Snowing Down South: Anomalies of Southern Folk Culture

Swinging in Place: Porch Life in Southern Culture. By Jocelyn Hazelwood Donlon. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. 2001. 193 pages. $39.95 (cloth). $17.95 (paper).

Snow was so rare in my hometown of Beaumont, Texas that I was eight years old before I first saw a few flakes drifting down and leaving a light dusting on our front yard on Adams Street. My little brother and I worked hard to scrape up enough snow to build a snowman. I still have the photograph Mama took of Bubba and me standing proudly beside the midget snowman on our front porch.

This is the story I would have told Jocelyn Donlon had she interviewed me for her book on porch life in southern culture. I tell it here in keeping with Donlon's argument for the inclusion of personal experience in folklore research and to establish my credentials as a southerner, albeit one who has lived in Ohio for the last thirty years. Donlon and I are both southerners and folklorists who are interested in personal experience narratives, vernacular architecture, and southern family folklore including our own families. Besides calling my brother Bubba and my older sister Sissy, my paternal grandparents were Big Mama and Big Daddy. Whenever I mention these family nicknames to my Midwestern students, they think I stepped out of a Tennessee Williams play. I grew up in a deeply southern culture even though Texas is often thought of as cowboy country and part of the Southwest.

Like Donlon, I developed "a conscious appreciation of being altogether southern" when I first lived in the North (1). I have always felt a regional identity, but I have a hard time explaining exactly what it means. Regionalism is important in Donlon's book although it is not as thoroughly examined as the other theories that inform her approach, like de Certeau's concepts of place and space, Turner's liminality, Goffman's presentation of self, and identity politics from various sources. Many of the values and behaviors that Donlon associates with southern porch life are not exclusive to the region, and are, in fact, considered important to regional identity in the Midwest and other American regions. She recognizes that these values are "not limited to southerners" (37), but she implies that they are more important to the South when she makes statements such as "'southern' identity is grounded in commitment to community and family" (27).

My students express the same values about Ohio small towns and urban neighborhoods in the hundreds of folklore collection projects they have turned in over the years, and I am sure students in Wisconsin, Utah, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire also would see family and community as central cultural values in their regions. Student family folklore projects often mention porches, and one of the acknowledged appeals of my neighborhood in Columbus is that most of the houses have front porches. When the weather is nice, people sit on them in swings and rocking chairs and chat with family and friends, much like the descriptions Donlon gives of southern life. Where are the boundaries that separate regional cultures? What are the specific traits that define a region?

The stories Donlon collected orally in interviews or received in letters as a result of newspaper stories about her research are full of concrete details that tell us much more about the South than abstract statements about cultural values and traits. Donlon cites her grandmother's front porch in Lake Charles, Louisiana as early inspiration for her interest in porches, but my experiences living in Lake Charles provide a very different perspective. Lake Charles is about fifty miles east of my hometown in Texas, and my family lived there for a short time in the early 1960s. Our house did not have a front porch. We lived in one of those 1950s "ranch style" houses built on a concrete slab instead of...