Is It True What They Say?

By Frank Trippett

MEDIA-MADE DIXIE by Jack Temple Kirby Louisiana State University Press; 203 pages; $9.95

In 1861 South Carolina's ex-U.S. Senator Robert Barnwell Rhett saw the future and found it tolerable. By the year 2000, he prophesied, the South would have "established an empire and wrought out a civilization that has never been equaled or surpassed -a civilization teeming with orators, poets, philosophers, statesmen and historians equal to those of Greece and Rome." Five years later the Confederacy was dead. The only thing the South never lost was its capacity to provoke intoxicated visions and literary hyperbole.

In fact, by 1978, the region had established public images of itself that may never be surpassed -portraits teeming with grotesqueries, distortions, exaggerations, sentimentalisms, myths and quasi folklore. All of them have been interesting enough to visit. Only it has been impossible to get there from here: for these locales have existed only as figments of storytellers, film makers, dramatists and songsmiths, who asked, Is It True What They Say About Dixie? Not very often.

The historic accumulation of fiction and fantasy has always confounded the analytic powers. Consider James Agee. The presence of a handful of tenant farmers moved him to an epic work of genius; yet, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it is easier to locate Agee than the not quite so exciting reality of rural Alabama.

Take the so-called Southern mystique. Long ago it became a journalistic catch-all to account for quirky folkways. It is currently a favorite of reporters straining to analyze the new presidency or transform the lackluster little Plains into a mecca of color.

Canards have so persisted that many untraveled Americans might be surprised to learn that millions of Southerners hate grits and could not quote the King James if threatened with hellfire. Scholars often fail to see that actual Mississippi is related to Yoknapatawpha County only as the tones of the musical scales are related to the symphonies of Beethoven. Even the grating H.L. Mencken did not manage to cut through the spoon bread. After a smart assessment of the Sahara of the beauxarts, Mencken paused to mourn the passing of a more "cultured" South that existed only in legend. The old iconoclast had swallowed the antebellum myth almost whole. And so have the generations that followed him.

Anybody who is even faintly curious about the South should be grateful for Jack Temple Kirby's lively, unpretentious little work. A native Virginian who is now professor of history at Miami University in Ohio, Kirby offers in Media-Made Dixie a survey of "popular historical images of the South since the advent of feature movies and annual bestseller lists." Kirby spends little attention on the South that is or was. But the not-quite-South he scrutinizes is worth the price of admission. It was created out of a flux of artistic or venal or propagandistic motives but seldom out of the whole historical reality. Audiences nevertheless gobbled up the resulting amalgam of distortion and fancy, of moonbeams and madness, as though it were gospel. They looked on Dixie as depraved, devilish or divine, depending on the shifting national attitude toward race and manners. The South was a lynch mob, a Technicolor idyl, the cradle of black aspirations, the grave of human decency, the last bastion of gentility, the birthplace of courthouse corruption. It was suffocating, lazy, aristocratic, sadistic, unspoiled; it was everything, that is, except complex, ineluctable and real.

Coolly and concisely, Kirby carries the reader through all the major images, from Birth of a Nation (in which Kentuckian D.W. Griffith hoped permanently to restore nobility to the Klan-prone bourbon class) right down through the treacly presentation of Virginians in television's The Waltons. Kirby believes the significance of that series is that it "reversed dramatically the Caldwell-Faulkner portraiture of the humble white South, and furthermore . . . created a national reference whose very southernness began to evaporate."

The book not only contains scholarship of rare lucidity, it makes a good browse. No major ingredient of the fictive-fantasy South is left unscrutinized; yet none is overtaxed. Here are the popular origins of the South as God's Little Acre, as Tara, as Walt Disney fantasy, the South as an interracial prison, the lollipop South of Shirley Temple and Bill ("Bojangles") Robinson, the "visceral" South -as Kirby calls it -of the two Williams boys, Hank and Tennessee, neither much of a student of Southern reality. There is the bestselling acreage of Frank Yerby, the black Southern novelist. Says Kirby: "Yerby's South was Margaret Mitchell's without Mammy."

He does not neglect that modern classic about the region, W.J. Cash's The Mind of the South, required reading for any journalist heading for Dixie. Nor does the author overlook the serious contemporary voices coming out of the South: Walker Percy and James Dickey. He takes their novels, indeed, as a sign that a " 'post-Southern' age has arrived."

Perhaps. If so, there is already at hand An Epitaph for Dixie. It was written in the late 1950s by Harry Ashmore, prizewinning editor of the Arkansas Gazette during the Little Rock crisis and later a fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Way back then, Ashmore saw that Dixie had long since vanished from the earth, dislodged and replaced by the televised consciousness emanating from New York and other alien parts. Ashmore supposed at the time that his modest epitaph might be useful, say, in a generation. That time is now at hand. But will the South ever lie down? Could it be that even plausible reports of Dixie's death will always turn out to be just more exaggeration?

Excerpt

"The historical quotient of Jimmy Carter's political success relates to the 'New' South -the redemption of the white masses from pity and from racism.

Carter personifies the resurgence of the white South which began about 1971. The memory and burden of Tobacco Road are purged by his work ethic and clean living. He is John-Boy Walton grown up ...

Carter is not merely a farmer, but an engineer and businessman of accomplishment. This combined with his strong sense of community reminds me most most of Herbert Hoover -our last farmboy cum millionaire businessman-engineer-president. In such a broader (and truer) perspective, Jimmy Carter may be the ultimate American regional synthesizer.

As his administration proceeds and the Georgia accents gradually seep past amazement into the everyday, Dixie's interment may occur almost unnoticed."

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