Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South

Oral Misery: The Columbus Syndrome

t h e c o l u m b u s s y n d r o m e Americans never turn sentimental about something of real value— wilderness, wild animals, small towns, baseball, mountain music, our privacy—until the way we live and do business has pressed it to the edge of extinction. Then we administer a≠ectionate last rites to everything we failed to love enough. In a culture where young and old feed their hunger for narrative from the electronic trash heap of television, it’s hard to imagine a human resource more precious or endangered than America’s storytellers, legitimate heirs to an oral tradition that was ancient when history was born. It’s hard to withhold applause from a book that takes up the lost cause and the soonto -be-lost art of folktales. Hard, but not impossible. Pamela Petro’s Sitting Up with the Dead: A Storied Journey through the American South is an odd book that strays from the marked trail of its author’s best intentions and lures her, like many a folktale protagonist, into a dark swamp where the light she takes for insight may be nothing but fox fire. Petro takes her first misstep when she decides that the stories she covets are inseparable from the identity and the history of the South. It may be true that the Southern states can claim the best Oral Misery 27 surviving storytellers, or the most. But it was a mischievous voice that told Petro she could decipher the South—assuming it’s a puzzle—by taping storytellers and running their tales through her personal software . (This journey into “the deep past,” as she styles it, is rife with incongruous references to modems, e-mail, and the Internet.) The South was never such an easy study, never such a seamless entity. Our problem with this book is what I call the Columbus syndrome . Indians were not amused by the notion that Columbus discovered America. The South is not amused to be rediscovered by Pamela Petro, intrepid explorer, cultural missionary to Darkest Dixie. We are no Samoans; she’s no Margaret Mead. She is, arguably, the most clueless Outlander to write about the South since V. S. Naipaul’s A Turn in the South. But she’s no V. S. Naipaul either. This is, after all, a Rhode Island Yankee who had never heard of a pimento cheese sandwich or a hush puppy, who includes a long footnote to explain that mountaineers rarely mean “shout” when they say “holler.” Candid to a fault, she admits that her abiding images of the South were dominated by bleeding civil rights marchers and snarling police dogs and that “Mississippi” is a word that chills her blood. At her most charmingly naïve, Petro confesses that her private code for the menacing Southland was the phrase “down there.” To my late mother-in-law, a native of Tidewater Virginia, “down there” was a genteel euphemism for a woman’s private parts. But Sitting Up with the Dead was not aimed at the Southern reader. Since no Southern reviewer will praise it, I should note some virtues that foreign readers might appreciate. Petro is a fluent writer with considerable powers of description. In her best passages, she responds poetically to spooky or awe-inspiring landscapes that a native might take for granted. Her physical descriptions of the motley tribe of storytellers are deft, often droll. But as she says, “a few hundred pages don’t have nearly as much personality as living, cussing, dancing, spitting , smoking, eating, drinking human beings.” Stories from the oral tradition need to be heard to be appreciated. Storytellers like North Carolina’s seven-foot Ray Hicks need to be seen to be believed. Even a qualified native folklorist—they abound 28 Words and Music on Southern campuses—might have rated this project unpromising. When Petro embraced the genre of the personal quest, like Peter Matthiessen on the trail of the snow leopard or Carlos Castaneda in search of Don Juan, she assumed an added burden of credibility. Is this a life-altering obsession or just a book contract? I’d assign her pilgrimage more existential weight if I didn’t know, from her acknowledgments, that it was suggested by friends at a party in 1998. Petro’s rental-car odyssey covered twelve states and several thousand miles of interstates and blue...