Long Time Leaving Dispatches from Up South

Bringing in the Sheaves This was written before the midterm elections of 2006, in which, as we now know, Americaeven as far South as Virginiabegan to take my advice. Much remains to be seen. Down South recently I read a letter to the editor that sought a middle ground on glossolalia. Apparently controversy has been high among Southern Baptists as to whether speaking in tongues should be embraced doctrinally. The writer began as follows: "I have never, as far as I am aware, been inspired to speak in tongues myself, but . . ." As far as I am aware. Aw, man, I miss that stuff. Best I recollect, I have not personally been swallowed by a whale, as such, but . . . I moved to the Northeast thirty-eight years ago. By now, you'd think I would have left the South. But I keep needing to get back down there. As long as I can get back out again. In October 2001, an American flag was stolen in Massachusetts and another one in North Carolina. I know of the first from a photograph in theBerkshire Eagle, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in which a reproachful-looking elderly couple are holding up a hand-lettered cardboard sign that says PLEASE RETURN OUR FLAG. SHAME ON YOU. I know of the second from a photograph in theIndependent Weeklyof Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in which an angry-looking middle-aged man is standing beneath professional plastic-letter signage, bolted onto the front of his house and floodlit, that says, I HOPE THE SORRY PIECE OF SHIT WHO STOLE MY U.S. FLAG DISPLAYS IT WITH PRIDE. The thinking is clearer in the Northern sign. There is more going on in the Southern one. And it's more flagrant. "Her lyricism can be flagrant," writes Margo Jefferson (about Carson McCullers), inThe New York Times. "But what Southern writer isn't flagrant about something?" Generalizations about the South, unless I am making them, usually put me off, but that one is mannerly enough, for one thing, to be couched as a question. And I don't know where Margo Jefferson grew up, but I know she is African American and a Jefferson, therefore at least somewhat Southern rooted, therefore not a writer whom I suspect of retaining, autonomically, as a chicken does a piece of gizzard grit, this calcified given: "My cultural hegemony may be pretty well played out [or on the verge of succumbing to barbarism], but at least I'm not Southern." Anyway, I like flagrant. As we used to say in the army, with regard to the First Infantry Division, vaunting itself as "the Big Red One": if you're going to be one, you might as well be a big red one. I am an emigre from a region that tried, a century and a half ago, to emigrate from the United States en masse. It may be that you can't love America (or Cuba, say, or Nature or the Promised Land) flagrantly until you and it have split. Then, too, part of being an American is feeling like the child of a broken home. There is always some kind of schism going on, with an overlap that is rich and strange. For instance, you'd think hog wild and bird-watching would have nothing in common, but the ivory-billed woodpecker was sighted in a state that roots for the Razorbacks. I root for the overlap. I keep trying to tell people in the Northeast that you can't be part of the solution until you accept that you're part of the problem. Thinking right is not enough. Different people hold different truths to be self-evident. Speaking of evidence, right after 9/11, when citizens were asking what they could do to help, President Bush came up with this response: "People need to be logical. If you find a person that you've never seen before geBlount, Roy, Jr. is the author of 'Long Time Leaving Dispatches from Up South', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307266187 and ISBN 0307266184.