It was the world of Southern, rural, black growing up, of folks sitting on porches day and night, of folks calling your mama, 'cau...se you walked by and didn't speak, and of the switch waiting when you got home so that you could be taught some manners. It was a world of single black older women schoolteachers, dedicated, tough; they had taught your mama, her sisters, and her friends. They knew your people in ways that you never would and shared their insight, keeping us in touch with generations. It was a world where we had a history.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Traditionally Southern statesmen have been orators. A society emphasizing social rituals and manners requires a kind of reverence ...for words to adequately express sentiment and feeling. The dregs of this rhetoric remain the stock in trade of the grass roots politicians. The Southerner generally does not shy away--to the extent the Northerner does--from a use of language that is something more than bare statement. The Northerner, with his conditioned respect for practicality and getting-to-the-point is more likely to possess a far greater reading than speaking vocabulary and to associate anything more than simple expression with ostentation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... as a result of generations of betrayal, it's nearly impossible for Southern Negroes to trust a Southern white. No matter what ...he does or what he suffers, a white liberal is never established beyond suspicion in the hearts of the minority.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think those Southern writers [William Faulkner, Carson McCullers] have analyzed very carefully the buildup in the South of a spe...cial consciousness brought about by the self- condemnation resulting from slavery, the humiliation following the War Between the States and the hope, sometimes expressed timidly, for redemption.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the most singular facts about the unwritten history of this country is the consummate ability with which Southern influence..., Southern ideas and Southern ideals, have from the very beginning even up to the present day, dictated to and domineered over the brain and sinew of this nation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Go! dive into the Southern Sea, and when Th'ast found, to trouble the nice sight of men,... A swelling pearl, and such whose single worth Boasts all the wonders which the seas bring forth, Give it Endymion's love, whose ev'ry tear Would more enrich the skilful jeweller.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have for years been intrigued with the ways in which Jews and southerners are alike--stepchildren of an anguished history. From ...the period before the Civil War, southerners have used Old Testament analogies to portray themselves as "the chosen people," surrounded and outnumbered but destined to survive and triumph against overwhelming odds. This analogy has endured deep in the southern psyche, influencing subconsciously its reactions to events. For example, in 1967, during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, polls showed that the South was caught up in military fervor and admiration for the lightning victory of the Israelis. It was almost as if Moshe Dayan had become the Israeli Stonewall Jackson, outthinking and outfighting his Arab foes, just as the boys in gray had done in the Shenandoah Valley against vastly superior numbers in the 1860s.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the ...sunset over the box house hills and cry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »