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About the Author:
Florence King is the author of Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, With Charity Toward None, and other books. Though she still lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Washington-fed yuppies may yet drive her father into the hills.
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SOUTHERN LADIES & GENTLEMEN
1"Build a Fence Around the South and You'd Have One Big Madhouse"or: The Tip of the IcebergI have good reason to know that the only way to understand Southerners fully is to be one. When I was in graduate school at the University of Mississippi, I found myself party to a drunken kidnapping and ended up in a rowboat in the middle of a lake at 2:00 A.M. with an hysterical Southern belle who kept hissing: "Kill him, Wade, kill him!"Suddenly I wondered: How did I get into this? What am I doing here? How was it possible that a sane young woman like myself could merge so effortlessly into a situation that bizarre?The answer came to me just as suddenly. I was not sane, I was a Southerner. It is interesting to speculate on the moment when a child first realizes that he or she is a Southerner. No one ever actually tells him he is one, but something always occurs at a very tender age that helps fix it in his mind. The moment of truth tends to arrive in a burst of comprehension, following an incident in which an important truth suddenly becomes perfectly clear despite the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever. Once a child successfully negotiates this psychological legerdemain and snatches chaos from the jaws of logic, he wins his crossed cavalry sabers.My red-letter moment occurred in the Year Eight of Franklin D. Roosevelt as I stood in front of the candy counter at Woolworth's. The sign on the counter read: TAR BABIES 20¢ LB. Inside the bin was amountain of little licorice candies shaped like black children. Everyone privately called them "nigger babies," but my grandmother had taught me that using the word "nigger" was one of those things no lady could do and still remain a lady. Granny wouldn't even say "tar." And so, to avoid hurting the feelings of the blacks who were standing up at the end of the segregated lunch counter where she was seated, she swiveled around on her stool and called out to me:"Do you want some babies to eat in the movies?"As the blacks looked up and stared at her, everything fell into place. Granny was an arch-segregationist with perfect manners; it's all right to segregate people as long as you don't hurt their feelings. Furthermore it is much better to be known as a white cannibal than as white trash who uses words like "nigger," because to a Southerner it is faux pas, not sins, that matter in this world.I bought a nickel bag of tar babies, and Granny and I went off to the movies. The film was H. Rider Haggard's She, which I assumed would be a newsreel about Mrs. Roosevelt. (I had grown up hearing: "It's not his fault, she made him do it. She got them all stirred up, she thinks they're just as good as she is.") I sat through the film waiting for the First Lady to appear. Finally, when the withered old woman died in the snows of Tibet, I asked Granny: "Is that Mrs. Roosevelt?"She snorted and said: "Would that it were."For the second time that day, I heard the click of regional identity in my brain. Now I understood how it was possible for my family to worship FDR despite all the things he had done during his administrations that enraged them. They had used Southern logic to "straighten everything out just fine." It was very simple: Credit Franklin, better known as He, for all the things you like, and blame Eleanor, better known as She or "that woman," for all the things you don't like. This way, He was cleared, She was castigated, and We were happy.Once my regionalism was launched, there was no stopping the stockpile of Southern contradiction that built up in my mind. As we emerged from the movie, Granny was busy making a grocery list and did not notice that I was still eating tar babies. But suddenly she turned, looked down, and gave me the Southern woman's all-powerful silent reproach known as "freezing." This is a look that needs no words. It is an exercise in pained hauteur and courageous endurance topped off with flaring nostrils and a stiffening just this side of rigor mortis. Despitemy tender age, I knew instantly what it meant without being told: Ladies don't eat on the street. Granny did not have to tell me why, because my burgeoning Southern instincts told me: It looked trashy.I already knew that ladies did not smoke on the street. My mother, who smoked five packs of Lucky Strike Greens a day, was always announcing an oncoming nicotine fit with a fluttery moan, an unfinished gesture toward her handbag, and her favorite dire pronouncement: "If I don't have a cigarette, I'm goin' to fall down dead." Yet as much as she loved tobacco, I had never seen her smoke on the street. I had seen her shake on the street and I had heard her become incoherent on the street, but she had never smoked alfresco because it looked trashy.No one ever told me what "trashy" meant, but I never asked because I can't remember ever not knowing. As any Southerner can verify, the definition of trashy is trashy.Granny and I went to the Fourteenth Street arcade market after the show. It took us nearly an hour to make our way down the sawdust-covered main aisle--Granny had to stop and "pass the time of day" with everyone she knew, which was just about everyone in the market. She sailed in, a two-hundred-pound neighborhood chatelaine in a lace bertha, bifocals, and a ten-year-old Empress Eugénie hat tilted at a rakish angle.Instantly, the air was thick with her Tidewater Virginia drawl and those view halloos worthy of John Peel that she emitted every time she saw a friend. Traffic in the aisle was soon backed up to the Bundles for Britain booth beside the front door, but Granny talked on, the spotted veil on her hat fluttering like an ensign in a high wind."Oh, look, there's Miz Whitmore! OOO-HOO! Miz Whitmore! You come right over here this very minute! I haven't seen you since the fall of Rome!"She meant two Saturdays ago, but I suddenly understood the principle behind the Southern internal time clock. Granny, a genealogy buff, was sunk like a Wasp dinosaur in the muck of prehistory, in love with any bygone age she could lay her hands on.Another regional click: What is past is perfect.After Granny had finished making her gracious way down the aisle, we bought a "mess" of pickled pigs' feet, a "mess" of oysters in the shell, and a "mess" of Maryland soft-shell crabs. Then, laden downwith enough unfit edibles to make us stagger, we stopped by the kosher deli for a "mess" of bagels, which Granny persisted in calling doughnuts."How do, Mr. Silverman! How in the world are you? Law, I haven't seen you since the Age of Pericles!""But you were here day before yesterday, Mrs. Ruding," Mr. Silverman pointed out. I looked at him strangely, realizing for the first time that he never picked up on Granny's figures of speech."Let me have a mess of your wonderful doughnuts, please, sir."Again, he looked puzzled."How many?""Twelve," said Granny.It was not the first time I had heard these two confuse each other, but now I gave some hard thought to their communication problem. How could anyone not know what a "mess" was? Everybody knew that it meant a dozen or a pound, unless, of course, it meant a bushel or a peck, or, in the country, a truckload. My maturing Southern mind conceived a clear, concise picture of a "mess." It was a neatly arranged and properly weighed collection of anything edible. If it was more than the usual unspecified amount, it was a "nice mess."It was to be many years before I realized how Mr. Silverman must have felt. Day after day, he had to stand in his hospital-clean store and listen to Southerners order a mess of his beautiful, ritually slaughtered, and rabbinically approved foods.
It has been said that when two Greeks meet they will start a restaurant, two Germans will start an army, and two Englishmen will start a silence. It is not necessary for two Southerners to meet in order to start something because we have taken a little nervous problem called schizophrenia and raised it to the level of a high art. When one-half of a Southerner meets the other half, the result is folie à deux.It is this simple fact that Yankees always miss.The best-known Yankee who missed it was that nineteenth-century traveler, Frederick Law Olmstead. Judging from his journals, his mind was blown soon after he set foot across the Mason-Dixon line.A much more recent casualty was one Dr. Jonathan Latham of Boston, who wanted to win the Pulitzer prize in regional studies.It all began on a Southbound plane, in which Dr. Latham was contentedly sipping a Scotch-on-the-rocks as he planned his scholarly attack on bourbon country. He was headed for a small city in Dixie, armed with an attaché case filled with three-by-five cards, which no Yankee sociologist can live without, and a heavily underlined copy of The Mind of the South, by Wilbur J. Cash, which no Yankee sociologist can live with--because, after all, Cash was himself a Southerner and therefore incapable of cool objectivity, that quality which alone can solve the mystery of Southern psychology.Dr. Latham, a wholehearted believer in the infallibility of the scientific method, was firmly convinced that his frequency charts and cluster-grouping graphs would triumph over the Southern penchant for irrational behavior and contradictory thought processes. He knew his forthcoming book about the South would be a brilliant success because he intended, with the aid of the objectivity for which he was deservedly famous, to drive the spike of logic through the opaque mist of contradiction and paradox that floats like a vapor over every Southerner's head.Warmed by this pleasant thought, Latham took out his copy of Gone with the Wind ...
1"Build a Fence Around the South and You'd Have One Big Madhouse"or: The Tip of the IcebergI have good reason to know that the only way to understand Southerners fully is to be one. When I was in graduate school at the University of Mississippi, I found myself party to a drunken kidnapping and ended up in a rowboat in the middle of a lake at 2:00 A.M. with an hysterical Southern belle who kept hissing: "Kill him, Wade, kill him!"Suddenly I wondered: How did I get into this? What am I doing here? How was it possible that a sane young woman like myself could merge so effortlessly into a situation that bizarre?The answer came to me just as suddenly. I was not sane, I was a Southerner. It is interesting to speculate on the moment when a child first realizes that he or she is a Southerner. No one ever actually tells him he is one, but something always occurs at a very tender age that helps fix it in his mind. The moment of truth tends to arrive in a burst of comprehension, following an incident in which an important truth suddenly becomes perfectly clear despite the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever. Once a child successfully negotiates this psychological legerdemain and snatches chaos from the jaws of logic, he wins his crossed cavalry sabers.My red-letter moment occurred in the Year Eight of Franklin D. Roosevelt as I stood in front of the candy counter at Woolworth's. The sign on the counter read: TAR BABIES 20¢ LB. Inside the bin was amountain of little licorice candies shaped like black children. Everyone privately called them "nigger babies," but my grandmother had taught me that using the word "nigger" was one of those things no lady could do and still remain a lady. Granny wouldn't even say "tar." And so, to avoid hurting the feelings of the blacks who were standing up at the end of the segregated lunch counter where she was seated, she swiveled around on her stool and called out to me:"Do you want some babies to eat in the movies?"As the blacks looked up and stared at her, everything fell into place. Granny was an arch-segregationist with perfect manners; it's all right to segregate people as long as you don't hurt their feelings. Furthermore it is much better to be known as a white cannibal than as white trash who uses words like "nigger," because to a Southerner it is faux pas, not sins, that matter in this world.I bought a nickel bag of tar babies, and Granny and I went off to the movies. The film was H. Rider Haggard's She, which I assumed would be a newsreel about Mrs. Roosevelt. (I had grown up hearing: "It's not his fault, she made him do it. She got them all stirred up, she thinks they're just as good as she is.") I sat through the film waiting for the First Lady to appear. Finally, when the withered old woman died in the snows of Tibet, I asked Granny: "Is that Mrs. Roosevelt?"She snorted and said: "Would that it were."For the second time that day, I heard the click of regional identity in my brain. Now I understood how it was possible for my family to worship FDR despite all the things he had done during his administrations that enraged them. They had used Southern logic to "straighten everything out just fine." It was very simple: Credit Franklin, better known as He, for all the things you like, and blame Eleanor, better known as She or "that woman," for all the things you don't like. This way, He was cleared, She was castigated, and We were happy.Once my regionalism was launched, there was no stopping the stockpile of Southern contradiction that built up in my mind. As we emerged from the movie, Granny was busy making a grocery list and did not notice that I was still eating tar babies. But suddenly she turned, looked down, and gave me the Southern woman's all-powerful silent reproach known as "freezing." This is a look that needs no words. It is an exercise in pained hauteur and courageous endurance topped off with flaring nostrils and a stiffening just this side of rigor mortis. Despitemy tender age, I knew instantly what it meant without being told: Ladies don't eat on the street. Granny did not have to tell me why, because my burgeoning Southern instincts told me: It looked trashy.I already knew that ladies did not smoke on the street. My mother, who smoked five packs of Lucky Strike Greens a day, was always announcing an oncoming nicotine fit with a fluttery moan, an unfinished gesture toward her handbag, and her favorite dire pronouncement: "If I don't have a cigarette, I'm goin' to fall down dead." Yet as much as she loved tobacco, I had never seen her smoke on the street. I had seen her shake on the street and I had heard her become incoherent on the street, but she had never smoked alfresco because it looked trashy.No one ever told me what "trashy" meant, but I never asked because I can't remember ever not knowing. As any Southerner can verify, the definition of trashy is trashy.Granny and I went to the Fourteenth Street arcade market after the show. It took us nearly an hour to make our way down the sawdust-covered main aisle--Granny had to stop and "pass the time of day" with everyone she knew, which was just about everyone in the market. She sailed in, a two-hundred-pound neighborhood chatelaine in a lace bertha, bifocals, and a ten-year-old Empress Eugénie hat tilted at a rakish angle.Instantly, the air was thick with her Tidewater Virginia drawl and those view halloos worthy of John Peel that she emitted every time she saw a friend. Traffic in the aisle was soon backed up to the Bundles for Britain booth beside the front door, but Granny talked on, the spotted veil on her hat fluttering like an ensign in a high wind."Oh, look, there's Miz Whitmore! OOO-HOO! Miz Whitmore! You come right over here this very minute! I haven't seen you since the fall of Rome!"She meant two Saturdays ago, but I suddenly understood the principle behind the Southern internal time clock. Granny, a genealogy buff, was sunk like a Wasp dinosaur in the muck of prehistory, in love with any bygone age she could lay her hands on.Another regional click: What is past is perfect.After Granny had finished making her gracious way down the aisle, we bought a "mess" of pickled pigs' feet, a "mess" of oysters in the shell, and a "mess" of Maryland soft-shell crabs. Then, laden downwith enough unfit edibles to make us stagger, we stopped by the kosher deli for a "mess" of bagels, which Granny persisted in calling doughnuts."How do, Mr. Silverman! How in the world are you? Law, I haven't seen you since the Age of Pericles!""But you were here day before yesterday, Mrs. Ruding," Mr. Silverman pointed out. I looked at him strangely, realizing for the first time that he never picked up on Granny's figures of speech."Let me have a mess of your wonderful doughnuts, please, sir."Again, he looked puzzled."How many?""Twelve," said Granny.It was not the first time I had heard these two confuse each other, but now I gave some hard thought to their communication problem. How could anyone not know what a "mess" was? Everybody knew that it meant a dozen or a pound, unless, of course, it meant a bushel or a peck, or, in the country, a truckload. My maturing Southern mind conceived a clear, concise picture of a "mess." It was a neatly arranged and properly weighed collection of anything edible. If it was more than the usual unspecified amount, it was a "nice mess."It was to be many years before I realized how Mr. Silverman must have felt. Day after day, he had to stand in his hospital-clean store and listen to Southerners order a mess of his beautiful, ritually slaughtered, and rabbinically approved foods.
It has been said that when two Greeks meet they will start a restaurant, two Germans will start an army, and two Englishmen will start a silence. It is not necessary for two Southerners to meet in order to start something because we have taken a little nervous problem called schizophrenia and raised it to the level of a high art. When one-half of a Southerner meets the other half, the result is folie à deux.It is this simple fact that Yankees always miss.The best-known Yankee who missed it was that nineteenth-century traveler, Frederick Law Olmstead. Judging from his journals, his mind was blown soon after he set foot across the Mason-Dixon line.A much more recent casualty was one Dr. Jonathan Latham of Boston, who wanted to win the Pulitzer prize in regional studies.It all began on a Southbound plane, in which Dr. Latham was contentedly sipping a Scotch-on-the-rocks as he planned his scholarly attack on bourbon country. He was headed for a small city in Dixie, armed with an attaché case filled with three-by-five cards, which no Yankee sociologist can live without, and a heavily underlined copy of The Mind of the South, by Wilbur J. Cash, which no Yankee sociologist can live with--because, after all, Cash was himself a Southerner and therefore incapable of cool objectivity, that quality which alone can solve the mystery of Southern psychology.Dr. Latham, a wholehearted believer in the infallibility of the scientific method, was firmly convinced that his frequency charts and cluster-grouping graphs would triumph over the Southern penchant for irrational behavior and contradictory thought processes. He knew his forthcoming book about the South would be a brilliant success because he intended, with the aid of the objectivity for which he was deservedly famous, to drive the spike of logic through the opaque mist of contradiction and paradox that floats like a vapor over every Southerner's head.Warmed by this pleasant thought, Latham took out his copy of Gone with the Wind ...
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- PublisherBlack Swan
- Publication date1989
- ISBN 10 0552993379
- ISBN 13 9780552993371
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages256
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