting camp,” and one might think of stereotypical images of mule-drawn wagons and furnished bunkhouses (as in Faulkner’s “The Bear,” for instance) or the even more well-appointed trappings found in North Woods Maine hunting lodges of the rich. Instead, the vast majority of southern deer camps these days consist of a small group of shacks, trailers, second- or third-hand mobile homes, or even school buses that function as shelter at the end of a cold, soggy day. Since my early adolescence, I have spent many winter afternoons and evenings at the Clear Run Hunting (and Social) Club in southwest Mississippi. Having exchanged shotgun for camera, I photographed the camp, its members, and the natural environment of the area in the years 2001 and 2002. This essay and selection of photographs meditate on the role of the deer camp as an institution of southern masculinity through which masculine values are preserved and passed on—that is to say, where southern boys become southern men. Only one camp is represented in these images; also, I chose to approach this analysis of the relationship between the institution of the deer camp and southern masculinity from behind the lens of a camera and as a native participant, rather than as an academic. I intended the images to evoke the common experiences many southern boys and men have at the deer camp, just as Clear Run is representative of thousands of small southern deer camps.2 The land leased by Clear Run, like that owned or hunted by most deer camps, was the home of whitetail deer long before European and African settlement. One hundred years ago Clear Run was part of the vast southeastern belt of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris), a variety prized by timber companies for its high quality and, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for the tremendous trees still to be found in this relatively uncut area. But by World War I, the vast longleaf pine forests of southwest Mississippi fell before the axe and the saw and were replaced by thousands of acres of row-planted loblolly pines, called “plantations” or “tree farms.” The wide-ranging, hearty loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) tolerates the partial shade found in recovering cut-over areas better than longleaf pine and, more important to timber companies, is particularly fast growing. Today, that land which is not under intense industrial cultivation for paper pulp is in its third- or fourthgeneration growth of mixed pine and hardwood forest, either recovering from or awaiting another round of clear-cutting to feed the paper, chip, and lumber mills that...