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Dixie
IN HINDS COUNTY, Mississippi, in a dark-paneled reception room brightened by striking orange Scandinavian furniture, on a mahogany pole, stands a Confederate battle flag. If you talk to people in the Norse [says Gross, who has the charming habit of referring to his new-found region as the Souse], they just don't know what Mississippi is. They just don't know where it is, sometimes. Indeed, the South has changed so much in the past decade or two that change itself has become Dixie's most identifiable characteristic. Long a region identified with stagnation - backward, rural, poor, and racist, a colony of the industrialized North, enamored of an allegedly glorious past of dubious authenticity - Dixie is now best described as that forever-underdeveloped North American nation across which the social and economic machine of the late twentieth century has most dramatically swept. The Southern Growth Policies Board - easily the most sophisticated regional economic pressure group in North America - casting about for a learned analogy from which to analyze Dixie, picked post-World War II Germany and Japan. In fact, in an almost impenetrable hardbound volume entitled The Economics of Southern Growth, it flat-out says that " 1965, the year by which both the voting rights and civil rights act had been passed, was for the South what 1945 had been for Germany and Japan." The board, created as the research and lobbying arm of the southern governors, in effect compares 1965, when "the ancient disputes about what racial policy should be were finally settled with a defeat of the Old South by the rest of the country," with the liberation of Europe and Asia by the Allies. It straightforwardly compares the economic effects on ingrown, nationalistic, totalitarian regimes suddenly opened to the effects, good and bad, of Western, liberal, social democratic realities. This, they say, is the condition which now defines the South. If that is true, it makes the task of defining the new borders of Dixie somewhat less formidable. Sociologically, climactically, historically, politically, topographically, and racially, Dixie is a quilt. Rigid analysis of what constitutes Dixie can lead one to believe that it doesn't exist, and never did. It's not hard to make the case that the heavily black coastal lowlands of the Carolinas are very different from the mountains of Tennessee. Louisiana Cajuns are very different from Ozark hillbillies. You can take a state like Alabama and confound those who would describe it as monolithically Deep South by pointing out the historically pro-Union counties at the southern tip of the Appalachians. Atlanta, undeniably, is the capital of Dixie. The authentic southern experience is changing planes in the just expanded, but until recently unutterably vile, concrete-block bomb shelter of an airport there. Yet all over the South you can find people who will flatly, and wrongly, assert that Atlanta has nothing to do with the "real" South. It's amazing, considering the variety of sage distinctions that can be made about Dixie, that people refer to themselves as "Southerners" at all. Considering that being a "Southerner" is the most fervent and time-honored regional distinction in North America, it almost makes you wonder if ordinary people know something that the academicians do not. Perhaps what most folk realize is that Dixie's boundaries are defined more by emotion than any other nation. Like New England, Dixie is an idea that has been around for a long time, and people have had a lot of time to savor it, curse it, love it, and leave it. In fact, one of the best ways of identifying the South is by listening for it in casual conversation. I don't mean drawls. I mean constant calculations - like shop talk in a factory or office - about where the place has been, where it's going, whether things are getting better or worse than the excruciatingly well-remembered past. There is such a multitude of threads to the fabric called Dixie that official organizations draw boundaries enclosing anywhere from nine to seventeen states and call the place "the South." (And this doesn't even get to the question of what constitutes that spurious idea called the "Sunbelt.") "Dixie" is the classic example of a place that eludes definition by conventional political geography. As a result, I like the interesting intuitive grip displayed by teenagers and small-town merchants when it comes to defining the South. The teenagers have an exquisite sense of where, geographically, displaying an ancient defiance by flying the Stars and Bars from their radio aerials will rile the grownups. The merchants have finely tuned ideas about where it is that calling their establishments the Dixie Bar and Grill, or Rebel Auto Sales, will help them make money. Drop back a county or two from the northern or westernmost meaningful collections of these displays (both of these groups notoriously overreach), and you're within shouting distance of the Dixie line. (There are many theories, and no unanimity, about how the South came to be called Dixie. However, my vote for the least plausible explanation seriously propounded goes to the learned gentleman who said he'd traced it all back to a Dutchman, name of Dixie. This Dutchman allegedly decided to grow tobacco in Harlem. When, with absolute predictability, this turned out to be a terrible idea, old man Dixye reportedly sold off his slaves to a guy in South Carolina, who did not treat them at all well. This led to the slaves composing songs in which they wished they were back in Dixye's land, and the rest, look away, is history.) At any rate, Dixie starts on the midcontinental Atlantic at about Ocean City, Maryland. Ocean City, socially, is to Washington, D.C., as Prince Georges County, Maryland, is to the capital, suburbanly. Prince Georges and Ocean City are those places which, unfavored by the high and mighty, tend to attract first-generation money - both black and white - to whom the very idea of living in a place called a "condo" - or, for that matter, a "suburb" - is rightfully perceived as a miracle of upward mobility. As resorts go, Ocean City is more like Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, than it is Surf City, New Jersey. In Myrtle Beach, a mayor who opposed billboards was denounced not only as a communist, but as a "Yankee." Economic observers only half-jokingly refer to this response as a triumph of modernism. They're grateful the mayor didn't end up in the swamp. From there, as described in the Foundry chapter, Dixie cuts across the chicken farms of southern Delaware to include the Eastern Shore of Maryland, eastern referring to its location relative to the Chesapeake Bay. The gracious capital, Annapolis, is a border town between Dixie and the Foundry. The boundary carefully skirts Washington's wealthier suburbs and drives up through rural Virginia, north of the Shenandoah Valley, to swoop down the western edge of the worst of the southern Appalachians, splitting off chemical-factory-laden West Virginia river counties like Mason, Jackson, and Wood. There are those who would argue that Ohio counties like Scioto and Adams, across the Ohio River from Kentucky, are still southern. Similarly, Covington, Kentucky, across the river from the industrial presence of Cincinnati, is not southern. But by and large, the Ohio River is a meaningful border until you hit Indiana, the rolling hills of which, north of Louisville, are economically and emotionally part of Dixie. Actually, some would say South Bend, on the Michigan border, is the northernmost penetration of the Confederacy, but that's an exaggeration perpetrated by Northerners who like to dwell unfairly on the Klan marches that were occurring there in the sixties. (For that matter, Louisville makes a fetish of claiming it is not part of the South. That's ridiculous. It may well have been a Union bastion over a century ago, but that's nothing on which to base Southernness today. I don't see any move on the part of Louisville to pry the evil influence of mint juleps from the minds of its young during the Kentucky Derby.) Indianapolis is the boundary where the Foundry and Dixie part company. From Indianapolis on, the distinction to be made is between the South and the "real" Midwest - the Breadbasket - another very old idea in America, which, despite industrialization, communications, and travel, retains great power. Near the Illinois boundary, Terre Haute has been a dividing line in Indiana dialects, politics, and values for over a hundred years and still is, and as a result is another good border town. As many as thirty-one counties, below a line roughly from Terre Haute to East St. Louis, have from time to time been identified as part of Southernillinois (pronounced by natives as one word). Route 50, from Vincennes, somewhat farther south, has also been suggested as the border, although Illinois political correspondents reply that it's "common knowledge" that Southernillinois "is ten miles beyond wherever you're standing." But what all these descriptions refer to is the area at the heart of which is the flat plain where the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers come together, locally called Egypt. Its capital is Cairo (pronounced KAY-roe), one of the meanest burgs of its size outside Oklahoma. The memory of pitched and repeated racial battles in this shabby Dixie river town is not dimmed. The news generally is not bright in this crescent, which has the disadvantages of southern problems in a state whose prosperity is built on decidedly nonsouthern solutions. Divisions between industrial and agricultural interests - divisions between the Foundry and the Breadbasket - get far more attention in Illinois. East St. Louis, Illinois, is one of the grimmer slums on the continent, with no appreciable tax base from which to attack its problems. Like St. Louis, Missouri, it is an outpost of Foundry-like third-generation problems, made worse by its being an island, and a border island at that, between regions that don't understand and don't want to understand. Both the Breadbasket and Dixie are afraid that what St. Louis and East St. Louis have got - congenital urban decay - is contagious. The only good news out of southern Illinois, where jobs are not plentiful, is that, like the rest of the state, it is resting on a thick bed of coal. The university town down there, in fact, is named Carbondale. Other parts of Illinois consider the chewing up of prime farmland preposterous. Southern Illinois is grateful to be one of the most heavily strip-mined lands east of the Mississippi. Missouri is a state of great conflicts and paradoxes. It was admitted to the Union as a slave state, but did not join the Confederacy. Instead, it waged a particularly virulent internal civil war over these issues. The southeast "boot heel" on the Mississippi River is thoroughly Deep South. The southwest corner is the Ozarks, which, in their mountainous isolation and great beauty, are like eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. The rich soil of northwest Missouri that the last glacier left behind is so thoroughly a part of the Great Plains that Kansas City is the capital of the Breadbasket. The center of the state is called "Little Dixie." The politics and history of this kind of mishmash have been so confused and tangled for so long that Missouri's boast is its pugnacity: "Show Me" is its motto, and Harry Truman, a native son, its pride. Missouri makes such little sense as a state that even the Federal Reserve Board has Kansas City and St. Louis as capitals of separate regions. Untangling this skein is complicated enough to explain why most observers just call Missouri a "border state," and then don't actually try to draw the border. But the Breadbasket-Dixie influences begin to balance out in a fashion such that the boundary probably should be drawn through St. Louis and on to Columbia. Dixie's influence does extend north of that line - as has been observed elsewhere, Mark Twain might still recognize his beloved river town of Hannibal - but it is leavened by those two cities. St. Louis, one of the dozens of places it's possible to call the "gateway to the West." is almost Foundry in its mixture of ethnics and blacks, machine politics and liberalism, heavy industry and tenements. Columbia, the capital of Little Dixie, is the home of the University of Missouri. From Columbia, the Dixie line curves down to include the Ozarks. John Gunther, in his seminal Inside U.S.A., charmingly assessed the Ozarks of the forties as "The Poor White Trash Citadel of America. The people are underdeveloped, suspicious, inert. There are children aged fifteen who have never seen a toothbrush." The last thirty years have brought such amazing southern-style change that the Ozarks should definitely be considered part of Dixie, despite their historic antipathy toward the Confederacy. To be sure, there are hollows in this highland Missouri-Arkansas-Oklahoma region that still hold poverty worse than southern Appalachia. But Arkansas, like West Virginia, has had as governor a Rockefeller who understood the value of throwing other people's money at poverty to help make it go away. And the politicians who followed Winthrop Rockefeller have been striking examples of the new young, mediagenic, non-Neanderthal southern politician, one of whom was briefly president in the seventies. The sure sign that social work has had impact on the Ozarks is that folklorists have descended on the region in droves to record the quirks of the white trash "before it is too late" and they all become well fed and uncolorful. But more important than the VISTA workers to the Ozarks has been the "quality-of-life" revolution, started in the sixties. The Ozarks in the past suffered from having little that would respond profitably to the assault of a dragline or an exploratory well or a Tennessee Valley Authority or DDT. The Ozarks have had precious little going for them except beautiful mountains, restful lakes, peaceful small to medium-sized towns, and cheap, available, if rarely horizontal, land. Thus, "progress" passed it by. In the latter half of the twentieth century, as it turns out, that very lack of "progress" was of enormous attraction to retirees, vacationers from the cities that ring the mountains, young people who, fancying themselves "homesteaders," wished to apply their urban educations to the problems of going "back to the land," and light industries that could locate anywhere there was an interstate highway and a WATS line. The influx of people like that, for better or for worse, has whiplashed, if not Future-Shocked, the Ozarks. That phenomenon - being Future-Shocked or the threat of being so - is, in the 1980s, what ties the South together. So the boundary toddles down through the thin northeastern edge of Oklahoma, which is part of the Ozarks, only to broaden and head west as it hits another Little Dixie, even more enduring than Missouri's. Unlike the Ozarks, Oklahoma's Little Dixie is marked by how little things have changed despite all attempts. Oklahoma always has demonstrated a singular resiliency to outsiders' notions of what is socially acceptable behavior. Little Dixie, which lives up to its name by being poor but proud, is champion in its articulation of a private sense of what constitutes murder. Mark Singer, in a marvelous New Yorker magazine disquisition on one Gene Stipe, who remains Little Dixie's "Prince of Darkness," observed that "in Latimer County, one of the three counties in Stipe's legislative district, the smartest thing that someone accused of a felony could have done between 1949 and 1974 would have been to request a jury trial. That quarter of a century slipped by without a single verdict of guilty." Singer continues, "'Let's say I pick up a Smith & Wesson double-action .22-calibre revolver on a .32 frame with a four-inch barrel and plant one right between your eyes,' a man in Latimer County once said to me, in what I decided to regard as an utterly speculative and friendly tone of voice. 'Now, if I've got a brain in my head, all I need to do is drop the gun and borrow a dime and call Gene Stipe. And I'm pretty sure he can find me a jury of my peers that believes in the good old "Judge not, that ye be not judged." ' " Couple this with cavernous brush country that to this day can conceal dangerous outlaws and even a couple of renegade circus elephants with complete thoroughness, despite massive searches, and you have a sense of the challenge Little Dixie is capable of offering to the forces of assimilation. Somewhere, perhaps below Durant, Oklahoma, we cross the Red River, leave Little Dixie, and are in Texas, on the last lap of the boundary tour. The problem here is that, as in Indiana, three nations come together, in this case, Dixie, the Breadbasket, and MexAmerica. In Indiana, the lines of force are tough to define because Indianapolis is the place where three nations peter out. Here, however, it's tough because the values of three nations have been and are coming together and clashing with great force and many fireworks. Here are the facts. East Texas near Louisiana is pure Dixie of loblolly and slash piney woods. Not only is it unlike the rest of Texas by being moist and densely forested; it is poor, it is black and "peckerwood" white, it is isolated, it is suspicious, and it has been so for a long, long time. South Texas near Mexico is dry, hot, and Spanish. Climatically, geographically, and historically, it belonged to Mexico, and at the rate the Spanish-speaking population is making itself felt, it may again. In the vast King ranch south of Corpus Christi, Hispanic workers do not say they work "for" the man; they work "with" him. It is MexAmerica. The West Texas hill country is where the chaparral starts. This is the land of Lyndon Baines Johnson, and "outlaw" country-and-western music star Willie Nelson. It is cattle and, farther north into the Panhandle, cotton and wheat. And it is very Anglo. It is the real home of the great Texas myths about plain-spoken square-shooters. It is the most colorful part of the Breadbasket. These three nations are competing for influence over a triangle approximately 250 miles on a side defined by Dallas and Fort Worth in the north, Houston in the southeast, and San Antonio in the southwest. Historically, Dixie had the upper hand. Although well into the Plains, Dallas, the cosmopolitan merchant town then at the end of the railroad line, was long considered southern. Not only did it have merchants, gamblers, and prostitutes; it had "society" and "good families" and a fixed sneer for its sister city, Fort Worth. Fort Worth was separated from Dallas by only a few dozen miles and the Balcones Fault, a geological fault of more interest to natural historians than anyone else, but Fort Worth always was either "where the West begins" or "a godforsaken cowtown," depending on who was talking. Breadbasket towns have always suffered from the theory that they're hick. Meanwhile, Houston, right on the edge of the pines, and only inches above sea level, is a swamp of heat and humidity only an air-conditioner repairman or an oil engineer could love. Dixie had a hold on it because of the climate, location, and opportunity it offered to both poor blacks and whites. Yet San Antonio was always part of MexAmerica. It has one of the largest Hispanic communities of any city well north of the United States border, and certainly one of the best organized politically. In Mexico, there are a lot of folk who literally think that San Antonio is the most important city in the States. With the rise of Houston and Dallas as cheerfully, obnoxiously arrogant world capitals of glass, steel, and money, the Anglo Plains culture is clearly now dominant in this crescent. But it's still tempting to draw the Dixie line right down the middle between Dallas and Fort Worth - smack on Runway 17 Left, the main north-south slab of concrete of that improbable megastructure, the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. From there, the boundary heads toward Houston and the Gulf of Mexico. Houston is the biggest draw for opportunity-seekers of all colors and classes this nation has seen since Los Angeles. Some of the richest and most powerful men in America call the western suburbs of Houston home. But while their presence is at the top of Houston's image, it's by no means the whole story. Almost literally in the shadow of the tall buildings at Houston's core are black slums straight out of the heart of Mississippi. They are so antiquely southern, they're not even urban. They're shotgun shacks - propped up on blocks and with a front door and a back door, through both of which, when they are open, a 12-gauge can be fired without hitting a thing. But Houston's blacks are not all poor and powerless. The community is numerous, and it votes. Barbara Jordan, with Andrew Young of Atlanta, the first black elected to Congress from the South in the twentieth century, was from Houston. The city can not only look and feel southern; it can act it. The Dixie line follows the extraordinarily vile liquid in the Houston Ship Channel the fifty miles to Galveston, and on out into the Gulf of Mexico. At the eastern edge of the Gulf, half a continent away, is southern Florida, which also isn't Dixie. Like the border town of Houston, Miami is a land of great promise in the eyes of a lot of people who don't commonly use the language in which this book is written. One major difference between these two parts of the Gulf is that the Hispanics of South Florida are so commonly first- and second-wave Cuban immigrants of the sixties, which is to say middle class, which is to say in possession of a heritage of education and skills such as entrepreneurship. Unlike the poor, rural Mexicans who have begun to ring Houston, living in houses that don't look like slums until you realize that four families are trying to live in one little bungalow, the Cubans have exported a whole world with them to Florida. In the words of songwriter Jimmy Buffett, they don't have to buy any secondhand American dreams. One of the more interesting lessons to be drawn from this tour is economic. Despite the South's reputation as a place of great growth, almost all the truly spectacular development of the so-called Sunbelt phenomenon has occurred on Dixie's boundaries: the wealth of the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., is as marginally "southern," as is the boom along the Dallas-Houston corridor or the population influx to South Florida. What you see in Dixie is great change - social, emotional, even architectural. Change so amazing to Southerners that sometimes it seems that all they can do is marvel over the recent past. This change, of course, is epitomized by attitudes about race. I watched a white man from Philadelphia, Mississippi, turn seriously purple from lack of oxygen, his mind trying to force his reluctant body to utter the word "nigger" in front of a reporter. Philadelphia, Mississippi, is noted for little save the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964 - murders that led to a scorched-earth policy on the part of the U.S. Justice Department, which guarantees that, no matter what happens elsewhere, the very last hamlet on the face of this earth to be de-integrated is going to be in Neshoba County. This fellow from Philadelphia, who presumably had nothing to do with the proverbial "racial disturbances" in his home town back then, is now the manager of a chemical plant elsewhere in the South, and to this day, he can't bring himself to refer to his non-Caucasian employees even as "Negroes" or "blacks." He calls them "minorities." As in, "The older minorities try to call me Mr. Jameson or Mr. Jim [neither his real name]. I tell the minorities that "Mister' was my father's name. I insist the minorities call me Jim." The way he got into oxygen deprivation was by attempting to explain to me how it was that his plant, which is currently high-paying, modern, and reasonably hygienic by the standards of the industry, came to have about 8o percent of its line workers black. Well, he explained, back in x961, when this factory was built, before OSHA, before EPA, before unionization threats, and before he was out of knee pants, the particular kind of chemical manipulation that it requires was performed in an un-air-conditioned, grueling atmosphere highly charged with toxic dust. Absolutely refusing to be tape-recorded, he said, "At that time, at this place, it was viewed as minority work." Realizing how ridiculous he sounded, he struggled to spit it out. "It was . . . was . . . view . . . viewed . . . as . . . nig . . . nig . . . nig . . . nigger work," he finally croaked, with visions of his future as a corporate manager flashing before his eyes, his career gone up in smoke for his candor. I didn't get to belt back a few bourbons with this guy and find out how he feels about "minorities" deep in the recesses of his soul. But I do conclude, from his verbal tick, that, at the very least, he will go to his grave believing that, as a Southerner working for a major corporation, if he doesn't appear to be the very model of modern race relations, he's cooked. Now, that may not be liberty and justice for all, but it is neck-snapping social change, and it is what I think is important to distinguish from economic growth in the South. Since growth and change have arrived in the South virtually simultaneously and, of course, have fed off each other, it's easy to think they're one phenomenon. But they're not. You can have growth without change. Tupelo, for example, in the hills of northeastern Mississippi, was mercifully bypassed by conflict and violence during the civil rights period of the sixties. Now a thriving industrial city - which is still not what you call common in Mississippi - in the late seventies, a resurgence of the Klan made the place look like a remake of The Birth of a Nation, complete with cross-burnings and a black boycott of white stores. The International Chemical Workers made the bold move of trying to organize a chicken-processing factory in southeastern Mississippi in the seventies. They have been unsuccessful in coming up with a contract, even though there is a standing joke that the factory has done more for race relations than every federal civil rights law ever written. "[The boss] didn't treat nobody different, no matter you black or white," one worker was quoted as saying. "Ever'body who worked there was treated like a nigger." And you can have change without growth. Neither New Orleanth that people are excited about as far away as Jackson. Main Street, meanwhile, has been turned into S-curves. The wide avenue, in which I'm sure a horse-drawn wagon once could easily have turned around, has been planted with mounds of trees and bushes, such that the traffic pattern now is very narrow, and swings from the left curb to the right curb to the left curb to the right curb. Presumably, the thought was to add shade to the street while making it difficult to speed. The plan did not take into account the southern drunk, of which there are few drunker. From time to time some old boy late at night forgets that they've put curves in Main Street and takes it straight in a four-wheel-drive pickup, clipping off saplings, left and right. Mercifully, the bulldozers haven't gotten to Greenville, though. Architecturally, it's still a Dixie town of two- and three-story facades, with shops below and offices and living quarters above, punctuated by the occasional grand old public building, like the massive stone bank. It's very pleasant to sit up on the second floor of one of these places, sipping something cool and telling lies, letting a breeze come in from an open window, watching the people below stroll late at night. Mr. Egerton seems to be right in thinking that the days of such buildings are numbered. People don't seem to know what to do with these old shops. They're not big enough for most modern emporiums. It's considered eccentric to want to live above one of them, if you've got a car and the ability to live out in the suburbs. When you put a high-rise Hilton or Federal-Building-Post-Office in among them, they start to look downright rural. By contrast, the question of abandoned railroad stations in Dixie has been thoroughly examined and conquered. I should have expected it, but I did not. The old Columbus and Greenville Railroad Company station is the site of the Clone Bar of Greenville, Mississippi. It's not really called the Clone Bar. That's just an idea that has stuck in my mind ever since a friend took me for a drink in Washington at yet another joint that is referred to as a "watering hole." He began speculating on the factory that must exist to grind out prefabricated trendiness. In nature, he figured, there are only so many ferns. Only so many spider plants. Only so much macrame from which to hang the ferns and the spider plants. For sure there is no way that the nineteenth century ever produced as many mirrors, on which are painted colorful and baroque advertising slogans for spirits, as there now exist on the walls of these clone bars. Where the hell did all these long, carved wooden bars with brass foot rests that just ooze character come from? The stained glass? The twist on this in the South - it may happen elsewhere, but nowhere else is it so ubiquitous - is to ensconce the clone bar in the abandoned railroad station. The station is inevitably of solid construction, near downtown, cheap, and of fabulously period design, complete with gingerbread. All that needs be done is blow out the interior walls, expose the beautiful brick and beams, and then - in the touch that is always considered a stroke of genius, no matter how often it's done - roll up a boxcar, and maybe a caboose, and rehab them too (!), connecting them permanently to the station (!). As these things go, the Clone Bar of Greenville is a very classy execution. It's multilevel, and red and white banners hang down from the ceiling. The seating is rattan and red plush. It has circular butcher-block tables. The wine racks above the bar are natural wood. The boxcar room is perfect. At its entrance is the legend: Home Shop for Repairs But the best part isn't the station itself. Nor is it the shacks to the side of it, which used to serve as dorms for freight-car workers, long ago, and which now have also been rehabbed and plate-glassed and house tiny art galleries. The best part is that this whole thing is the project of an outfit called Delta Enterprises. Delta Enterprises is a black self-help organization encouraged by the Ford Foundation to turn to capitalism to help relieve poverty in the Delta, in the Mississippi once referred to as "The Closed Society." Well, think 1, casually examining the leggy, long-haired blondes at the bar, and feeling far more dazed by the whole experience than can be accounted for by the whiskey. It's working. This place is packed. It must be making a fortune. Mr. Egerton would be proud. But, then, if Dixie is being Americanized, what in blazes do Southerners have against Atlanta? Surely, the airport was long an abomination in the eyes of God, and naturally, any capital city will evoke envy. But what I was hearing, I felt, was more thoughtful. For example, it came from the Chamber of Commerce factotum of a small, decidedly non-Georgian town about as far away from Atlanta as you can get and still be undeniably in the South. I had dropped in on him for some statistics, unannounced and in a hurry to make another appointment. Of course, the visit provoked a prolonged tale about the development of the town, its new schools, its new industrial park, its bright future . . . With the new north-south crossroad coming through, he said, we should really take off now. (Pause.) It kind of scares me, he seemed to surprise himself by admitting. I sure hope we don't become like Atlanta, he sighed, ignoring the obvious impossibility of his city going from a population of twenty thousand to a population of two million any time soon. I took a sudden new interest in the man's ambivalence. Why? What's the matter with Atlanta? Well, he fumbled, it's the quality of life, falling back on the line he'd read somewhere. What do you mean? I asked. What have you got here that you don't have in Atlanta? Well, he said, when I drive downtown here, I almost go off the road because I have to use both hands to wave at friends. Again and again I ran into this strange antipathy toward Dixie's largest city, matched by similarly unsatisfactory explanations. A certain amount of it was mixed with pride, but it was part of a great-place-to-visit-hate-to-live-there attitude. And this came even from transplanted Northerners, that species which is becoming so common in the South. Could it be the crime reports? I asked myself. Atlanta from time to time is labeled the murder capital of the United States. But not for lack of competition. It regularly trades the title with New Orleans and Houston. Each of the three cities is far more bloody than Detroit, New York, or Washington. And New Orleans is more the home of quadruple apartment locks than Atlanta. Yet I didn't hear people badmouthing New Orleans and Houston. Could it be the transportation? The freeways of Atlanta are a mess at rush hour, but, again, no more so than in most cities, and Atlanta has brought MARTA, the subway system, into operation, freeing thousands of commuters, a fact that had been widely reported and hailed. And, of course, the airport has been rebuilt. It's now the continent's largest. Could it be that the city government is run by blacks? How likely could that be when the economic structure is still firmly and obviously in the hands of whites? For that matter, it's been a long time since black city governments were a rarity in the South or anywhere else. Why pick on Atlanta? The mystery deepened for me when I got there. By any reasonable urban standards, this is a swell city. It's got a well-developed fabric of 118 neighborhoods, most of them with their own local neighborhood association. It's got excellent older housing stock that lends itself to being spruced up and made fashionable. A lot of the neighborhoods are amazingly close to downtown - easy bicycle distance, even walking distance. The prices are ,right. Maybe high by the standards of Paducah, Kentucky, or Trenton, New Jersey, but a steal by the standards of desirable living in Washington, Baltimore, or Philadelphia. It's an easy place to get outdoors. (The jogging population is absolutely obnoxious.) It may not be what you'd call integrated, especially when it comes to redneck neighborhoods versus poor black neighborhoods. But in the more middle-class areas, there are white enclaves in the black west side and a thin but significant black presence in the white east side. The fact that there are a hundred thousand or so members of the black middle class within the city limits is a stabilizing influence most big city mayors would die for. This is, after all, the city of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, of Martin Luther King, senior and junior. That's always been an essentially middle-class congregation, even if its Auburn Street neighborhood - "Sweet Auburn," as it's locally known - has seen better days as a commercial strip. For that matter, it's the home of the chain of black colleges anchored by Morehouse, the most prestigious in the world. Atlanta's loaded with schools, Georgia Tech and Coca-Cola-endowed Emory among them. Still within the city limits, but to the north, there are twenty-five solid square miles of nonstop mansions, weaving in and out of the creeks and valleys of the foothills of north Georgia. If there's a larger collection of quarter-million-dollar-and-up homes within a major city's limits in North America, I don't know where it is. When this neighborhood goes downhill, there won't be enough stiffs in all of North America to justify turning all these places into funeral homes. Even if some were made into small hotels - a perfectly plausible use - it wouldn't take up all the slack. There are not now, and never in all of history were, as many Corinthian columns in Greece as there are along Paces Ferry Road in north Atlanta. Even the neighborhood movie house is called Loew's Tara. The downtown, admittedly, is a bit much. Atlanta has given in to the proverbial edifice complex. "Megastructure" is the by-word in downtown Atlanta. A local architect who is nauseated by the competition to build bigger, glitzier, more stunt-laden buildings has devised a plan that, he is convinced, could make him Atlanta Architect of the Year. He wants to put up a building ten or so stories taller than the Peachtree Plaza, which now tops the city at seventy stories, and then crown it with a ferris wheel. He's positive it would make him a civic hero. He's right in observing that Atlanta seems to love inducing vertigo. Among the clichés no hotel would be without is the glass-walled elevator, whether it offers a view or not. Multistory atriums are very big. (Newspapermen whisper about the indoor suicide leaps right into the indoor dogwood trees.) Fronds of plants trail from space frames that support acres of skylights wherever you go. Indoor ponds are fed by indoor waterfalls. Restaurants rotate, walls are carpeted, ceilings are mirrored, banners hang everywhere, and it seems to be a crime against the profession to build a right angle, or design a shop with a simple, flat, nonmultilevel floor. I think this vertigo may have something to do with the reason a lot of Southerners who used to rail against New York have now focused on Atlanta. One crowded Saturday afternoon, in the Omni International - the home of every distracting environmental stunt that architecture has ever devised - a wise Georgian and I spent some minutes watching a teenage girl watch an escalator. She stared at the sharp-edged, slatted blades of steel emerge from the floor and march up the ramp, and she watched people step on them. She watched how they held their bodies; she swayed as if to catch the rhythm with which they stepped off the floor and onto the moving stairs. She was with three younger children, and clearly she was attempting to figure out how the four of them were going to get up this escalator. She finally took a deep breath, faced the escalator - and took off her shoes. As in touch with the situation as she was ever going to be, she leaped on. Arriving successfully at the top, she started hollering directions down to her charges. From the hollering - which, as a habit, is perfectly ordinary in a rural setting, but is quickly dropped when folk start getting used to cities - my friend analyzed the situation as one of south Georgia culture shock. Later, I was pointed toward a bar called Harrison's as a place to study why "they" hate Atlanta. It's a clone bar, albeit one of the biggest I've ever seen. It's where former presidential assistants like Ham Jordan and Jody Powell hung out back when all they were was ambitious, and it's probably where they hang out now. It was jammed with slinky young women in velvet and floppy hats, and with blow-dry-coiffed, square-jawed young men in the standard southern uniform of three-piece suits all buttoned up even well after office hours. I was trying to take notes on this discreetly, still not certain what I was supposed to be understanding, when I was picked up by the girl from Tennessee. She was from a small mountain town and had left there "to look for a change." She had tried living in Washington, but had come to Atlanta to work for a federal grant program, "giving away money, you know?" She said she didn't really like Harrison's "because the guys won't even talk to you, they're just looking around, you know?" although she objected to characterizing the place as a meat rack, pointing out that here, at least, it was possible to come without getting molested. She gave me a big brave smile as she continued her slightly cracked urban hustle, which she had never learned in Tennessee. It finally clicked. I got to wondering what her daddy did, and if he knew the kind of urban insecurity his daughter had accepted in trade for leaving her small town. And then I thought about the late Dr. Andrew Young, Sr., the New Orleans dentist who was the father of Andrew Young, briefly our ambassador to the UN after serving as one of the first black congressmen from Dixie in this century. Dr. Young, born in 1896, was a frail thoughtful man near the end of a long life when I talked with him. When he spoke about Dixie, he repeatedly came back to the point that, in his opinion: The South has always been a better place to live than the North, even during segregation. You always knew where you were. The South has always been better because you've had less chance of being embarrassed. In the North [in the pre-civil rights era] you could go into a store, or a tavern, but they'd serve you when they felt like serving you. In my opinion, it was better not to be able to go into a store at all than face that kind of humiliation. Now, in the South those unjust old [segregation] laws don't exist. They can't hide behind those laws. In the North you still wait. In New York, just recently, we were in Lord and Taylor. I sat there. my wife walked around, and nobody came up to her at all. It was humiliating. Here in New Orleans, they meet you at the door. This sense of knowing where you are and who you are - in the best, non-racist sense of the phrase, quite literally knowing your place, both geographic and your position in it - might be the elusive factor that is southern and good and possibly capable of surviving. The suggestion is rooted in the South, more than any other region, being a patchwork of small cities and towns, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. It is one of the few places where economics are matching social goals. Small cities and towns are where people want to live, and small cities and towns are where industry wants to go. Since the South is an industrial frontier, nothing is there to stop it. This suggests that the forces of nature are working to prevent exactly what the residents fear: the Atlanta-ization of every comfortable town. The importance of this comes down to the hackles on your neck. People who grew up in the Foundry or New England may find it difficult to believe, but it's possible to have a stranger wave and say hello on the street without that person being a Moonie or a bum. In Charlottesville, Virginia, being waved at by people you don't know is a warm and enduring part of life in a southern town. It's considered poor form to respond to it by averting your eyes, shortening your neck down into your shirt collar, and quickening your step. People who do that remind me of the Wall Street Journal reporter who recently asked me of my travels: "Is Mississippi still scary?" In Mississippi, drivers go so far as to wave automatically to strangers in a raised two-finger salute from the top of the steering wheel as they speed past. It's part of living in a world that people understand and feel that they can control. It even helps to bring the apparently inexplicable into focus. As one Atlantan put it: Crime in the city is tremendously threatening - the bizarre things that happen. But you know, it's not that things are more bizarre. It's that you don't know the person. You don't have any idea where he or she came from, and it's just crazy to you. For example, the guy who walked up and shot the secretary in broad daylight. There were two million people in Atlanta who didn't know that fella, and it just seemed awfully bizarre. Yet there are many who argue that a vision of an industrialized, wealthy. dispersed, friendly South, freed by foresight and intelligence from having made the mistakes of the North all over again, is a joke. A bunch of southern liberals, called the L. Q. C. Lamar Society, in 1912 published an extraordinarily depressing book entitled You Can't Eat Magnolias. First it argued the importance and inevitability of economic development. Then it listed just about every single thing that could go wrong in the process. Then it attempted to suggest solutions. The reason the book is depressing is that the solutions often read like the same ones that have been defeated everywhere else. Like schemes to limit suburban sprawl by the government intervening and buying up land. If the solutions don't sound likely to be adopted, then you're left with the list of problems; and believe me, it is long. I wasted more than a hour of the time of Blaine Liner, the director of the Southern Growth Policies Board, in the manicured monument to that immaculate miracle of industry, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. I kept on talking at cross-purposes with the man. He discoursed about growth. I kept asking, "What's southern in all this?" Finally, he blew up at my ignorance. "What the hell do you want from us?" he asked. "Twelve-inch-wide pecan floorboards on our airports? Do you want to spend two days slopping from Raleigh to Durham on roads that aren't paved? I can fly to Birmingham, get my work done, and fly back the same night. I don't know if that's southern, but I like it " It wasn't until I talked to Terry Sanford, the former governor of North Carolina, former presidential candidate, and guiding spirit behind the founding of the board, that I realized quite how confused I'd been. When the board was first founded early in the seventies, its very slogan was "Southern Growth Without Northern Mistakes," and I thought that still was where they were coming from. I didn't pick up on the repeated reference to the slogan being "that old cliche." Sanford finally explained it to me. Around the middle of the seventies, people stopped taking the idea seriously because the politicians involved couldn't come up with a specific consensus on what a northern mistake was. Even Stephen Suitts, whose Southern Regional Council attempts to continue the work of the civil rights movement, referred ironically to some of his old ideas as "foolish." I've always held that quixotic notion [he said], that the South's potential for what Martin King called a beloved community - and what I hope is an integrated community - has always been much greater than in any other region. And I've always thought that was important not only in terms of equality and freedom, but in terms of productivity for your region. It influences everything. If writing about Dixie has been a growth industry for the last two hundred years (which it has; there is little more daunting than facing the libraries and libraries published about Dixie), then declaring a portion of southern history "New" is the South's most time-honored literary trap. By my calculations, there have been at least six major, widely hailed New Souths since Lee's surrender to Grant, not to mention the minor, trial-balloon New Souths that the sad surplus of southern journalists float from time to time (everybody's gotta eat). Few have not taken a lick at the notion. Faulkner, in Absalom, Absalom!, had one of his characters, a Canadian, upon hearing a particularly lurid tale, remark: "Jesus, the South is fine, isn't it. It's better than the theatre, isn't it. It's better than Ben Hur, isn't it. No wonder you have to come away now and then, isn't it." W. J. Cash, in a much-honored work called The Mind of the South, published in 1941, says in the preface that his New South - which I believe is about three New Souths ago - "now, indeed, save for a few quaint survivals and gentle sentimentalities and a few shocking and inexplicable brutalities such as lynching is almost as industrialized and modernized in its outlook as the North." (This is the same preface in which the author feels compelled to address the question of whether "white trash" are really genetically incapacitated. After considerable discussion, the author cautiously generalizes that the answer is no.) So it's always dangerous to talk about change in the South, and undoubtedly even more dangerous to fixate on Opelousas, Louisiana. But west of the Atchafalaya Bridge, which is where, they say, real Cajun country starts, and on your way up toward Evangeline Parish, north of Opelousas, there's a place called T and D's Groceries and Apartments. It's right on the cement-tar road there, just a block from a house where a family is keeping four young steers in the side yard - you never know these days about beef prices. The Sears Service Center is across the street. T and D's offers state-of-the-art hot boudin, which, kept warm in a slow-cooking electric pot, is a fat gray sausage with rice in it and a spiciness that kind of sneaks up on you from behind when you're not looking. T and D's also offers cracklin's, which are pieces of golden fried fatback, packed in a little plastic bag, convenient for snacks. Also tasso (for gumbo), crawfish tails, and duck meat. Back of T and D's, through the mixture of rural and suburban housing that plants a five-house brick subdivision next to trailer homes up on blocks, emerges a broad, football-field-sized expanse of lawn surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, beyond which is a cluster of buildings identified by a small sign: FMC. FMC is a twenty-nine-division conglomerate, into everything from food-handling to solid rocket propellants. This plant was built in the sixties to make insecticides. It produces carbofuran, which is marketed as Furadan, and what Furadan does is get poured into the ground of Dixie by tractors, and then taken up into the root systems of corn, tobacco, peanuts, rice, sugar cane, Irish potatoes, sorghum, and millet. It then proceeds to do terrible things to the corn-root worm, the tobacco worm, and nematodes. There's a guy who lives next to this FMC plant who also claims, in a very large lawsuit, the likes of which is also becoming very Dixie, that Furadan has done terrible things to his horses, which graze a few feet from the plant's fence. Also typically, the plant's management vigorously, and thoroughly, refuses to discuss this. The FMC plant is worth studying in other ways. Its pay of $5.00 to $6.00 an hour for line employees is considered an 8 on the local 10-point wage scale. It's in a place with a convenient "surplus" of labor. Unemployment ranges from 8.5 to 11.5 percent. Taxes are low. Unions are few. Its location is twenty-four miles from the nearest interstate, although it is serviced by two other major divided highways. Navigable water is nearby; the airport is being expanded. And it employs Agnes Stelly. In 1965, Opelousas, faced with the civil rights revolution, attempted to counter demands for integration of the schools by offering "freedom of choice." Anybody could register for any high school they chose. Agnes Stelly, one of a family of seven black children born on literally the wrong side of the tracks, had a vague sense that she might be able to get a better education if she got out of her segregated environment. So she chose to sign up for the white high school. She remembers those years as very lonely. A few months into the school year, she concluded she'd made a terrible mistake. There were so few blacks that she refers to herself as part of "one half of one percent." As for the whites, well, when I asked her if interracial dating was a problem, Agnes said, "It wasn't a question of interracial dating. It was a question of interracial hello-saying." Yet the thought of going back to her old life, and admitting that she couldn't handle her decision to face the new, seemed even more humiliating. So Agnes stuck it out in the white high school for four years. The year she graduated was the year the freedom-of-choice plan was shucked and the Opelousas schools were thoroughly, and mandatorily, integrated. But meanwhile, Agnes had gone on to the University of Southwestern Louisiana, in Lafayette, to study chemistry. Despite her father's skepticism about the cash value of higher learning - after all, look at schoolteachers - all seven of his children went to colleges ranging from USL to Southern University to Xavier to the University of New Orleans. And now, all seven young Stellys have found their place in the world. Two are middle-management executives - one in Los Angeles and one in Flint, Michigan. Another is a sales rep in San Francisco. (Agnes particularly admires him. She can't get over that he's gotten into something as risky as sales and has actually made it.) Two are in New Orleans - one working for the federal government and the other a reporter for the States-Item. (The latter is the one the elder Stelly points to as proving his point about the dubious cash value of higher education.) And one is a bookkeeper in Houston. But Agnes has returned to Opelousas. Her early twenties were turbulent. At a certain point, Agnes had had so many chemistry courses that she could have screamed. She left school short of a degree. A marriage, a child, a life in Houston, and a divorce were mixed in there, before she decided to come back home and sort out her life. That's when FMC came to get her. Bill Williamson, the manager at the plant and her boss, keeps saying, "She's worth every penny. She's worth every penny." Agnes is using her chemistry background to be the head of quality control for the plant. In her lab inside the firestone-brick office building at FMC, in front of the huge gray cubes of aluminum that make up the plant itself, she is surrounded by things like her Hewlett-Packard 5730A gas chromatograph. It's attached to the 57o1A isotherm oven and the 3380A computer. A Mettler H51 balance for weighing things to five digits right of the decimal point is somehow associated with the microscope, the centrifuge, the pipettes, and the sulfuric acid. Agnes is making plans. FMC is willing to pay for her to take courses leading to the completion of her degree, and she intends to take the company up on the offer. She doesn't want to stay in Opelousas forever, although she admits the money is good, and she's putting away every nickel she can, and they are many. Williamson, when asked about Agnes' salary, takes a deep breath. She's making a lot of money, he says. Compared with those line workers whose wages are described as 8 on a 10-point scale? Oh hell, she's making a lot more money than them. She makes more money than a schoolteacher. Why, he adds, she's making a lot of money by the standards of a man! And that remark may reveal why it's logical to suggest that we're heading into a kind of seventh New South, another step, perhaps, in the Americanization of Dixie. In 1956, Agnes' father, a bus driver, was approached by the city fathers and asked if he would accept a special task. Times were changing, they explained, and Louisiana had to change with them, and would Philip Stelly be willing to take a job as one of the first two black police officers of Opelousas? He describes those years as so long ago that "it was before they made the streets one-way." And he doesn't remember them as being easy. First it was a struggle to get a patrol car allocated to a black man, and then it was a struggle to get a patrol car that wasn't a hand-me-down from a white man. But time moved on, and Mr. Stelly moved with them. And now FMC has turned to Agnes and offered her a job, and it admits that it recruited her for reasons of social justice. But not because she's black. This plant, surrounded by homes the front yards of which, even in the 1980s, can still be found littered with geese and goats - in a Dixie deeper than which it's damn tough to get - has been integrated for years. Bill Williamson even looked confused when I asked him whether he'd hired Agnes because of her race. Of course not, he said. I hired her because she's a woman.
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