Ode to Southern Writers

After my another COVID-19 vaccine shot, smarting soreness permeated my shoulders, neck and back when I woke the next day.  I felt like I’d been in a dogfight and the dog won.  So, I sat licking my wounds but was stricken with sufficient guilt keep me from watching reruns of Star Trek. Instead, as a double dose of Tylenol kicked-in, I browsed book lists on the Internet, trying to remember what I read before 2018, the time before I began tracking the books I read.  

I thought about the authors that made a sufficient enough impression on me that I actually remembered their books.  Almost all of them were southern writers – the likes of Robert Penn Warren, Dorothy Allison, Pat Conroy, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Wolfe, Truman Capote, Zora Neale Hurston, Barbara Kingsolver, Ann Tyler, Doris Betts, Sue Monk Kidd, Mary Karr, John Berendt, Rebecca Wells, not to mention Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.

Why are southern writers so near and dear to my heart, I asked? Maybe it’s because I’ve lived there.  I spent ages one through seven in Alabama and then as a fifty something adult two years in Memphis at the tip of delta country. Virginia and Baltimore Maryland have also been my home states for forty some years. Those places gave me the bitter taste of southern realities -- the heat, red dirt, struggling share cropper farmers eking a living from the land, and the hostility of white people who weren’t interested in knowing you unless you attended the right church, right private schools and had the right family history. Those experiences themselves should have put me off southern stories, but they didn’t.

My affection for these authors springs from the magic of their language – it’s languid and lyrical phrasing, the humor of circumstances and acceptance of the past without dictating a future that creates an atmosphere that seeps in my bones with every chapter I read. Their words hang in the air drifting slowing like Spanish moss growing on iconic low limbed live oak trees. The tone and timber of their stories draw me into their worlds of unhurried life, of violent acts, of evolving suspense, of tragic love or deeply rooted sense of place.  

Spreading from the Mississippi river, across the Appalachian Mountains to the mud flats of the Carolinas and Georgia, these authors confirm both the beauty and harshness the region and of the stickiness that keeps them coming back. Instead of running away, these writers were unafraid to confront the south's traditions, pulling sweetness from pain with purpose and speaking with directness over a subtext of affection that makes me want to read more.

Today the fisted grip of southern traditions that imprisoned women into meaningless roles for life and disenfranchised generations people are finally out in the open and, in time, hopefully, can be vanquished.  But I crave that the unique lush beauty of the land, the softness of the air, the mystery of its characters, and the lilt of the language that will not be lost in the stories from new generations of authors who call the south home.