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CHAPTER 5 Moving South I was not there for any of that because I had embarked for the New World. I had no more idea where I was going than Columbus had when he pushed off for India. I looked up one day in  and found myself in the intimidating newsroom of the world’s best newspaper. In my fuzzed recollection, that newsroom was about a mile wide and populated by thousands of people who sounded funny when they talked. The paper had hired me precisely because the people who ran it thought I talked funny, and they needed such a fellow on the staff then. That there are many Souths has become a commonplace among scholars,but for the purposes of my story I choose to stay mainly in just two: upland and lowland, the hills stretching fromVirginia to Arkansas and the plantation country south of them. Those are the regions that I have studied, experienced, worked in, and lived in. If there is a strong thread that binds all Southerners together, upland and lowland, it is a belief that government should be limited, meaning that it should not waste money on sick people or welfare for needy children. There are Southern men who believe that the only proper function of government is to wage war and to do so as often as possible.A war allows a gentleman to get mad and kill somebody without going to the pen. Not counting a few months after college spent at the Globe in Joplin, Missouri, my first serious work in journalism was at the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock. After eight years at the Gazette, I worked fourteen years for the New York Times, and for nine of those years I traveled the South,with periodic forays into other regions.Here is an odd thing: I always felt at home in the Upper South, from the  Ozarks to the Appalachians. But when I dropped below the Thirtyfifth Parallel, I became a stranger. The race story that occupied much of my working time during those years was to a great extent a story of the Deep South. The editors who sent me there assumed that I was fully familiar with it because I was after all a Southerner. I never told them any different. I went into a stall in the men’s room on my second or third day in the Times newsroom in .The stall was equipped with a partial door that swung about a foot above the floor, leaving a gap that a thin man might crawl under if he desired. Someone had left a message printed neatly in ink just above the bottom of the inside of the door: BEWARE OF LIMBO DANCERS. This was a style of wit that I had never before encountered. I suddenly knew that I was a stranger in town—not unwelcome, just a stranger. Before my first year with the paper was out, I found myself covering a story in Greenville, Mississippi. I was invited to a party at the country estate of Betty and Hodding Carter Jr.,the owners of the Delta Democrat-Times. The crowd spilled onto the lawn in late evening, and one of the Carter sons, either Hodding III or Philip, produced a bar of some kind, maybe a broomstick. People began to bend backward and duck-walk under it as the men holding the ends lowered it further and further toward the ground. I struggled under it once or twice, enough to make me understand that you have to be young or drunk to dance the limbo. Again, I knew that I was a stranger in town. The Mississippi Delta is as different from the Arkansas hills as Milwaukee is from Shreveport. I had heard of the limbo,but I had never known anyone who had done it. The traditional dance of the hills is stately. The partners face each other but don’t touch. Sometimes it is performed by just men after the fashion of the Greeks or the Russians, but with more restraint. They move no part of the body from the knees up. The face is solemn. Not frowning, just solemn and unsmiling, totally concentrated on the subtle movement of legs and feet. Sometime after the rise of Nashville and the Americanization of country music, the old hill dance became something different, adulterated with laughing and wild swings of the body and with men and women clinging to each other.We saw it...

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