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frontporch Back in the 1930s, the late W.J. Cash made quite a name for himselfwith TheMind ofthe South, his passionate analysis ofwhat made the U.S. South different from the rest ofthe country. Cash acknowledged the existence ofsouthern diversity, but he discounted it. "If it can be said there are many Souths," he allowed, "the fact remains that there is also one South." Cash thought there was one underlying cultural fabric wrapping together the different Souths ofmountain, coast, and Gulf, upcountry and bayou. He called this fabric "a fairly definite mental pattern, associated with a fairly definite social pattern," and devoted himself to describing it with his hypnotic, richly textured prose. Today's cultural pundits are more inclined than Cash to stress diversity instead ofunderlying sameness, a suspect quality that can earn the damning label of "esabove : Sophie Wilson infront ofher inherited cabin (detail). Photo by RolandL·. Freeman,fune 1981. sentialism." Cash himselfacknowledged that his portrait of"one" South only applied to white people, and subsequent commentators have pointed out sharply that his account likewise deals mostly with white men. Whittling his subject even further, others have suggested that Cash's one South mosdy flourished in the upcountry patch between his birthplace in Gaffney, South Carolina, his boyhood home in Shelby, North Carolina, and his adult career in nearby Charlotte. Cash's notion of "one" South now bears a heavy burden of proof in contemporary courts ofopinion, and righdy so. Ifa definition ofsoufhernness leaves out the variety of southern experience, there's likely to be something wrong with it. This issue of Southern Cultures addresses the question of diversity from several different directions, most ofthem literary. The first is a contribution from novelist Doris Betts, who reflects on a remark by the late C. Hugh Holman, to the effect that she and the inimitable Flannery O'Connor were "both Piedmont writers ." Resisting the temptation to use the huge category "southern" to lump these two authors with writers as different as—let's say—William Byrd and Richard Wright, Holman put them in a subset: the Piedmont. Butwhen she first heard the remark, Betts was puzzled. What was "Piedmont," anyway? And how did it link her to Flannery O'Connor, famous for her gothic sinners and her peacock farm? After all, Betts tells us, "the closest I ever owned to a peacock was a crippled chicken that even in the hungry thirties nobody had the heart to behead and fry." Was Hugh Holman right after all? Betts uses the recollection to explore for us the meaning of"Piedmont" as a southern region, with its peculiar legacy ofshirttail farms, red clay gullies, and cotton mill boosterism. Her musings take her naturally to the mind ofher near neighbor from Shelby, North Carolina, the venerable though perhaps shortsighted Cash, before finally looping back to the redoubtable Flannery O'Connor. Are Betts, Cash, and O'Connor all "Piedmont writers"? For Betts, the obvious differences loom larger than the similarities, even between herselfand Cash. Ifthere is a commonality between her people and the other writers she mentions, it is not in the continuity of historical experience or in the tabulated facts ofthe social scientist, but in a certain ornery toughness, a tart refusal to surrender to euphemism or sentimentality. That quality Doris Betts certainly does share with Flannery O'Connor and, in his own way, with WJ. Cash. Elizabeth Davey explores a similar devotion to diversity and individuality in the writing ofSterling A. Brown, noted black poet and essayist from the 1930s to the 1950s. Like Betts, Brown resisted stereotyped portraits of "one South," even ofone black South, and especially ofthat peculiarJim Crow fantasy, "the Negro." When Popular Front writers of the 1930s wrote optimistically of cross-racial organizing by a unified working class, Brown remembered the complexity of relations between blacks and poor whites. When professors and experts praised the organic creativity ofthe Negro "folk," Brown remembered their variety and mu2 Front Porch tability, pointing especially to the influence of modern mass culture and technology even as the folklore collectors made their earnest rounds. Defying the expectations of contemporary white editors, Brown found his message difficult to publish, and his major book projects were...