From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

Introduction

Introduction Afew years ago, I visited a coffee shop in a small midwestern town. The shop’s owner leased space to a local entrepreneur who sold used books. The books sat on crude wooden shelves in no particular order. On one shelf I saw an old frayed volume, its tan cover bordered in faded green. The spine bore a title that intrigued me, A Southerner Discovers the South. The author, Jonathan Daniels, was unknown to me. Later I learned that Mr. Daniels was publisher of the Raleigh News and Observer but had left his North Carolina home in the spring of 1937 to tour the South and record his experiences and observations of the region during the Great Depression. Browsing the book, I discovered across from page 12 a not-to-scale map captioned “Route of the Journey.” I found the map intriguing. It showed the path of his tour with some seventy-five places noted on it. I calculated that Mr. Daniels traveled 4,600 miles over the course of his Journey, quite a distance on Depression-era southern roads. The route included the South’s largest cities—Atlanta, Chattanooga, Memphis, New Orleans, Birmingham, and Charleston—along with nine southern state capitals. It also passed through little-known towns such as Scottsboro, Marked Tree, Union Church, Opelousas, and Thomasville. The map revealed obscure southern places like Caesar’s Head, Copperhill, Friars Point, and Lumpkin. To be truthful, I was ambivalent about buying the book. At $22.50, it seemed a bit pricey for a used book (which originally retailed in 1937 14 for $3.00). But the map kept calling me, especially the dot that denoted the town of Florence in northwest Alabama. My mom had lived in Florence during her high school and college years when her father worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority, bringing electrical power to the South. I figured that even if the book didn’t prove especially interesting , Mom would enjoy it because of the reference to Florence. Long story short, I bought the book and read it. The writing style was dated, and Mr. Daniels referenced people, places, and events I’d never heard of. But the book was intriguing. He wrote of conversations with hitchhikers and governors. He saw the country’s first ecological disaster in the Tennessee hills. He visited the places where labor unions had been broken and where the South’s most infamous trial took place. And that was just his first week of traveling. When I had finished the book, I found I was still wondering about those places on the map. For example, Mr. Daniels toured the country’s largest cotton plantation at Scott, Mississippi. Five thousand sharecroppers lived and worked the land there during the thirties. I wondered, since cotton production has become so mechanized, what had become of Scott, Mississippi. Ducktown and Copperhill, Tennessee, the site of a Tennessee copper-smelting industry—what’s there now? And St. Martinsville, Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country, where most of the residents didn’t speak English: What’s St. Martinsville like today? I’d never heard of the Cone brothers of Greensboro, North Carolina, their pine trees, or their mill village called Proximity. Greensboro, a major metropolitan area, is famous as the site of America’s first sit-in during the civil rights movement. I wanted to see Greensboro and check out the Cone pines. Though the mill at Proximity is long gone, modern-day entrepreneurs have taken the name and developed this country’s first LEED-certified platinum hotel in Greensboro. (More on the Proximity Hotel later.) Soon I decided to recreate Daniels’ entire Journey. I’d visit all the dots on his map. And so I did. By the time I finished my Journey, I had visited all 75 places listed on the map and added a few dots of my own. Now the map has 82 dots, each one representing a note in the song of the modern South. During the seventy-five years since Mr. Daniels toured it, the South has changed mightily. No longer is it America’s backward, third-world 15 region. Much of the change has been economic. Two generations ago, the textile industry began abandoning the southeast in search of lowerwage workers in third-world countries. Today, southern textile mills are being destroyed or adaptively reused throughout Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, oftentimes being turned into upscale...