Reading the South: Book Reviews and Notes by Faculty, Staff, Students, and Friends of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture

Cold Mountain. By Charles Frazier. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997. $24.00.

By the time anyone sees this, many Southern Register readers will have already read Cold Mountain, the remarkable first novel of North Carolinian Charles Frazier. In recent weeks the book has gone to number one on the bestseller list. (Tarheels must be proud; at this writing, numbers one and two on the list are books by North Carolina writers--the other is Patricia Cornwell.)

Cold Mountain has met with all sorts of high praise for its compelling narrative and lyrical style, and there's not much that I could add to that here--it is a pleasure to read. But I do want to suggest that the novel will also have great and long-lasting worth as reading material to accompany texts and lectures for courses on Civil War history, Southern Studies, material culture, 19th-century Appalachian culture and history, and women's studies.

The story of Inman, a Confederate soldier wounded at Petersburg who deserts and walks hundreds of miles back to his home, Cold Mountain is based on Frazier's great-great uncle and on years of research about life in Appalachian North Carolina, where his family has lived for 200 years. In a recent New York Times article, Frazier said: "Part of what I wanted to do was to learn as much as I could about the history of that little piece of the world." To do this, he dug deep into family and community lore, commercial records, photos, letters and diaries, and books, among them the 18th-century naturalist William Bartram's Travels, Robert Cantwell's Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound, William Trotter's Bushwackers: The Civil War in North Carolina, W. K. McNeil's Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture, and James Mooney's Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees.

The resultant descriptions of landscape, work, artifact, and lore are richly rendered:

Ada began to make out rectangular shapes through the trees. Huts. Cabins. A tiny Cherokee village, a ghost town, its people long since driven out onto the Trail of Tears and banished to a barren land. Except for one rotted relic from the age of wattle and daub, the cabins were made of chestnut logs, peeled and notched and lapped. Roofed with shingles and curls of chestnut bark. A big white oak had fallen across one hut, but the rest were largely intact after three decades along, and such was the power of chestnut timber against damp that they might remain so for a hundred years more before melting into the ground. Grey lichen grew on the cabin logs and dried stalks of horseweed and pigweed and fleabane rose from the snow in the doorways. There was not flat ground for raising much in the way of crops, so it might have been a seasonal hunting camp. Or refuge wherein a handful of carnivore outcasts had lived, nearly anchoritic. All in all, only a half-dozen little windowless cells. They were set at uneven intervals down the bank of the creek, which was deep and strong and black, its way broken by great smooth boulders with green moss grown on their faces.

And here is another example:

The crops were growing well, largely, Ruby claimed, because they had been planted, at her insistence, in strict accordance with the signs. In Ruby's mind, everything--setting fence posts, making sauerkraut, killing hogs--fell under the rule of the heavens. Cut firewood in the old of the moon, she'd advised, otherwise it won't do much but fry and hiss at you come winter. Next April when the poplar leaves are bout the size of a squirrel's ear, we'll plant corn when the signs are in the feet; otherwise the corn will just shank and hang down. November, we'll kill a hog in the growing of the moon, for if we don't the meat will lack grease and pork chops will cup up in the pan.

To understand Bartram, Frazier visited his Philadelphia home, and to more fully flesh a character who became a fiddler, Frazier traveled to a fiddler's convention. A large part of Cold Mountain was written in solitude in a mountain cabin; "the long view from the porch is the book's presiding spirit." Using these tools and his native ear for the language of the Southern mountains, Frazier constructs his saga: the lives of men and women of poor to middling circumstance as they really were lived, and a war without noble cause or glory.

I wish more often that we would use fiction in classes that are not about literature. Fiction can be a natural and authentic complement to history and cultural studies. There's no reason to shun or fear it because it doesn't deal entirely in fact. As Shelby Foote (who by the way was an advance reader of Cold Mountain and admired it) said, "it doesn't much matter if facts come out of documents or out of your head, they are still things you work with and respect. You are looking for the truth, and . . . it's not a different truth, it's the same truth." Using a book like Cold Mountain alongside, say, Foote's Civil War would surely help students get as close as possible to that truth. I urge teachers to adopt this novel to enhance any number of courses on American culture.

Lisa N. Howorth

Power in the Blood: Land, Memory, and a Southern Family. By John Bentley Mays. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. 288 pages. $24.00.

John Bentley Mays grew up with enough inherited regional, family, and personal burdens to have made a first-rate Faulkner character. This splendid new book has Mays using his family history to try to unravel the meanings of the South. It takes its place as one of the most insightful recent attempts of that enduring tradition of telling about the South.

From one of the South's oldest families, Mays, who is the art critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, was the son of a Louisiana planter who died when young John Bentley was six years old, and his mother died of cancer three years later. He embraced the South's traditional agrarian culture as a young man, clinging to the heroic image of the Confederate Lost Cause and the rigid morality of his undergraduate school, Bob Jones University. After college, his mental world came apart and he had a nervous breakdown, after which he headed north for graduate school. 

Mays has been an expatriate Southerner for several decades, but his regional burdens returned in force when his last close Deep South relative, Aunt Vandalia, died in Greenwood, Louisiana, in 1990. Feeling an imminent severing of his ties to place and family, Mays embarks on a fascinating physical and spiritual pilgrimage through the South, tracing his family's settlement pattern by visiting sites in coastal Virginia, the Staunton River Valley, upland South Carolina, east Texas, and then back to his homeplace in Louisiana.

Mays uses family history to show "genealogy's unfurling banners of identities." He is generally appreciative and fair of his ancestors and the Southern past, not judging them precipitously. He is surely an independent thinker, though, and the book is filled with sharp judgments. He cannot make himself at home in the backcountry where some of his ancestors lived, and the rough-hewn yeoman culture does not have an appeal to him. Mays's South is the agrarian South, but it is that of Thomas Jefferson, Stoic philosophy, and other learned and artistic aspirations. His conclusion is that the Southern identity has always been rooted in the land and memory. He found "precious traces" of efforts to build a South resting on natural rhythms of the seasons and abiding loyalties of place. He does not ignore the corroding effects of race relations on older Southern culture, noting that his ancestors world was "rooted in racial injustice and black misery," which he sees as "hateful Southern things." Essie De, the black woman who helped raise him, plays the key role in the narrative, helping to realize that he can understand the South of his ancestry and raising, and yet not have to embrace fully its old identities.

Mays's work is an imaginative effort to understand a Southern philosophy. He comes to appreciate genealogy as "a way of knowledge, a practice of the examined life." In remembering the ancestors, people "summon up lessons and warnings created in the course of living in a certain place and examples of how our own moral living can be done."

The image that Mays finds to characterize his Southern philosophy is from classical tradition, and it reflects not an essence of the South but suggests its diversity. While on campus at the University of Mississippi, Mays sits in the University Grove, amid the Corinthian-columned buildings, and recalls an image from Heraclitus of the bow and lyre, opposing forces interacting to make harmonious music. From his own genealogy and Southern history, he learns that the South is like "a chord created by the beautiful conflict of the string and bow that makes it sing." The result is a harmony coming from plurality. The beauty he sees in Southern culture comes from the interaction of the different versions of the South that have arisen on Southern soil, conflicting yet making beautiful music in the end.

Charles Reagan Wilson

William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist. By Daniel J. Singal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. 357 pages. $29.95.

Daniel Singal's intellectual history of William Faulkner has been long awaited, and it does not disappoint. Amid the giant corpus of Faulkner studies, it stands out as a serious study of his ideas, placing him in the context of 20th-century American thought.

Readers of Singal's The War Within will be familiar with his general interpretation of Faulkner. Singal shows him growing up in a Victorian culture that had become rooted in the late 19th-century South, and then he traces his growth beyond that culture into Modernism. The achievement and value of this book is Singal's precision in demonstrating, step-by-step, Faulkner's pilgrimage.

The South's Victorian culture had taught young Faulkner that absolute moral standards existed and must be honored. Hard work would lead to material success. Above all, Southern Victorianism posited a sharp distinction between civilization and savagery, and Victorians yearned for a "radical standard of innocence and purity," banishing traces of evil and corruption. Singal shows how Faulkner came slowly to move beyond this sensibility and embrace Modernism as he developed as a writer. He became aware of psychology in the 1920s, and Freud seems a major influence. Like other good Modernists, Faulkner dived into the dark areas of the human psyche, exploring the passions and conflicts of his characters.

Faulkner's art worked to demythologize the Southern Victorian sensibility, which had been embodied in the powerful Cavalier mythology represented in his family by the Old Colonel, William C. Falkner, his legendary great-grandfather. Singal effectively combines biography with his greater interest in Faulkner's ideas to present a new approach to the Nobel Prize winner. Throughout, he emphasizes that neither the Victorian nor the Modern sensibility would gain complete dominance in Faulkner, creating a tension and the need for "incessant fine-tuning," which becomes a key for Singal to Faulkner's creativity.

Singal's study is convincing that identity is the major subject of Faulkner's work. Specialists will likely wonder about the neatness of his Victorian-Modernist dichotomy, and he does not explore the relationship of Faulkner's intellectual Modernism to the changes associated with socioeconomic modernization of the South. Still, this book is a thorough, well-written, and smart study. Singal has waded through the massive Faulkner scholarship and draws from it with the ease of a careful scholar. He presents a striking interpretive framework for understanding a complex writer.

Charles Reagan Wilson

Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B. B. King. By B. B. King and David Ritz. New York: Avon Books, 1996. 338 pages. $23.00 cloth, $6.99 paper.

Even if its author-subject hadn't turned out to be a major figure in American music, Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B. B. King would be an interesting and entertaining tale. Its first, gripping chapters tell of King's hard childhood in the Mississippi Delta, where he lived on his own from the age of 10. Decades-old hurts are described in vivid detail, leaving no doubt that King grew up living the blues. His fondness for music, women, and hard work also developed at an early age, and helped him through his many difficulties. Later chapters describe his move to Memphis, where he struggled to make it as a musician, his years on the road touring strictly in the black community, and his eventual mild crossover success after white rock fans embraced him in the 1970s. King's downhome wit, his acceptance of whatever life throws him, and his love for music and for humanity shine through the book.

Steve Cheseborough

Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South. By Tracy Elaine K'Meyer. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. 242 pages. $35.00.

Whereas most scholars have emphasized the conservative nature of the religion of white Southerners, Tracy Elaine K'Meyer in Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South shows the radical potential of Christians who challenged Southern norms in both economic life and race relations with a cooperative farm that operated from 1942 to 1968 in Sumter County, Georgia. K'Meyer stresses how ideas about community, rooted in the agricultural and evangelical South, served as inspiration for Koinonia Farm, which racist notions of white community life challenged the Farm's efforts.

Ted Ownby

One of the finest poets now writing anywhere, T. R. Hummer of Meridian, Mississippi, arrives at his own mature power with Walt Whitman in Hell, his sixth book. In this powerful collection, Hummer searches the nation, from the backwoods of the South to the streets of New York, for an expanded awareness of history. A sense of narrative emerges not through strict march of story but by a subtle accretion of compelling imagery and powerful language. The poems revolve around a lone wanderer in a desolate landscape; Hummer presents us with a witness who relates the isolation and woe of contemporary urban life. We readily allow Hummer to place his world beside our own and hear a miraculous voice meditating on time, memory, inheritance, and irony of loss.

Maury Gortemiller

The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South. By Eli N. Evans. New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1997. $16.00.

Eli N. Evans's first book, The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South, was selected by the Free Press of Simon an Schuster as one of 12 books to be reissued in celebration of the press's 50th anniversary. The reissued text includes a new introduction by Willie Morris and five new chapters by Evans. This classic portrait of Jews in the South takes readers inside the nexus between Southern and Jewish histories, from the earliest immigrants to present day. Evans intertwines his autobiography of growing up Jewish in the Bible Belt with the stories of communities, individuals, and events in this unfamiliar landscape in America.

Guide to Selected Manuscript and Photograph Collections of the Filson Club Historical Society. Compiled by James J. Holmberg, James T. Kirkwood, and Mary Jean Kinsman. Louisville, Kentucky: The Filson Club Historical Society, 1996. 179 pages. $12.00.

The Filson Club, founded in Louisville in 1884 as Kentucky's state historical society, is a privately endowed nonprofit research library with four collection departments (manuscripts, photographs and prints, library, and museum), a publishing department, and an education program. The Guide to Selected Manuscript and Photograph Collections of the Filson Club Historical Society features materials from the manuscript department, which contains approximately 1.5 million items, and describes the photographs and prints collections, which total approximately 50,000 images. The collections focus on Kentucky but contain titles and files concerning Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and other states. The cost of the Guide is $12.00 postpaid. Orders should be addressed to Manuscript Department, The Filson Club, 1310 South Third Street, Louisville KY 40208.

May We All Remember Well, Volume 1: A Journal of the History and Cultures of Western North Carolina. Edited by Robert S. Brunk. Asheville, North Carolina: Robert S. Brunk Auction Services Inc., 1997. 288 pages, 385 illustrations (95 in color), indexed. $40.00 paper.

May We All Remember Well is the first in a series of publications documenting the Native American, African American, and European cultures in Western North Carolina. The volume consists of 18 works on archaeology, architecture, photography, decorative arts, and related subjects. Proceeds from the sale of the first volume will pay for stipends for writers and researchers who submit proposals for research to be published in later volumes. The cost is $40.00 plus $4.50 shipping for the first copy and $1.00 for each additional copy; North Carolina residents should add 6 percent sales tax. Address orders to Robert S. Brunk Auction Services Inc., P.O. Box 2135, Asheville, NC 28802; telephone 704-254-6846; fax 7040-254-6545; e-mail auction@rsbrunk.com.

American Made Music Series

The University Press of Mississippi is four-deep into what will be a continuing series, edited by blues scholar David Evans and titled American Made Music. The books cover a wide berth of American-born forms of music, from traditional country to gospel, to blues.

Charles Wolfe, author of The Life and Times of Leadbelly, weighs in with In Close Harmony: The Story of the Louvin Brothers ($40.00 cloth, $16.95 paper). In Close Harmony is the expanded version of what was to originally to be the annotations for a Louvin brothers complete recordings box set released on Charly Records, which may explain why the narrative at times takes a back seat to session notes and other information. But, Wolfe does keep the story moving otherwise and provides the first book-length treatment of one of the most influential traditional country duos ever, as well as an in-depth discography.

If you thought that blues lyrics dealt only with jelly rolls, king bees, and back doors, be sure to pick up a copy of Roosevelt's Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Artists on FDR ($45.00 cloth, $18.00 paper). Although the genre is usually clear of political commentary, Dutch scholar Guido van Rijn presents multiple examples of blues artists that confronted topical events of the FDR administration in song.

Van Rijn uses lyrics as a form of oral tradition to chronicle the attitudes of black men and women regarding such subjects as the Red Cross Store, the Works Progress Administration, and World War II. The information on the original recordings are meticulously done, and the book contains over 100 transcribed lyrics. Combined with an accompanying CD of 25 songs dubbed from 78s produced by Agram Blues in conjunction with the author Roosevelt's Blues is an important document that would be otherwise lost.

Shane K. Bernard, son of swamp pop great Rod Bernard, has undertaken an unwieldy task with Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues ($50.00 cloth, $17.00 paper). Bernard gives a brief history of the Acadian region of Louisiana with all its diversity in order to give context to the unique form of pop music which the area produced mainly in the 1950s and '60s. Following a history lesson on the region and the music, Swamp Pop allows the musicians to speak for themselves and contains individual case studies of some of the genre's more popular artists. Besides being a scholar in the field, Bernard is also a musician and lifelong fan of swamp pop, all of which are evident. Along with the hard cover version of the book, comes a Swamp Pop CD, which may be purchased separately in bookstores, and contains 14 songs that define the genre as performed by the original artists.

New Zealander Alan Young came to the American South to study blues but instead found himself fascinated by black gospel music and its surrounding culture. Woke Me Up This Morning: Black Gospel Singers and the Gospel Life ($47.50 cloth, $18.00 paper) is the product of Young's grassroots level research in the black gospel communities of southwest Tennessee and northwest Mississippi. Seventeen interviews with people involved in the gospel community in different roles such as pastor, performer, and radio personality constitute the bulk of the work and serve to illustrate the importance and influence of gospel music on the African American community. Young remains largely absent from the interviews, providing context for the anecdotes. However unobtrusive, he deftly guides his subjects to speak in colorful detail regarding gospel music and its history and surviving traditions as well as its relationship with the blues.

Scott McCraw