Flashes of a Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South

Introduction. "The Soul-Life of the Land": Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South

INTRODUCTION The Soul-Life of the Land” Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South Soul singer Al Green was born in Arkansas, moved to Michigan, and then returned to the South in 1970, noting later that “there’s something here that makes it easier for that music of the soul, that feeling sort of music, to come out.” In a 1986 essay on “The Southern Soul,” Green saw history as the background to a distinctive spirit in the South, reminding readers that slaves “didn’t have much of anything, but they had God, and when they sang, what they sang was for Him, and it had meaning, and it had feeling.” He saw a “sweetness here, a Southern sweetness, that makes a sweet music.” The South, he said, is “the home ground,” the place that “can keep the real thing alive.”1 Green’s comments are only one example of the social construction of the spirit as a signifier of the South. Green’s words primarily apply to African American music, but they appeared in Southern magazine, implying that the “soul” he spoke about was a specifically “southern” soul, part of the biracial regional culture that has been celebrated in the South since the 1970s. In the early twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois identified a similar working of the black spirit on the southern landscape in his classic The Souls of Black Folk. He noted the pain of black life in the South since the end of Reconstruction, “the burning of body and “ 2 Introduction rending of soul” that made the region’s way of life one that rested on the brokenness of the physical and spiritual black selves. He lamented that the materialism of the times, “the spirit of the age which was dominating the North,” was affecting the South, “replacing the finer type of Southerner with vulgar money-getters.” In this view, the South was a place of the spirit as distinct from the material, an idea that the creators of the Lost Cause myth had memorialized for several decades. He feared that a particularly African American spirituality was endangered by “the Mammonism of this South” that was “reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its half-wakened black millions.” Du Bois used the striking phrase “the soul-life of the land” and noted that what blacks dreamed in his age was “unthought of, half forgotten” by the larger society. Du Bois’s book was a testament to that black spirituality and its profound role in the South’s “soul-life.”2 A range of observers, in and of the South and from outside its boundaries , have found the region a place where the spirit has worked in a variety of ways. It has sometimes been a patriotic spirit, while at other times a prophetic one. The dichotomies of a hierarchical society appeared in uses of the spirit: the spirit could be wild and spontaneous, tapping into some primal quality, whether the blues or Pentecostal worship ; or the spirit could be disciplined and orderly, a spirit that helped generations of people in the South survive the traumas of their history. Spirit can be an abstract concept, of course, but dictionary definitions can help anchor the meanings that have taken particular configuration in the South. The first definition of spirit in the New Oxford American Dictionary (2001) says it is the “nonphysical part of a person that is the seat of emotions and character,” or “the soul.”3 Elaborating on this definition, the dictionary says it is the part of a person “manifested as an apparition after their death; a ghost.” It mentions that the spirit, this “nonphysical part of a person,” can refer to a supernatural being, “the Holy Spirit.” As we will see, this language rests comfortably with discourse about the spirit in the South. The second definition does as well: “those qualities regarded as forming the definitive or typical elements in the character of a person, nation, or group, or in the thought and attitudes of a particular period.” So “the definitive or typical elements” forge one of the understandings of the “spirit” of a group, and in this case the group is a “The Soul-Life of the Land” 3 regional one. Such a definition works against contemporary realizations that there are not “essences” that define movements or...