The South has a cast of characters that, if you grow up there, you can't help wanting to write about it. It has its scoundrels and its saints, just like everywhere else. It's filled up with liars and truth-tellers and a whole bunch of people in between.
William Faulkner said, "To understand the world, you first have to understand a place like Mississippi."
Most Southern writers are good at describing characters and places because they spend a lot of time looking at them, taking them in, and being them. Someone once asked Walker Percy, the Louisiana writer, why the South produced so many good writers, and he said, "Because we lost the war." (Hmmmm--not sure I agree, but okay, that's what he said.)
I could have spent days in Conundrum, the independent book store in St. Francisville that has an impressive collection of books by Southern writers. I bought a couple of books by writers new to me, but I want to re-read the ones I already read. Only now do I have enough life experience to get them, really get them, not like I thought I did back in college.
Southern writers, like Flannery and William and Eudora and Alice and Walker, put their fingers right on the seeming contradictions of deep-South people and places--the seeming awful people who have some good in them, the seeming good people who could do you ill.
The South has its racists (I met one in Louisiana who told me that her hometown wasn't what it used to be now that it's been taken over by--[she whispered the last word:]
Blacks) but it also has, I'm pretty sure, way more tolerant and big-hearted folks.
What you can't miss driving through the South are the steeples and stained glass and singing of churches.
I started counting the little bitty Baptist churches on the backroads of Mississippi and Louisiana, but there were too many to count. There must be one every three miles in the countryside, and bigger ones in the towns.
Their signs are so well thought-out, so reflective of the theologies of those who took the time to post them.
Some denominations announce Friday Night Fish Fries and Crab Boils and times of services. But Baptist churches, and sometimes others, post mini-sermons. You could do a whole trip just taking pictures of church signs.
One sign said, in a Martin Luther King rhetorical style,
"We do God's work, God's way, for God's glory."
Another announced that their God was a burning-up sort of God--
though I whizzed by too fast to capture the actual words.
I even saw a road-side stand selling Cracklin'....and if you don't know what that is,
you haven't missed much. It's the skin of pigs, fried in lard.
Beside the cracklin' stand was a wooden pig, in a red dress,
that said, "Praise The LARD!"
A car wash business sign promises "Christ-Like Car Washes."
For all its quirks, because of all its quirks maybe, I have a real affinity for the South. It's known for its food, music, laughter, and hospitality. Gospel and grits. Magnolias and gravy.
It's like a great big layer cake on the outside, but only if you grow up in it (like probably anyplace else) do you know what's stirred into the batter and what people mean when they say what they say.
Good food, craft beer and bourbon, live music, and a great time talking about books and Southern culture under the live oaks: That's what the fourth annual Walker Percy Weekend has to offer when it returns to celebrate the acclaimed novelist's life and work. For more information and tickets visit : www.walkerpercyweekend.org
