Forum:

To the Editors:

Faulkner was speaking for Southerners when he said, “The past is not dead; it isn’t even past.” Having recently moved North after a life spent mostly in the South, I find Northerners wondering why Southerners talk as if the past were real. I tell them that in the South, we have been busy for a long time trying to sort out the past worth keeping from the past worth getting rid of. It’s a job that connects us with most of the world’s people today—the vital business of achieving a particular identity in a plural world.

For my own part, I hope Southerners (white and black) don’t forget the suffering, the defeat, the injustice of Southern history, or the courage it took to endure and throw some of it off. We Americans can use that remembering. It might remedy our rootlessness, our disdain for limits. And it might free us for change.

I have always wondered if a Southerner put up that famous sign over the Western bar: “I ain’t what I oughta be; I ain’t what I’m gonna be; but I ain’t what I was.”

Donald W. ShriverJr., President

Union Theological Seminary

New York City

It was the mid-’50s, and my home town, Clinton, Tenn., had just become integrated. Many of the scenes of those days will never leave my memory. At the courthouse, endless speeches inflamed the night air. On the outskirts of town lighted crosses sat overlooking the city as white knights danced beneath them. On my 15th birthday a series of bombs erupted inside our school, and for two years I was among 1,000 high school students who rode 13 miles a day to a lent-out grammar school, where the commodes were the right height for second-graders.

Recently my wife and I went to Montgomery, Ala., to pick up our first child, an adopted daughter. As we got in the car to leave, I whispered to her, “Melinda, thank heavens you never knew, you never knew.”

Dan Kenneth Phillips

Jacksonville, Ala.

Love and Hate

I was born and raised in Clinton, N.C., the son of two professionals who happen to be black. I lived in New Jersey for 13 years. I regret my return to the Sunbelt.

The first major shock was the disproportionate number of young blacks with college degrees who were unemployed and turning to alcohol and drugs. It was also obvious that the arrogance and greed of the white community remained largely unchanged. My wife, who happens to be white, was able to observe some of this firsthand. There was a prevailing hostility toward blacks, but what was most shocking was the automatic assumption by whites that all other whites shared this hostility. What has been harder for my wife to accept is the hostility of the black community toward her. I’m beginning to hate myself for loving this place as I do.

Delford A. Jones

Clinton, N.C.

Forever Proud

The new spirit of the American South is an outgrowth of the trauma experienced by the U.S. in the ’60s and early ’70s. Long the nation’s moral whipping boy, the South gained its amnesty during a period of racial tension, assassination, war, urban unrest, youthful alienation and political misconduct that left no American unaffected.

Free to think of itself in a different light, the South has replaced self-righteous demagoguery with genuine pride. The South has always been proud of its ways despite, perhaps even because of, the derision it suffered for its shortcomings. But the new Southern pride is based on the steady progress the region has made toward overcoming its problems while retaining its special identity.

Albert Oetgen

Savannah, Ga.

Lost Our Character

Forty years ago, Columbia, S.C., was a sleepy little Southern town (pop. 40,000) with wide streets, a farmers’ market, 12 o’clock whistles, midday dinner, and lots of blacks living in decaying little shacks who helped with the house, yard and children for shameful wages —but then nobody had much money in those days. You would not believe the transformation we have undergone: enclosed, air-conditioned malls every few blocks, high-rise apartments and complexes, condominiums, housing for the elderly, underprivileged, young and swingy, middle-aged and any category. No more slums and quaint neighborhoods. Blacks hold important jobs. They are heads of agencies, live in exclusive neighborhoods, get elected to judgeships and the legislature. To say that maids and yardmen are vanishing would be trite. About the only thing that has not changed is the weather—still beastly hot in summer and mild in winter.

We have entered the mainstream of America. We’re already complaining about the traffic congestion, and it won’t be long before we’ll have smog and pollution to contend with. It’s a good feeling not to be apologetic about being a Southerner, but it’s not the same South. We’ve lost our character, but I guess that’s the price of progress.

Evelyn Baker Alion

Columbia, S.C.

A Computer and a Bible

The thing that I find most interesting about the New South is that it clings to traditional values. The New South is carrying a computer in one hand and the Bible in the other.

Tarek Hamada

St. Louis

In Los Angeles the only game in town seems to be talking about “getting your head together” and then never doing it. In New York it’s fashionable to decry the physical deterioration of “landmark” buildings and then forget about them on the way to your air-conditioned office. But in Charleston, S.C., citizens’ groups have restored entire blocks to antebellum splendor.

Southerners are working out a consensus between the dynamics of contemporary living and the values of traditional life.

Edmund Guertin

Jr. Los Angeles

Lust and Eden

The South is space, light, trees, the sun. The South is mediocrity, violence, boosterism, glorified ignorance. It is friendliness and a joy in simple pleasures —and simple ideas. It is row upon row of churches, Maginot-like bastions against the Forces of Darkness. It is the Darkness as well: a lust for guilty, drunken excess. And, perhaps most memorably, the South is sudden visions of Eden, like crossing the Black Warrior River in Alabama at dusk and looking down to see the Peaceable Kingdom, painted in gold and rust.

Michael Riggall

Atlanta

The Big Switch

The move to the Sunbelt is on! It appears that the rest of this country has discovered the South’s faith in God and belief in the Judeo-Christian ethic.

Edward S. Moak

Brookhaven, Miss.

Look Away, Dixiecrats

The only change I can see in the past 50 years is that the Dixiecrats have finally registered as Republicans.

Helen Doyle

Fort Myers, Fla.

View from Vereeniging

Brought up in the South after being transplanted from the North at age twelve, I witnessed a good deal of change there during my formative years. But the magnitude of the change never really struck me until I was assigned to my present job in South Africa.

Here I feel as though I were living in the Southern U.S. of the early 1800s. I believe the progress in the American South will eventually result in more harmonious race relations than now exist in other areas of America. I cannot predict the same for South Africa.

Robert P. Davids

Vereeniging, South Africa

Fear of Liking

The South has many new and exciting attractions, but many people are scared to visit for fear they may like it.

Tracey Mitchell

Memphis

Southern Hospitality

I have one thing to say concerning our Northern brothers’ growing interest in coming here: “Yankees, go home!”

Larry Henley

Pruitt, Ark.

Wrong Issue

You have assigned the wrong title to your issue. It should be: “Why Have the People of the U.S. Changed?”

Integration, Social Security, Medicare, investments by foreign companies, welfare, farm subsidies and wildlife protection have taken place in the North, South, East and West. These are many of the things that have transformed this large country. The change cannot be assigned to only one region—the South.

Hallie F. Blair

Blair, S.C.

In 92 Years…

I have been a Southerner for my 92 years—born and reared in Kentucky, moved for a while to North Carolina, married into Tennessee.

The South is changing, but the “upper crust” has resisted so far. There is more flexibility in its thinking and actions, but down deep little real change. I recall the constant admonition, “Remember who you are”—and that meant a Southern lady or gentleman.

Our Yankee friends have changed too. The Southern gentleness has often been “caught” as the mixing brought on by marriage, college and business transfers has made Southerners and Northerners speak, eat, live more alike.

I truly believe that before another 92 years go by, the good people of the U.S. will live up to the name United.

Mary Caperton Bowles Dale

Columbia, Tenn.