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CHAPTER ONE “America is Mississippi Now” The Portable South and the Exile of Richard Wright Orientations When I see Southern landscape from an airplane, my eyes follow the winding snake of Atlanta to my mountain home across the state border in Seneca, South Carolina; perhaps I feel more at home with the distance. When I hear that weekend sailors have of late spotted graves and flooded churches through the cerulean waters of manmade upcountry lakes, I swim in my own fear. I remember that those miles of water covering towns and rivers landed my county its starring role as a rural hellscape in Deliverance (John Boorman, 1971). From the waters of these lakes, the South smells as green and slick as driftwood. From the coast of South Carolina, it reeks of paper mills and swamp decay. When my dog’s ruff is stained red by its clay, I fear, like James Baldwin, that blood dyed the Southern soil. The map is touched by more than memory, yet I cannot escape its simulation of place. I am obsessed with finding the region’s borders and delineating its character to mark what makes me alien to it. The most beautiful names I know mark terrifying places: Dahlonega, Demorest, Honea Path, and Pascagoula lynched men. There are landscapes so lovely that names don’t matter; the foot of Canal Street, near where downtown New Orleans becomes Vieux Carre, was once the site of the White League monument, marking the slaughter of freedmen by former Confederates in 1874. The Lynches River—an idyllic site in the Carolina Lowcountry—is rumored to be carpeted with human bones instead of dirt. The map in my mind is folded like an origami dove, but the place itself is a hawk. If I can find the South at all, I must first acknowledge that it does not exist. Once I might have believed that for the four years between Fort 31 32 Blood at the Root Sumter and Appomattox, its borders were solid, but now I know otherwise. Southerners may remember the Civil War as a battle over states’ rights, but federalism was the Confederacy’s occasional prerogative, as race-progressive dissenters in the Free State of Jones found when they seceded from Mississippi (Bynum 2002, 113).1 Unionist and anti-slavery stalwarts held much of Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Missouri and were occupied by the Confederacy as retribution for exercising their “states’ rights.” Every Southern state with the exception of South Carolina sent soldiers to the Union as well as the Confederacy (Loewen 1995, 190). The contestation of the borders of the South and the memory of it as monolithically Confederate reveal the nation’s significant investments in the region’s opacity, an obsession mirrored in the region’s attempt to define itself. On countless occasions, I have heard Southerners debate if Virginia, Maryland, Florida, Texas, and Kentucky are sufficiently Southern places. I have heard the Midwest called “the Northern South.” I have heard it suggested that Maine is just Arkansas with whitewash and clapboard, that Pennsylvania is Philadelphia in the East, Pittsburgh in the West, and Alabama in between, and that American geographies exempting New York and Los Angeles are undifferentiated “flyover country.” Any beauty reminds me of home; as disorienting and alien as I found the mist and fogs around Irish ruins, they reminded me of nothing so much as the Blue Ridge Mountains’ violet horizon. Though I would never dispense with it, I admit that the South is itself a metaphor. Metaphors—no more imagined or constructed than national and regional borders—depend upon perspective, as Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn maintain: Virginians . . . tend . . . to draw the line . . . around Warrenton. South of that line, including Charlottesville, is “the South”; north of it are simply deregionalized suburbs of the nation’s capital. Mississippians, by contrast, tend to draw their line . . . somewhere across the Carolinas, thereby demonstrating something of the arbitrariness of the whole enterprise. (Smith and Cohn 2004, 11) If the South is “dangerous territory” or the id of the nation, then its own desires for differentiation and border certainty are shared by the nation, whose tendency is to define and disavow its regional Other (Ladd 1996, xii). In “Where is Southern Literature? The Practice of Place in a Postsouthern Age,” Scott Romine locates six criteria by which the South has been defined: geography, economy, ideology, culture, history, and orientation (Romine 2002, [3.21.100.34] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 16...

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