Southern culture on the skids…
I don’t really like the term “The New South” because it suggests progress, and as I drive around the South I don’t see a lot of progress. Economically, yes; the industrialization of the post-Civil War South has given us jobs and money that during antebellum times only a tiny percentage of Southerners enjoyed. But culturally, the New South has digressed. Now it’s just carbon copy sprawl. Sure there are some cities that are doing good things–Huntsville, Mobile, Atlanta, Miami. But for every good example it seems there are five bad ones–Birmingham, Montgomery, Jackson, even Savannah, where you could say the only true southern culture exists to this day outside of maybe Charleston, but even there it is meticulously cultivated. Some would offer New Orleans, and I would agree to a certain extent, adding that New Orleans has a culture all its own and, proud as I am that it is a southern city and a city that I dearly love, it is unlike most any other place you can visit.
What I see when I travel around the South, and I do travel extensively throughout the “Deep South”–Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida–is a loss of identity. I see culture flying out the window. There’s no architecture to be proud of, and the restaurants are at least 90% chains. Churches are going up in metal buildings now, springing up daily it seems, and trailer parks–despite good interest rates for mortgages over the past ten years (or so)–have surged to heretofore unrealized numbers. What does it all mean, though, when you get right down to it? It means that being southern doesn’t have any romance any more. Where once there was a culture, now there’s just sprawl and loss of identity. Sure, I’m the first to admit the culture we had was founded on the backs of slaves, and I’ll tell you that even though I am deeply ashamed of that, in one way I am grateful for it–because those people who were brought forcibly here from Africa brought their culture with them. They made our food worth eating, our music worth listening to, and our entertainment entertaining. There are parts of my heritage I am deeply ashamed of, but there are other parts that I, like most southerners white and black, cling to, and how I wish that part of it could remain. But it seems to be floating away on a magnolia-scented breeze.
I’m not saying it’s all bad. Things couldn’t have been much worse if you were a black person living in the slavery states, or even in the segregated South. And for that progress I am glad, and the term New South does ring true there, but racism still exists (and not only in the South). Maybe it always will, but there are those of us who believe MLK was right in many ways. Still, though, there are those who don’t, and there still exists a separation of class, despite desegregation’s best intentions.
Granted, southern culture wasn’t all peachy even at its height (can any culture ever be?). But it was distinct to the region. It was our own, and we were proud to live here, and to talk the way we do. It wasn’t all Tara, no. There was a lot of poverty, but there was a lot of family, too, and in the South there weren’t very many things more important than family. From our great familial bonds came southern hospitality, probably what we’re most famous for, but even that trait seems to have gone by the wayside. How can I tell? Because twenty years ago you couldn’t pass another vehicle on the road and not get a friendly wave. Seriously. But not any more; maybe it’s because there are so many more vehicles out on the road today–you’d be waving the whole time you were driving, today. Or maybe it is indicative of the situation, that Southern hospitality is just another fading relic of a bygone era.
So where is our culture now, and what happened to the cool, halcyon southern solitude? We once had uniqueness–in our architecture, our food, our style. We once felt noble and proud. Shouldn’t desegregation only have freed up that pride for all Southerners, white and black? The fact is that the Old South was built on farmland and steel mills, tobacco and king cotton controlled the economy. If you weren’t in one of those two vocations you were probably a very hungry person. And today there are no farming communities left. The steel mills have all, for the most part, shut down and moved away. Today’s economy is driven by the same paper as every other corner of the nation, all rolled up into the petrodollar. And all those things that made the South unique and grand are withering away, fading into obscurity.
Is the South a better place? Sure it is. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad I have my job. I’m glad the Southern economy is what it is–even with the country in recession, the gripping poverty that once ruled in the South has become, comparatively, a miniscule thing. I’m glad I can be friends with a man who is black without white elitists whispering insults at me. I’m glad for all those things, yes, but I sorely miss the things that were embedded in our culture and made the South unique.
