South Writ Large: Stories from the Global South

By Michael Malone and James L. Peacock

South Writ Large: Stories from the Global South is an anthology of personal essays, articles, poetry, and artwork that explores the culture of the U.S. South and its extensive connections to other regions of the world. The collection is composed of articles published over the past ten years in the online magazine South Writ Large, which examines the changing South in its symbolic and psychological complexity to stimulate conversation about the culture of the South at home and abroad. The anthology's accomplished contributors work in broad-ranging fields: novelist Jill McCorkle; poet Jaki Shelton Green; historians Clay Risen and Malinda Maynor Lowery; journalist and politician W. Hodding Carter III; author and chef Bill Smith; and artists Bo Bartlett and Welmon Sharlhome. The introduction is by novelist Michael Malone and the afterword is by anthropologist Jim Peacock, whose Global South concept inspired South Writ Large Magazine and this anthology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: May 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469668598

Michael Malone

Michael Malone is the author of ten novels, a collection of short stories and two works of nonfiction. Educated at Carolina and at Harvard, he is now a professor in Theater Studies at Duke University. Among his prizes are the Edgar, the O. Henry, the Writers Guild Award, and the Emmy. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife.

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MICHAEL MALONE

Introduction

IN AMERICA, there will always be the South, as long as there is a southerner left alive to define it. We will write it in books, paint it, protest it; sit on porches and at family reunions and Waffle Houses and golf clubs, at churches, campuses, courthouses and statehouses and talk it forever. Our mythical Souths. For the South has always been a big flexible myth and nothing lasts longer than a myth. Myths allow people to believe a lot of absolutely mutually exclusive things about their culture and therefore about themselves.

The painting (Hog Series CCLV: Red Rooster/Cardinal), an oil on canvas by the brilliant South Carolinian artist Tarleton Blackwell, captures the oxymoronic multiplicity of the southern myth: it’s a portrait of a rooster boastful as the braggadocio Looney Tunes rooster Foghorn Leghorn, who was himself based on the blowhard southern politician Senator Claghorn from The Fred Allen Show.

Blackwell’s rooster poses cocksure as General Custer in an elegant red uniform jacket, crowded with vainglorious military medals. He’s like a Velasquez cavalier, or a leather-gloved Jeb Stuart, and he’s posed in front of banners of sky and stars and bars. But there’s a cardinal perched on his shoulder like a pirate’s parrot, and the cardinal’s claws are stars on the rooster’s left epaulet. The cardinal is, of course, the state bird of Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. The rooster is, of course, a food product, like Kentucky fried chicken.

The mythic South is always writ as large and as complexly as Blackwell’s painting. Its soundtrack springs from My Old Kentucky Home and Wayfaring Stranger and Shoo Fly, from field hollers and banjo blues to ragtime, jazz, soul, rock, pop, funk, and hip-hop, from Scotch-Irish ballads and spirituals, all these contributory streams flowing into the great Mississippi of American music with its deep African American roots. Our roots are space and race, as Styron said, and they support our best gifts to art. They give us Huckleberry Finn and W. C. Handy.

In one guise or another, the myth of the South will always be reborn, redeemed or unrepentant, conceived as a lost dream or a cause indefensible, a struggle to be free, to go to hell for a good cause like Huck Finn. Like the unending fight for a national Ireland (Erin Go Bragh—May Ireland Live Forever, An Ireland Divided Will Never Be Free), the South dreams backwards and forwards. This anthology is an effort to analyze at least parts of our complicated southern dream.

For cultural analysts, there are plenty of new regional mythologies—the Rust Belt, the West Coast, and the East Coast, but the myth of the South is among the oldest, perhaps the longest lasting, and so one of the most complex. It goes far back before John Smith’s telling Jamestown colonists that if they didn’t work, they wouldn’t eat; back before the Colony of Georgia overturned their founder Oglethorpe’s ban on slavery. It is about more than a civil war, bound to an origin story of displaced Natives, enslaved Africans, and usurping colonists.

In popular story, the South weds its American mythology to our other major nostalgic myth: the Old West or the Wild West. This imagined West has been broadly used around the world to define the fundamental character of the United States as a fiction of cowboys and Indians, outlaws and lawmen, everyone fast on the trigger. The West has had a greater impact than the South on international fashion (Levi’s have traveled the world), on our motor culture (vans and trucks resemble covered wagons and stage coaches; cars and jeeps are named Cherokees, Comanches, Bisons, Broncos, and Mustangs), on our gun culture, our don’t fence me in isolationism. And through Hollywood movies, westerns have provided a whole genre of globally exported myths. But we should notice that the South is writ large in this western narrative, that the West is rooted in the South. The western landscape is filled with displaced, defeated Confederates (like John Wayne in The Searchers or True Grit), with rural gunmen who found jobs as cowboys, sheriffs, US cavalry, rustlers and outlaws. Virginian Jesse James is as southern (and mythic) as Atticus Finch.

So maybe westerners are southerners who can’t stay home or who can’t go home again. The home-hungry who just think they can’t go home again. Or the outsider who can never leave home and whose heart is always a lonely hunter.

This anthology tackles the complexity and diversity of southerners not by simply stitching together a large patchwork quilt but by developing an argument about how the South is writ large. The argument is not only chronological but accretive, accumulating new subject matter and adding to the old arguments of the Mind of the South.

Certain essays set the southern landscape in traditional ways like journalist Hodding Carter’s A Loyal Son of the South, and my own Writing the South. Others use different parameters, like Half-Drawn Hispaniola by historian and novelist Katy Simpson Smith, a fascinating speculation on a partial hand-drawn map by Christopher Columbus upon seeing the new world: It occurred to me that Columbus is kind of a southern story, if we embrace our Caribbean neighbors in a shared past. And what do southerners do if not remember things problematically?

The section titled Antebellum Legacies invites a new generation of Civil War scholars including Clay Risen and John Dunn to bring contemporary analytic techniques and subject matters to old cotton fields and battlefields whose every inch has long been dug by generations of academic hoes.

Cultural Cartographies, Homelands, Southern Afterlives, and Culinary Kinships go beyond the binary of black and white to give voice to other cultures brought by immigrants to the South. María Teresa Unger Palmer’s Mi Terra: Homeland for North Carolina Latinos. Malinda Maynor Lowery’s Recognizing Lumbee History Through Land. John Jung’s To Live and Die in the South: The Chinese Story. Katerina Katsarka Whitley, a Greek immigrant, writes of bringing her cooking to a small southern town: The Flavors that Bind Us. Or we’re asked to share in the experience of Ramesh Rao, an East Asian Indian immigrant, in Georgia via Guntur.

Yet another perspective is that of the poems and illustrations throughout this anthology. There is also art criticism: the interpretations of a writer like Jill McCorkle on the painting of Bo Bartlett.

Again, it’s not that southerners can’t go home. It’s that they always have to. We go home through our memories, we return to our childhoods, we visit our cemeteries. We go home when we re-experience our food, our cooking, our kitchens, our shared meals. It’s been said that by knowing what we eat, we know who we are. Bill Smith’s hard crab soup takes us home. Jaki Shelton Green’s grandmother’s hands in a mixing bowl take us home.

That’s why collections like this one are invaluable. They are maps to who we were. And as Faulkner knew, the past is not even past. It’s not just true for southerners.

Najee Dorsey, Henrietta Lacks, courtesy of the artist

CULTURAL CARTOGRAPHIES

KATY SIMPSON SMITH

Half-Drawn Hispaniola

IN FEBRUARY, I found myself in Nashville with a few hours to kill before my reading at Parnassus Books. It was terribly cold, and weird pellets of slush were pinging off my windshield; I asked the audience that night about the phenomenon, and they told me it was sleet. I felt a renewed gratitude for my New Orleans home. In the midst of this frigid, wet assault, seeking shelter, I made my way to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, a museum encased in an art deco former post office that’s marbled with glamour. The exhibition on display didn’t matter—I just wanted to thaw my toes—but it ended up being quite beautiful, pulling together a private Spanish collection that included works by Goya, Rubens, and Titian. This noble family also owned a folder of Columbiana, documents from those initial expeditions to the Americas in the 1490s: a ship manifest, a decree from Ferdinand and Isabella, and a travel diary from the winter of 1492–93 with a sketch of the northern coastline of Hispaniola.

I hovered over this map for a few moments then continued around the gallery, gawking at Goya’s Duchess of Alba in White with its hilariously stoic lapdog. But a few minutes later I was standing again at the glass case, peering in. Just a simple sketch. Probably, though not certainly, by Columbus. Probably, though not certainly, the first map of the Americas drawn by a European. I was impressed, against my better judgment. (Where was the first map of Europe drawn by an indigenous American?) The image was captivating because it represented one of those flash points in history after which everything was irrevocably changed. That line in ink, drawn by a single man on a single ship sailing slowly past a coast, was also a line through the heart of the continent. Not a sketch but a garrote.

The map is small, but it takes up two pages of Columbus’s travel diary, as if he misjudged the proportions when he began and ran over the crease in the binding with some chagrin. I can’t help thinking he could have turned the diary ninety degrees and used his white space more efficiently. He may have thought the same. But this was more a placeholder than a piece of art. The line starts around the present-day town of Gaspar Hernández in the Dominican Republic, then snakes around the bumps in coastline (more prominent here than in actuality) until it rounds the western corner of Haiti and fizzles out near the present-day town of Gonaïves. Columbus is taken with the islands: Île de la Tortue is here (Tortuga), but also a cluster of three small islands near Cap-Haitien and a veritable archipelago near the peak of Monte Cristi: a larger bean-shaped island and four whimsical satellites, each drawn counterclockwise. He deems the western cape San Nicolas and marks a single mainland town: Natividad, or Villa de la Navidad, the fort his men built after the Santa María floundered on the reef. He was stuck there three weeks before finally escaping on the Niña. (When he returned a year later, the thirty-nine men he’d left had vanished, the settlement burned to the ground. Archaeologists are still poking around the Haitian coast searching for the ruins, the Hispanic Roanoke.) In and among the lines representing actual features are eight brown inkblots that exist in a cartographic twilight zone between island and bloodstain. They’re precise enough for the former, and brown and clotty enough to shiver anyone who knows what Columbus brought to the Caribbean. From one of the stains a small cross grows: a sign of faith? A compass rose?

I didn’t know what else was in the diary, and I wasn’t particularly interested; Columbus’s actual notes didn’t hold any fascination for me. It’s the map that was magnetic. It marked a story that had just begun; the continent’s fate was being outlined—messily, hesitatingly. The fact that the map was unfinished drew the viewer in like a morbid counterfactual. Could things have gone differently? He’s only half there. He’s only so far in. No one knows what comes next.

This map only pops up in a few places when you search online. One is Yale University, on a webpage nestled in their Genocide Studies Program. Another is Southern Methodist University, where it advertises an exhibition on campus celebrating Columbus Day weekend. It occurred to me that Columbus is kind of a southern story, if we embrace our Caribbean neighbors in a shared past. And what do southerners do if not remember things problematically?

What do we think we’re celebrating on Columbus Day? That half-drawn line? The unknown that lures any explorer? The darkness that needs our own enlightened gaze? It’s the impulse behind Manifest Destiny, colonialism, the Apollo missions: white people be conquerin’! Columbus’s partial map is a drawing that invites our participation not only in the thrill of discovery but in the horror of what was to come. On the island of Hispaniola alone, 80 to 90 percent of the Taíno population died within a generation after Columbus’s ships arrived. Some estimates put that at three million souls. As the great navigator bent over the desk in his cabin, tracing out the contours of a foreign land, his men were twisting through the forests, carrying guns and swords and viruses and Christianity and racism. For the Taíno, this was a story of genocide, not celebration. Yale got it right.

But the South, for all its memory problems, has a wealth of stories to draw from; Europeans weren’t the only ones telling us what the world is shaped like. What about early American Indian maps? What do they look like? Circles upon circles upon circles, each linked by umbilical cords. Where Columbus drew a line and abandoned it, as far as his own knowledge reached, early maps from Catawbas and Chickasaws on the North American continent show the intricate relations between communities. There was no individual; there was no unknown territory. On a Catawba deerskin map from 1721, beyond the circles of towns, the English settlements to the north and south sit on the periphery, represented as squares. This is our country, the map implicitly says, and you are over there. (In addition to these sociopolitical maps, Native peoples created pictorial facsimiles of their physical environments as accurately as any European; Columbus himself encountered a Mayan man in 1502 who could chart sections of the coastline of Honduras.)¹

West from Hispaniola, at about the same time Columbus was poking around the islands, the Aztecs were engaged in an interdisciplinary mapmaking venture of their own. The Codex Xolotl shows not just the mountains and rivers of the region but also its history: the arrival of the Chichimecs to Mexico, their exploratory jaunts through the terrain, and all the intricate dramas of a people in migration. There are speech bubbles, flipbooks of action, secondary plots. These maps are very much alive; the Aztecs had no interest in creating a static record of an unchanging natural world.

Maps reveal what a person, and the culture looming behind that person, thinks is important. Columbus wanted a precise rendering of Hispaniola’s coastline, as far as his pen could reach. Why? So he knew where to land, how to retrace settlements, what he could claim. The Catawbas wanted a holistic picture of the peoples of the South; they needed to know where their friends and enemies stood, along what lines resources could be shared or traded, what a Catawba identity meant in a region of many identities. The Aztecs recounted a conquering history in order to legitimize their enduring presence in Mexico, link the people with the land, and shape communal memory. The indigenous mapmaking of the Americas tended to prize stories over data, a sense of fullness and completeness rather than the line that trails off because the individual’s knowledge comes to an end.

And I, standing over a glass case in an old post office to escape the sleet of downtown Nashville—what did I need directions for?

I don’t travel as much as I’d like. As a writer, I tend to be fairly stationary. Maps to me are games for the imagination: alternate worlds, a different set of eyes, might-have-beens. I imagine myself a tiny ink person traveling along this wiggly ink coastline—at a certain point, I fall off, like people told Columbus he would. His line takes me to the Caribbean. A map that depicts a location. His messy inkblots carry me to the cabin