A Slice of Humble Southern Pride
Writing about the blessed paradox of home
“Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all…” (William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! 142).
I suppose it doesn’t get any more blunt than that. These questions, asked by a Canadian college student to his Mississippi roommate, have echoed through me for the past forty years in this form, and for a decade more in others.
I’m from just outside of Birmingham, Alabama. Bessemer, to be exact. I grew up wondering why the South couldn’t have won the Civil War. I grew up loving the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide football team. When I turned fifteen, I discovered Neil Young to add to my rock and roll gods. This new love seemed to necessitate that I hate Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Southern Boogie Rock,” and anything smacking of country (read redneck) music.
Life throws sharp-breaking curves at us, and so when the University of Alabama turned me down for graduate school in English, I turned to the University of Tennessee, Alabama’s hated football rival, whose “Big Orange” enraged anyone loving Crimson.
I never hated Tennessee, though, and even purchased one of its pennants and hung it in my boyhood room (underneath my Alabama pennant) after we visited Chattanooga one…
