Going Home

I have grown a little tired of philosophy, at least for the moment. I need a break. I think this is two fold. I have been sick with a sinus infection, nothing serious, but just rather nagging.

The second and most important is reading Ron Rash. I had know about him for a long time and a friend had ben telling me that it is a must read. I had even heard him speak at a literary festival. Well finally my friend handed me a copy of Saints at the River. He told me to read it in a night. It was a skinny paperback, not more than 300 pages of medium sized text. I decided I would give it a go. The first image of the novel was captivated--poetic, and eerie. It was eerie because of the language. It was my language. The language I had heard all of my life. As I read more into the novel, the story became a story that I might have heard, with characters I knew. I could not put it down. I finished it and starting reading it again in the next 4 hours.

Why was I drawn to it?

I am a southerner. I am the son of once proud plantation owners, of grocery store owners who lost it all on a black day in 1929, I am a son of people who once joined a group whose blood boiled with hate, but I am also the soon of Ohio farmers. My family came here with the Mayflower and Jamestown and haven't left. I will say that I have tried to downplay my southern ancestry. I do not know why. There is so much baggage. I read Robert Penn Warren about Jack Burden and I see myself. I read Faulkner about the decaying South and I see my family. I try to avoid it.

That was until I picked up Rash.

I really don't have roots in Appalachia. But I do in the state. I know the language, the peoples, the drives up into the mountains my family would take every year. The canoeing on Jocassee, our hiking trips. I knew the world he was describing and the language he was using to describe it. Veiled and poetic, always revealing more than an outsider will ever know. What is left out, what plot is undeveloped. In the South, there are certain things you let alone, some you hint at, others remain unsaid. That is in the story.

I spent one night at the beach talking in my slow, forgotten, southern accent practising the art of story telling that is so often forgotten, but is part of the life blood of the south. We sit and tell stories. True or false--it does not matter. All that maters is that they could have happened. They drip with history and family, the air so thick you could cut it, always haunted by ghosts of the past that haunt us in the very furniture and furnishings that surround us. Always blurring the lines between story and narrative poetry. The landscapes of every tale breathed the air as we kept spinning tales.

I read another Rash...now I'm on to Cormac McCarthy's early work. Soon I will move to Erskine Caldwell and if I get my courage up, I will read Faulkner. We need more academics reading and writing about Southern Literature. Those of us who know it, who live it, who are haunted by it, who are even part of it. Not an archivist at Dartmouth. Southern Literature doesn't let you study it from afar. It is not some dead work that can be tossed into some neat cannon. It cries out with the agony of a South that has never been consolidated, for there are many Souths, nor a south that has gotten over its history, for we live with our past unlike those other parts of the nation that seek to build over its scars, and of the south that history has forgotten--like the gullah villages on the coast.