Look Away Dixieland: A Carpetbagger's Great-Grandson Travels Highway 84 in Search of the Shack-up-on-Cinder-Blocks, Confederate-Flag-Waving, Squirrel-Hunting, Boiled-Peanuts, Deep-Drawl, Don't-Stop-the-Car-Here South

Introduction: Deep in the Heart of Dixie

1 Introduction Deep in the Heart of Dixie There is no truth but in transit. —ralph waldo emerson I have two stories to tell. One is about a trip I took across the Deep South, and the other is about my great-grandfather, who, for a while, lived there. I think of these stories as the vertical and horizontal axes of my sense of Dixieland. The vertical one is my family history going back to when “Dixie” really caught the American imagination, namely, after the Civil War. And the horizontal axis is my literal trip in 2009 across a narrow ribbon of the midsections of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. My hope is that, as with the X and Y axes of dreaded algebra, plotting a point in one story may somehow sooner or later connect me to a point in the other. In other words, historical events don’t go away; the past lingers in the present. And geographical places don’t exist merely on the surface; they are rooted in culture. So here’s one of the questions of this book: Can you travel across the present and somehow connect to a past event? Or, to borrow an image from science fiction, can you, like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, hop into the DeLorean time machine and drive back along present-day two-lane blacktop into Reconstruction Dixie? My great-grandfather was a carpetbagger. He lived in Coushatta, Louisiana , after the Civil War. A big chunk of his family moved there too. A look away, dixieland 2 lot of them got killed. He got his arms shot off. Coushatta is on the banks of the Red River, just below Shreveport. I live in northern Florida, on the east side of Dixieland. Here’s the crux of this book: If I drive slowly across the region, will I come to understand better what happened to my kin in the 1870s? Can I find a path across the South that will duplicate enough of the world my great-grandfather and his family experienced so that I can have an understanding of what happened to them? And, if so, will Spinoza be right: is to understand all to forgive all? Or, to be more realistic , is to be able to understand a little bit to be able to forgive a little bit? Here are some of the things I want to understand by intersecting the stories of family history with a literal journey across the South: How much of my sense of the Deep South is created by stories told in the faraway North and in the Hollywood west? What are the limits of southern culture in absorbing the foreign, the Other, the Yankee? How come the South is so violent (or is that just part of media-made Dixie)? Why is Dixieland still proud of behavior it knows is rebellious (or is that just contrived bravado)? What is the role of honor and blood, and does this still motivate behavior, especially of white males? How important is topography (swampy) and climate (moist) to culture? How come the South is known for down-home hospitality when there seems to be such a history of you-keep-out? Is the South really all about race? How could Reconstruction have been so right and yet have been done so wrong? Why is the Southern Baptist religion so popular? Why didn’t blacks burn the place down in the 1960s? What is the obsession with landowning and bloodlines? How come they have such great writers and musicians? How come McCain did better than George W in only one place in the country, namely, in a narrow swath across Deep Dixie; and, well, you get the point. Like a pesky little brat pulling at his mother’s skirts, I want to know about the South. First, let me map out the horizontal path of my trip—the X axis. And then, in the first chapter, I’ll try to explain the more complicated vertical path of family stories—the Y axis. Let’s assume that there really is such a place as the Deep South that still exists today. As opposed to most other sectionsofthecountry(easternseaboard,NewEngland,RustBelt,Southwest , Pacific Northwest, and the like), Dixieland is markedly different from the rest of the United States. And, unlike most of the other sections, deep in the heart of dixie 3 this...