Some years ago, I spent a year at Columbia University in New York City, doing research in the field of ethnic and racial history. In that setting, I found myself using a southern accent I thought I had lost years earlier and thinking alot about my roots. I even wondered whether white southerners like myself could be considered an ethnic group, worthy of academic research, but in the following essay, I attempted to answer only the question of what it means to me to be a southerner.

    Some scholars have credited climate with the distinctive pace of southern speech patterns and life styles, while others have argued that persistent agrarianism and folk traditions have stamped even the "New" South with deeper peculiarities. Another school holds that it is the collective experience of the southern people, through slavery, military defeat, and a century of being cited for sins of which the rest of the country assumed innocence, that sets them apart. On the other hand, some have argued that "the cracker has crumbled" and that the New South has finally arrived via television and interstate highways, contenting its inhabitants with "Shake 'n Bake" or the same fried chicken available in Peoria in identical red-and-white striped barrels of fun.

    My own conviction that Southerners remain unique results not from research in such sources, but rather from forty years of first-hand observation in the region. But not until a recent trip to Georgia did I sense the real distinctiveness of my origins and the importance of seeing that my heritage survives me. Without pretending to be an impartial observer, I examined three aspects on my reputedly peculiar regional roots: an attachment to family, an attachment to place, and a fascination with the southern past.

    I sacrificed the pleasures of the trip by train, began the Christmas break early, and flew to Georgia for my Grandmother Katie's 97th birthday, on December 16th. After beating the socks off me and my cousin Cliff, a Rhodes Scholar, in Scrabble, she reviewed for us the American histories of the Reeds, Reavises, Delaneys, and Durhams, who came from England, Scotland, and Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries, landed in Virginia and the Carolinas, and drifted down the frontier, all arriving in Georgia in the 1820s. They settled near Crabapple, several of the families on lands recently taken from the Cherokee Indians. They established the Boiling Springs Primitive Baptist Church in 1831, which is still active although considerably less primitive now, with carpets and cushioned pews. With visible emotion, my grandmother told us what a humbling experience it was for her, as a child, to participate in the foot-washing ceremonies that preceded communion services there. The following day, my father and I visited burying grounds in the vicinity, and I saw the graves of my grandfather, my great grandparents, my great-great grandparents, and my great-great-great grandparents, who were also my great-great-great-great grandparents. (My grandparents were third cousins, once-removed, before they were married - actually, after they were married as well, though no longer so removed!)

    The patriarch of the family - "Grandfather Reed" - died in 1955, but he is not forgotten. He was a rock-ribbed, upright, fierce individualist, respected if not loved by everyone who knew him. He allowed no conversation at his dinner table and, as far as anyone remembers, never showed an emotion. His dignity and moral consciousness, if not his stoicism, are just as evident in my father, who, like my grandfather, for all his adult life has been the local "telephone man." His family could hardly afford to put eight children through college, so my dad began at the bottom, selling yellow pages advertising door-to-door in South Georgia. Through hard work and right living, he moved through the ranks and was rewarded a few years ago with a responsible position at Southern Bell headquarters in Atlanta. (The capstone of his career may have been the recent ceremony at the new Gainesville, Georgia, telephone building, dedicated to the memory of his father, manager there for 46 years). But the city that arose from the ashes and which now bills itself "the city too busy to hate" has become a very big and impersonal place, and my father found that his job involved him more with word processors than with people, so last spring he decided to retire and take a job as administrator of a small mental health hospital in.Columbus, the south Georgia city where he was telephone manager through the 1960s. My father is also completing a year as Governor of 56 Georgia Rotary Clubs, an organization that will continue to command much of my parents' time and talents. Meanwhile, my mother has taken the job of interim Director of Christian Education at their church. At this stage in their lives, it would be easy for them to take a well-earned rest, but it is gratifying to their son to see them so active and excited about their new opportunities to contribute to the region that produced them.

    I doubt that the extended Reed family will remain close once my grandmother is gone; we are already spread from coast to coast. But while we might not always live up to the standards my grandparents set for themselves, and for us, it will never be easy for us to set them aside. Being a member of this particular southern family requires, whether or not one wants it, a consciousness of those who have been before.

    I spent a total of 72 hours outside the South in my first 18 years, and a measure of my attachment to the region may be my habit of answering, when asked where I am from, "Georgia" or "South Georgia," decades after leaving home to go up north - all the way to North Carolina. Home until I was ten was Dublin, pop. 9000, a market town for south central Georgia peanut, corn, and cotton farmers. I had not been back to Dublin since 1965, so to test the strength of my ties, I returned the week before Christmas.

    I may not visit Dublin for another twenty years, but I am glad I grew up there. The attention showered on me by the four ladies in the telephone office - no more were needed until Dublin got dial telephones in 1959 - gave me a sense of self-worth and security that remain a part of my character; the casual,, though respectful, acquaintance I was able to develop with authority figures - my teachers, little league coaches, the minister - outside the school and church and off the ball field helped instill in me a degree of social discipline that I see lacking in many of the young suburbanites I meet in my classroom. The South is not unique in its potential to impress on its inhabitants a respect for tradition and an ability to enjoy some of life's simpler pleasures (sandlot baseball, horseshoe pitching, home-made ice cream), but these are aspects of the South's character - and of mine - which I hope will survive whatever changes lie ahead for the region - and for me.

    I have not yet mentioned any of the less pleasant aspects - the burdens - of being a Southerner, but despite my idyllic childhood, I must admit that not all was well with the South I knew, or thought I knew. I agree with historian C. Vann Woodward that Southerners have a special obligation to try to come to terms with their past, for it is their collective experience that gives Southerners not only their group character, but also a special opportunity to share with the nation some of the hard lessons they have been made to learn.

    Blacks are supposed to loom large in the southern landscape, but for me, blacks just seemed to fade into the background. Ralph Ellison was right when he said, "southern whites cannot walk, talk, sing, conceive of laws or justice, think of sex, love, the family or freedom without responding to the presence of Negroes;" I cannot imagine Dublin or the South without them. Yet my familiarity with blacks seems to have been a superficial rather than a personal one. As long as blacks remained quiet, we managed to ignore them most of the time.

    My ancestors had owned a few slaves, and I had heard stories – myths - about loyal ones who lived on with the family through the hard times following emancipation. My parents held what would have been considered moderate views on the race issue. The n-word was never permitted, and we believed in integration - though only "after blacks had brought themselves up to our standards." I am sure we thought our maid Wessie should be eternally thankful for letting her do our ironing for $2 or $3 a day. Not with just a little embarrassment do I remember the horrendous impersonations of black radio stations we did on the tape recorder my father would sometimes bring home from his office, or the prank phone calls we would make to people whose names in the phone book distinguished them, in our minds, as black. And even more embarrassing is to recall that in almost every instance, our condescension and occasional cruelty were rewarded with seemingly sincere kindness. We still get a gracious Christmas card each year from Wessie, and I will never forget the half dollar that Sammy Buehl, Dublin's fleet-footed, black, center fielder, gave me on my birthday in 1956, even though a lot of seven-year-olds in the "colored bleachers" had much more need for it than I. Theirs was a different world from mine; the rules of my world did not permit me to enter it, nor them to enter mine.

    From the late 1860s to the 1960s, white Southerners asked to be left alone to work out relations with "their" blacks; they "knew" blacks as liberal northerners could not. This is what whites in Dublin did, and evidently they have gotten away with it. Town leaders enlisted the help of the local black mortician and spokesman to keep Martin Luther King, Jr., from bringing his movement to the town, and though surface changes have come, the attitudes of white townspeople remain too familiar. Blacks have "wrecked" the new integrated high school, I was told repeatedly. And the suspicious, old woman who now lives in our house, and who proceeded to talk my ear off about her son the doctor and his hemorrhoid operation once I had convinced her that I just wanted to look around for nostalgia's sake, plans to cut down all the pines and pyracantha around the house to prevent "the niggers who won't work and who rape and kill white women" from hiding there before breaking in. White Southerners never "knew" black Southerners; I certainly did not. And the scary part is that had I not gotten out, I might still think I did.

    If I was discouraged from getting to know my black neighbors as a child, I was carefully indoctrinated into the culture of the lost cause. I vividly remember seeing, when I was about eight-years-old, a Civil War movie, which amazingly, was sympathetic to the North and the cause of emancipation. As my brother and I were leaving the theater, I said to him, "You know, I'm glad the North won the war." He was three years older then -and still is - and so knew that what I had said was heresy, and he set me right in a hurry. I was also taught to take great pride in the fact that both of Grandmother Katie's grandfathers were killed fighting for the Confederacy, one of them within sight of the home-place by some of Sherman's scavengers on their way to Atlanta. Even after I began to study American history more seriously, I continued to stand in awe of what I perceived as the South's gallantry in war and its graciousness in defeat, though I still could find no constructive meaning in the South's - or my family's - sacrifice. I will never forget the first time I taught the American history survey course to college freshmen. I had no idea what to do with the Civil War, how I could come to grips with it, so ... I skipped it. But then I read a book, a novel about a place very near where I grew up, and for the first time I began to question whether there was anything at all glorious about the South's conduct in the American Civil War, or about the deaths of my great-great grandfathers. And I began to understand the true tragedy of war, and of that one in particular.

    From Dublin I was going to Columbus, and my route took me near Plains, Georgia, a town I had driven through dozens of times and barely noticed, so I stopped to see the changes that had come since an American president had hailed from such an unlikely place. The obvious - and self-defeating - materialism behind development was disappointing, and so I quickly drove on. But my route also took me near the site that was the subject of the book I mentioned, and it was there that I became convinced of the need for Southerners, whatever our past sins, to resist becoming "merely American," and of the potential value of the South's peculiar history not only to Southerners, but to the country as a whole.

    Ten miles from Plains, the dark, almost purple clay soil began to turn a dark, then a lighter gray, the terrain began to roll noticeably, and stands of long-leaf pine replaced the flat, open peanut fields. Then twenty miles out, I crossed over Sweetwater Creek and knew I was near. I pulled through a gate and into a parking lot and was at old Camp Sumter, better known as Andersonville.

    McKinley Kantor's fictional account of the last year and a half of the war at the southern prisoner-of-war camp at Andersonville traces the pre-war lives of the captives, so that the reader can identify with them in their graphically-described suffering. Easily the book's most memorable character for me was Missouri-born Willie Mann, whose doctor father had taught him the importance of pure drinking water, and who must have suffered most at the lack of it in the camp. And though I assumed he was a fictional character, I actually cried when I read the lines with which Kantor concluded Willie's story, telling the reader that Willie survived and returned safely home at war's end. Then, in Section K of the Andersonville Cemetery, where 13,000 of the 40,000 prisoners are buried, beneath the state of Iowa's monument to them (a weeping, kneeling woman), my tears fell again, like the rain on that dreary, gray December afternoon, when I came upon the simple marble slab just like the thousands around it except that this one read

1031

WILLIE MANN

MISSOURI

    Within the stockade itself, no place is more sacred than Providence Spring, near the spot where the fictional Willie Mann was lying one August night in 1864, when a very real bolt of lightning struck the ground and produced from it the spring, by then the sole source of fresh water for the camp's current 29,000 prisoners. It was late afternoon and the site was deserted the day of my visit; despite the overcast sky and steady drizzle, it was quite warm, so in the small brick pools that have been built to catch the water below Providence Spring, I washed my face and hands, and then, remembering the ceremonies in which my grandmother had participated at Boiling Springs in north Georgia, I removed my shoes and socks and washed my feet. There follows the paragraph I wrote in my journal that afternoon:

    To what shall I dedicate myself after this ritual cleansing in the presence of only the souls who once knelt and drank deep from the spring water in which my feet rest? As I write, the sun suddenly emerges on the horizon on my right and throws an odd yellow light across this special scene: the water, tumbling as it has for 116 years toward Sweetwater Creek below; the pine woods which have since reclaimed this abused piece of earth, standing tall across the deadline, which, then, to cross was to die. But I will cross to them. And I will stoop, and from the floor of Sweetwater Creek that was a sewer, I will take a handful of silt, hoping to squeeze from it the knowledge it must hold, perhaps as many Americans hoped in 1976 to squeeze some knowledge or comfort from a self-confident - some would say self-righteous - Southerner, who seemed to have learned to bear the burden of his region's peculiar past. For in the aftermath of Vietnam, didn't many non-southerners feel for the first time, the guilt that only Southerners had previously been expected to feel? Didn't we all share a sense of shame in our country? It was clearly expecting too much that the man from Plains, even from the White House, could widely share what knowledge he may possess. But as a Southerner, don't I have a special obligation to try to share the knowledge I believe the soil in my hand holds? The knowledge that the will to power, the will to control other men's lives and make their choices for them, will lead only to sorrow, inhumanity, and, ultimately, self-destruction.