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Southern Cultures: Volume 20: Number 4 – Winter 2014 Issue
Southern Cultures: Volume 20: Number 4 – Winter 2014 Issue
Southern Cultures: Volume 20: Number 4 – Winter 2014 Issue
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Southern Cultures: Volume 20: Number 4 – Winter 2014 Issue

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The Winter 2014 Issue brings us duels and Dashboard Poets, eels and faux
villages, a beloved television icon, interviews with liberal hero Walter Mondale
and conservative activist Jack Kershaw, Civil War battlefi eld monuments, and
more. From familiar faces and famous legends to humble commemorations
and invented histories, we explore the tensions between preservation and
progress that have forged the region as we know it.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 21, 2014
ISBN9781469615967
Southern Cultures: Volume 20: Number 4 – Winter 2014 Issue

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    Southern Cultures - Harry L. Watson

    Front Porch

    Smoke, salt, pepper, and sea. In this issue’s Beyond Grits and Gravy, our friend Bernie Herman prepares an Eastern Shore delicacy: When I try to describe the rich dark flavors of the firm yet creamy meat, words fail me. As our neighbors remark, ‘This tastes like more.’ I think this eel tastes exactly like winter holidays and the advent of the sleeping season. Eels fishing ground, 2014, photographed by Bernard L. Herman.

    One hundred and thirty years ago, Huckleberry Finn’s wild adventures on the Mississippi River first entered our imaginations, made all the more entrancing by the native lure of the water. Rivers are the lifeblood of communities, equal parts permanence and transience, ever-flowing as their waters pass through and beyond. For those who sit on the bank, the river is a muse. For those who dive into her current, the river is the road to elsewhere. Rivers take us back into history, sometimes literally, as the mighty Colorado has laid out the past in the rocky strata of the Grand Canyon. But elsewhere, that time-travel is sparked in the imagination. And rivers weave together much of this issue of Southern Cultures, inviting us to reflect or float away on one for a moment.

    The Tennessee River runs through a region in northwest Alabama known as Muscle Shoals. When the Wilson Dam was completed there in 1921, it turned the river into the economic driver of the region, opening up transportation options and, as one piece of the larger Tennessee Valley Authority project, heralding a new era of development and progress for part of the South. The river was mobility. It was also inspiration, coursing through the small towns, where, in the 1960s, an independent recording studio produced some of the most memorable soul recordings of the era, including hits by Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett, and Aretha Franklin. A local bass player named David Hood was part of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, a team of white musicians who backed legendary black singers, including Franklin and the Staple Singers, on R&B and soul classics.

    Some thirty years later, Hood’s son, Patterson, and the southern rock/alt-country band Drive-By Truckers released an influential album, Southern Rock Opera, a poetic, introspective, and hard-rocking musical exposition on growing up in Muscle Shoals alongside the Tennessee River to a soundtrack of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s southern rock, Hood’s dad’s music, and the politics that framed and forged his youth. Patterson penned his summation, Proud of the glory, stare down the shame / the duality of the southern thing.

    That southern pride, entangled in its own confounding past, is at the heart of the infamous 1856 caning of Senator Charles Sumner, an incident in which U.S. Representative Preston Brooks from South Carolina attacked the Massachusetts senator with his walking stick in congress. While the incident itself is legendary pre–Civil War drama, in The Cane of His Existence, Stephen Berry and James Hill Welborn III offer a compelling exploration of Brooks’s life, the burdens of southern pride, and the toll it exacted on him. In the aftermath, Brooks was vilified in the North as a beast out of control, reduced to a mere caricature of the southern politician.

    A century later, public perception of southerners, at least as seen on TV, was still essentially a caricature, as Sara K. Eskridge explores in There Goes Old Gomer. Yet, Eskridge suggests that By embracing the harmless, humorous hick, rural comedy privileged, for southern viewers, the more innocuous and charming traits of their region over very real issues of racism and poverty in an era when violent conflicts over Civil Rights, for example, threatened far more excoriating characterizations.

    Patterson Hood’s turn of phrase prompted Angie Maxwell to revisit the sociological and political implications of self-professed southern identity in The Duality of the Southern Thing, wherein she challenges the longstanding political association of southernness with whiteness and offers a summary of the way in which black southernness is an increasingly significant regional identity with powerful political implications in the twenty-first century.

    But back to the river. On the Eastern Shore of Virginia, Bernard L. Herman paddles us up a creek in search of the perfect if unexpected Beyond Grits and Gravy Thanksgiving feast: eels! His prose puts us in the canoe alongside him, contemplating the old traditions and handicrafts next to the newfangled contraptions for catching eels. And poet Joseph Bathanti suggests the timelessness of a river, the wife of a coal miner living beside the Gauley River in West Virginia as sister to a Chinese merchant’s wife a millennium ago.

    Jim Nabors, featured in Sara Eskridge’s There Goes Old Gomer, and George Wallace, whose career casts a long shadow on southern politics in Angie Maxwell’s essay, The Duality of the Southern Thing, together ca. 1970–1979, courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama.

    With metaphors in mind, Brian Carpenter’s Dashboard Poet offers a compelling and captivating portrait of songwriter Roger Miller’s relationship with his hometown, the open road, and the concrete rivers running across 1950s and ’60s America. Writer of the classic King of the Road, Miller recalled, I would … think about a boy growing up on a river and wondering what he would think … probably the same things I would think as a boy growing up on a concrete river, which was Highway 66 going west [to] California. I used to see cars on that highway and wonder where they were going and want to go with them. Like so many others who came of age in a small town in Middle America after World War II, Miller reflected on his past with a nostalgia deeply tainted by the bounded opportunities his hometown afforded him. And where his concrete rivers unleashed his creativity and led him to superstar status as an entertainer, Huck Finn and the Mississippi brought his career home to roost when, after decades of success as a songwriter and singer, he penned the Broadway hit Big River.

    Amanda M. Brian invites us to consider the opposite: a hometown with no history, with no time travel by river into a conflicted past, where nostalgia is not personal. In The Faux History of The Villages, Florida, Brian takes us to a community of transplants, where retirees have left behind their pasts to live in a theme park-like community with fantasy legendary characters and monuments and plaques that are works of pure fiction. But what conflicted past of both people and the land itself has been paved over by the utopian town of leisure and pleasure? And what of the rich lived history in the autobiographies of the residents who have untethered themselves from their own pasts?

    Next to the fake markers that decorate the Villages, photographs of the Civil War battlefield monuments, erected by active-duty soldiers during the war itself, are jarring. Michael W. Panhorst reveals how soldiers returned for the dedication of one monument in 1861: As they walked over the field, the sight of nearly every point in it would, by association, bring to vivid remembrance, some exciting scene in the awful tragedies of that eventful day … Each one, naturally, seeks the place where his own Regiment had its severest struggle. Arrived there, he sees and hears once again, the indescribable scenes of bloody carnage, and fearful horror, which his memory now presents with most painful distinctness.

    And finally, we offer two interviews that let us hear in their own words accounts of the 1960s civil rights struggle: former Vice President Walter Mondale’s recollections of the controversial seating of the Mississippi Delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention and Jack Kershaw, vice-chair of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, the state’s foremost massive resistance group during the 1950s, discussing his attitudes on race and the concept of voluntary association.

    Somewhere near your hometown is a river, perhaps whitewater churning, perhaps still water, with a powerful current beneath the calm surface. Where might it take you? To a feast of eels or soft-shell crabs? On a journey where the world is your oyster? Or floating back in time? As Roger Miller wrote, Oh muddy water / your mysteries are deep and wide. Dive in if you dare.

    JOCELYN R. NEAL, Editor

    ESSAY

    The Cane of His Existence

    Depression, Damage, and the Brooks–Sumner Affair

    by Stephen Berry and James Hill Welborn III

    In ways that historians have utterly failed to appreciate, the caning of Charles Sumner was the work of two men. Certainly Brooks hatched the scheme and carried it out. But Keitt was a critical co-conspirator. For two days after Sumner’s speech, Brooks found reason after reason to delay. But always Brooks had Keitt at his elbow, fortifying his spirits and stiffening his resolve. Brooks had to act, Keitt said, and if he didn’t, Keitt would. Detail of the cover of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 7, 1856, depicting the caning of Charles Sumner.

    Looking out across the scorched strand from atop one of the few remaining horses, the regimental surgeon scanned the marching throng and noticed a curious drag in the left leg of Captain Preston S. Brooks. It was so striking it occupied my attention some time, the surgeon recalled, and he pulled alongside Brooks to ask if he was all right. None of the soldiers were doing well; all were thirsty; all were broiling; many were already succumbing to the diseases that would kill them during the Mexican campaign or shortly thereafter. Only two days in country, the regimental commander was on his back, being borne along on a litter. The surgeon himself would have his health so wrecked he would survive the war by only a few months. But Brooks looked worse than most—sweating profusely and grimacing with each labored step. I was satisfied it was a serious matter, the surgeon recalled, "& advised him to march no further & to borrow a horse, or to get into a wagon, for I apprehended if he continued to walk he might lose the use of his lower limb from paralysis. I then told him I feared he would not be able to continue in the service & that he certainly would not be able to march through it."¹ Despite this, Brooks refused any aid and continued his labored march. By God, he would make it to Alvarado.

    Lurching toward Alvarado, Captain Brooks had ample time to consider what he had become. He had never been a promising young man. At eighteen, he had been suspended from college for menacing a fellow student with a gun. Two years later, he was expelled for menacing a local sheriff with a gun. Between these events, he had streaked home to fight a duel with Louis Wigfall, a man who had recently dueled and killed Brooks’s nephew, Thomas Bird. Away at school, Brooks had assumed his father would want revenge, but Whitfield Sr. considered the entire affair one of trial, suffering & solicitude of a painful nature, beyond any thing that I have encountered in all my past life. He granted that Wigfall was a thug and a miscreant. That rash & misguided young man [has] caused me more grief, vexation and suffering than I have had to bear from all the other crosses losses or misfortunes of a life of fifty years, he confided to his journal. Even so, his own son seemed hardly less of a hotspur. In the presence of Heaven, Whitfield scolded, a quarrel with that young man [Wigfall] was not sought by me, nor was it acceptable to my wishes and purposes … I was willing to do every thing consistent with truth and honor to avoid any hostility with him. He was not in my way, he did not cross my path or that of my family; I had no unkind feeling toward him but on the contrary he had my best wishes for his success.²

    Such fatherly remonstrance stung, but, having thrown down the gauntlet, Preston felt he could not back out now. Thus hurried into the fight without the necessary preparation, he met Wigfall on a small, sterile & bleak island in the [Savannah] River, called goat island … having no accommodations but its insulated situation which protected the party from interruption. As his father later narrated, the first shot was ineffectual … at the second fire both were wounded and both fell. I saw my son fall. My feelings at that occurrence may be more easily conceived than described. Upon examining Preston’s wound, it was discovered that the ball had entered near the spine, passing through the fleshy part of the left hip and touching the bone, & then passing through the left arm, shattering one of the bones, while Wigfall had been shot through both thighs. The remoteness of the location forced both combatants to remain on the island during the night, on the very spots, where they fell. By the time Preston was evacuated and operated upon, his wound was clotted, his hip mangled, and his body in the grips of fever. He had been so sure that this was what his father had wanted—for him to stand up to defend the family honor. I’ll kill Wigfall! he had reportedly cried when he sped away from school. Now he would loll on his back for a month under his father’s reproachful eye, recuperating incompletely from this latest rash attempt to measure up as a man. And when he did walk again, it was with a permanent limp and the cane he would carry, not as a dandified affectation, but as a badge of indistinction—a painful reminder of paternal disappointment and honor unfulfilled.³

    Preston Brooks had never been a promising young man. At eighteen, he had been suspended from college for menacing a fellow student with a gun. Two years later, he was expelled for menacing a local sheriff with a gun. Between these events, he had streaked home to fight a duel with Louis Wigfall. When he did walk again, after being shot through the hip, it was with a permanent limp and the cane he would carry, not as a dandified affectation, but as a badge of indistinction—a painful reminder of paternal disappointment and honor unfulfilled. Engraving of Preston S. Brooks, by Adam B. Walter, ca. 1857, Library of Congress.

    Six years later, Mexico seemed to offer Preston another chance at masculine redemption. Kicked out of college, he was now a married planter desultorily working land his father had given him. He is deficient in moral energy and decision in mental activity and is too indulgent in mere physical gratifications, Whitfield Sr. confessed of Preston in this period. The spiritual man must overcome the more corporeal. Preston too seemed a little bored with his vices, and when his cousin, Colonel Pierce Mason Butler, offered him a captain’s commission in the Palmetto Regiment of the South Carolina Volunteers he leapt at it. "I am much gratified at the spirit and patriotism evinced by your self and other officers, Butler noted. From Old Edgefield, nothing less was expected."

    But the weight of expectations wasn’t helping Preston now as he lurched toward Alvarado. The little port town was sixty miles down the coast and utterly tangential to General Scott’s plans in Mexico. Having lost more than forty supply vessels wrecked or run aground in the landing at Vera Cruz, Scott was particularly worried about horses and pack animals. He had always intended to gather extras along the march to the Mexican interior, but so many had already drowned that gathering more became an immediate priority. He therefore issued orders for a combined land-sea attack on Alvarado; the navy under Commodore Perry was ordered to take the city fort while the army established a perimeter to round up any residents attempting to flee with their animals. (In the end, a single naval vessel sent ahead on a recon took the fort with a single-gun salute and the animals got away.) With all his grim determination, then, Preston Brooks was limping toward a fort that had already fallen. His relentless exertions brought on a severe attack of roasting typhoid fever and rendered him "too unwell to resume the duties of his office for months to come." Weeks after landing with

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