The following is a list of frequently read Southern Cultures essays in the classroom from 2016–2017. Why did our readers choose to consult these essays again and again throughout the year? We can’t know for sure. They do point to preoccupations of the present moment—a society grappling with racism and its symbols; political turns of tide. But they also demonstrate the diversity of perspectives found on our pages and among our readership. From American Indian rock ‘n’ roll to women’s behind-the-scenes civil rights work to the invention of southern beaches, we invite you to explore some of that lively variety here.
Bertrand’s essay unveils what every folklorist knows about rumor. They reveal deeply felt anxieties and fears. They are real and true to those who believe them. They are nearly impossible to substantiate. And attempts at debunking them only fan their flames. The rumor at hand in Bertrand’s essay is a racial slur Elvis Presley reportedly uttered: The only thing Blacks could do for him was buy his records and shine his shoes. Ready to believe a working-class white Mississippian would be a racist, Bertrand argues, many African Americans cited the rumor as evidence of Presley’s disregard for the Black culture whose expressive traditions he borrowed so heavily from. Bertrand traces the rumor to a potential source, concluding, however, that Presley’s tenuous reputation among African Americans “was tied to a long-standing and often tragic relationship between black and white people in the western hemisphere” (65). This essay is a great read for anyone interested in rumor; popular culture; history and memory.
Shrift brings an acute anthropological perspective to bear in her essay on the Angola Prison Rodeo. Shrift uses a “public display” framework to analyze the event, which has taken place annually at Louisiana’s State Penitentiary for more than 50 years. Shrift maintains that the rodeo communicates “complex and disturbing messages about crime and incarceration to a curious public” (23). Through close attention to symbolic forms, Shrift identifies several ways in which the rodeo reinforces the sexual and racial politics of this prison and the prison system more generally. Men get locked in sexually suggestive positions as they grasp and fall all over each other in rodeo games. Additionally, the Confederate flag is prominently on display and many African American inmates choose not to participate in the rodeo. Shrift’s final analysis notes that the rodeo and the accompanying Inmate Arts Festival “normalize incarceration” by drawing clear boundaries between the public spectators and the inmate performers and artists and thus reinforcing inmate otherness. This is an excellent essay for students of festival, public display, and symbolic forms.
In this informative essay about the Miccosukee tribe and the rock band Tiger Tiger, Patsy West and Lee Tiger are likely exposing many readers for the first time to the Miccosukee tribe of South Florida and to Native American rock music. West’s introduction provides a short history of the tribe’s relation to other native peoples of the region, their entrepreneurial engagement with the tourist economy along the Tamiami Highway (U.S. Highway 41), and their nurturing of a vibrant expressive culture. Her profile of Stephen and Lee Tiger, the Miccosukee brothers who started the band Tiger Tiger in the early 1970s, demonstrates how they became spokespeople for the tribe, promoting its arts and history and substantially increasing tourism dollars to Miccosukee communities. An autobiographical essay by Lee Tiger reflects on his career in music with his brother, the influence of their musically gifted and politically powerful father, and the significance of their songs within the genre of Native American rock-n-roll music. This essay is a good resource for American Indian studies; popular culture and music studies; southern studies; and folklore classes.
Kahrl’s important essay uncovers the power structure behind the development of the coastal south and the wholesale removal of its African American landowning residents. Kahrl crafts a compelling history of the wild, unruly and constantly shifting southern coastline and its transformation to rigidly controlled sandy beaches held in place with federally funded jetties and lined with high-end private real estate developments. Illustrated with examples from North Carolina, Virginia and Florida, Kahrl details the step-by-step process through which the South became the Sunbelt and how the mad rush for coastal property was a large part of its growth. An excellent read for environmental studies; the sociology and history of real estate development; economics; and black land loss.
This essay examines the motif of water in the work of Thornton Dial, Ronald Lockett, Georgia Speller, and other southern artists, whose sculpture and paintings Arnett has collected over the course of thirty years and housed at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia. Herman is a folklorist and art historian. The captions that accompany each image in the essay are drawn from their years of experience collecting, cataloguing and exhibiting the art and getting to know the artists. Observations and analysis from the artists themselves about their work as well as from Herman and Arnett point to water as a force that has the capacity to give life and to drown it out. This essay reflects one of Southern Culture’s signature strengths—ample space for high-quality representations of southern visual culture. This is a great resource for students of southern and African American art.
In her thoughtful essay, Lowen analyzes the precarious social position of southern Jews through the lens of Daisy Werthan, the main character in the 1989 film Driving Miss Daisy. Lowen also pays careful attention to the film’s pairing of Daisy with her African American driver, Hoke. “Through its portrayal of the vulnerability of southern Jewishness,” Lowen notes. “’Miss Daisy’ demonstrates the inseparability of Jewishness and blackness within southern society” (52). To illustrate, Lowen describes a scene in which Hoke and Daisy are stuck in traffic due to the bombing of the Atlanta temple. Her careful attention to the details of this scene illustrates well how Hoke and Daisy are “linked through violence and prejudice” (54). This piece is a useful way to open conversations about southern Jewish identity and about the tropes used to depict the South in film more generally. Excellent essay for use in Jewish studies, film studies, African American studies, and southern studies classrooms.
This feature essay sheds light on two content strengths of Southern Cultures: oral history and the Civil Rights Movement. While Septima Clark is well known to Civil Rights scholars, she is under-represented in popular knowledge about the Movement. Hall and Walker, who interviewed Septima Clark for the Southern Oral History Program, provide an excellent introduction to Clark’s long-time civil rights work and to the compiled excerpts from the interviews that highlight key moments in her life. In the mid-1950s, Septima Clark was fired from her public-school teaching position in Charleston, SC when she refused to deny her membership in the NAACP. She subsequently took a position at the Highlander Center in Tennessee, where she worked to develop “citizenship schools.” Clark trained African American teachers to go back to their own communities and convey voter registration procedures, local healthcare and employment opportunities, the ins and outs of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and how to access federal antipoverty benefits. The positions came with small salaries and they were behind the scenes and long-term. These qualities allowed women to get involved, stay involved and have a long-term impact in their communities and on the larger Civil Rights Movement. The interview excerpts are rich with descriptions of Clark’s upbringing; her short, married life; and her work experiences. This is an excellent piece for students of African American history; women’s history; the Civil Rights Movement; oral history; and southern studies.
Huber historicizes the word “redneck,” tracing its first usages back to late nineteenth-century Mississippi where whites and African Americans use the term to refer to poor whites. The etymology of “redneck” is hard to substantiate, but the most compelling theory suggests it derives from reference to white skin reddened by working in the sun. From the beginning, the word was used to identify color and class difference. Huber draws on the observations of travel writers such as William Cullen Bryant and Frederick Law Olmsted, to flesh this out: “non-slaving masses of southern white men…prized their racial identity because it distinguished them as free men and entitled them to political and civil rights” (152). Establishing the inferiority of African Americans, Huber argues, was critical to poor white southern identity. Intended to be pejorative, the term “redneck” has been reclaimed through the years and recast by those who embrace it to mean a “honest, hard-working workingman who identifies with traditional southern social and religious values” (157). Huber’s long view of the term incorporates Civil Rights, southern industrial, social, political and migration histories. It is a fascinating lens through which to consider race, class and masculinity in the South.
Panhorst draws the title for his essay from an article, published in the New York Times in in 1865, identifying monuments at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and Manassas National Battlefield which were erected by committee and dedicated in 1865 as the “first of our hundred battle monuments.” His essay peels back these popular narratives of Civil War monuments erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy or other institutional bodies, and invites readers to contemplate the monuments that soldiers themselves erected to honor their fallen comrades. “These,” Panhorst writes, “represent earliest attempts to mark Civil War battlefields for posterity” (23). Take, for example, the Bartow Monument at Manassas. The plain, round marble column honored Colonel Francis Bartow (1816 – 1861) who died while leading the 7th Georgia Voluntary Infantry in the first major battle of Manassas, Virginia in 1861. Panhorst features period writing by Melvin Dwinell who described the commemoration event and the memories that flooded him as he walked across the battlefield. He writes: Each soldier [as they wander the grounds] “imagines that he again hears the whiz of the canon ball—the zip-zip-zip-zip-zip-zip of the musketry charge, and the quick whist, whist of the rifle. He sees where this and that friend stood and where others fell” (26). This photo essay, with its deeply descriptive captions, highlights the need for commemoration, the act of marking ground made sacred by death and the work of ordinary people at crafting funerary art. Panhorst’s essay articulates well with other Southern Cultures essays about Civil War-era monuments (see the “Monuments and Memory” reading list on this website). An excellent resource for students of Civil War history; public memory; and commemoration.
Cooper and Knotts analyze the status of partisan competitiveness in southern state legislatures, looking at voting data from 1953 to 2013. They examine the well-publicized shift from Democratic to Republican political dominance in the South, starting in 1952, when, for the first time, white southerners voted overwhelmingly for a Republican candidate: Dwight Eisenhower. With the exception of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, Republicans have carried the South in presidential elections ever since. And beginning in the 1970s, Republicans have also come to dominate congressional and gubernatorial elections in the region. The lesser known story is at the southern state legislature level, which, Cooper and Knotts maintain, has more impact on the day-to-day lives of southerners. They ask: Is there partisan competitiveness in state legislatures and what might the future hold for state legislative party competition in the South? They found a Republican trickle-down at the local level, but note that the trickle down has been slow and uneven. Louisiana and Mississippi, for example, which have large populations of African Americans, maintain partisan competitiveness in their legislatures, and at times have maintained dominant Democratic representation. Cooper and Knotts discuss redistricting and Nixon’s “southern strategy” (which garnered votes from proponents of states’ rights), which would be useful in generating discussion and further research about local voting practices and voting rights in the South. This essay would fit well in political science; southern studies and southern history courses.
Essay
In the United States, why is wealth—especially financial wealth—held by white households so disproportionately and, in particular, by the most affluent ones? Racial wealth inequality is no accident of history. Rather, it is the intended result of the southern Democrats in Congress who controlled federal tax policy throughout most of the twentieth century. Beginning in »
Essay
The water in our creek and marsh on Virginia’s Eastern Shore grows colder by the day as a fading year slips away and the hopefulness of a new one approaches. Frost clings to browning marsh grasses, the tide runs winter clear, passing seabirds huddle on shoals and bars. Low tide. I wade out through the »
Food
In 1971, as Black Panther Robert Hillary King Wilkerson later wrote, “The mood in the streets had caught up with the men in prisons.” That same year, Robert King, Albert Woodfox, and Herman Wallace formed the first official incarcerated chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) in the largest maximum-security penitentiary in the United States, »
Essay
In January 1941, literati tastemaker Carl van Vechten wrote in mock reproach to Gertrude Stein in Paris—whom he addressed as “Baby Woojums”—chastising her and her partner Alice B. Toklas for their absence when simply everyone else who mattered was there in Manhattan. To further pique the envy of author and art aficionado Stein, he noted »
Food
“‘It’s very hard to describe what that pone tasted like, except it was delicious. It was not really sweet, but not unsweet. It was dark brown in color. It was not light and feathery; it was of a heavier, denser consistency. It was just delicious.’” Sweet potatoes flourish in sandy soil. Strawberries announce the advent »
Food is the door through which Bernard L. Herman brings readers to deep human ecologies of the Eastern Shore of Virginia. From large, dark drum fish to the little shimmery spot to eels to oysters and corn, from “marsh to field to table,” Herman listens carefully, partakes heartily, and responds poetically to the sense of belonging food engenders in these coastal communities. His methods are ethnographic, and while his writing is delightfully free of scholarly jargon, he has honed the concept of terroir to a theoretical framework. Used by French wine growers to describe how locale affects the taste of wine, terroir has come to mean “taste of place.” For Herman terroir goes beyond soil and taste to include story and experience, a consuming process through which local residents reinforce their place-based identities and are able to share them with others. Herman’s essays about Eastern Shore foodways grow out of years of experience living, working (he raises oysters in addition to researching and writing), and being in the community.
His following five essays from Southern Cultures make three things clear:
Read separately or together, these pieces will inspire discussion of how to write about food and place.
This is the first of four essays Herman has published in Southern Cultures about communities on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, “a long, narrow peninsula that projects roughly seventy miles southward from the Maryland state line to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay” (37). Here, Herman introduces terroir, a concept that “defines particular attributes of a place embodied in cuisine and narrated through words and actions and objects” (36). Herman foregrounds one local delicacy (drum fish), and through excerpts from interviews and conversations, his own documentary photographs, and secondary sources that describe the locale, he shows how food and story invite everyone to partake of a place. Herman’s work is always richly illustrated, elegantly written, and accessible. Recipes for drum fish stew, gathered by Herman from local residents, stand out like poetry in the body of the essay. But his is not just pretty food writing. Herman acknowledges the poverty and the threats of big commercial farming and fishing and real estate development to the cohesion of this fragile coastal wetland and its cultures. Foodways, he asserts, and the stories that go with them, “provide the core elements for sustainable economic development rooted in human ecology” (37).
Here, Herman introduces readers to Theodore Peed, who hosts his entire community annually in the fall of the year for a feast of wild game—turtle, venison, fish. At Peed’s party, attendees congregate in a garage-turned-banquet-hall and reinforce their social ties as they mix and mingle, eat local food (marsh hens, grits, sea bass), and talk about the work and the rhythms integral to the production of that food. Herman foregrounds residents’ own talk to reveal ecologies and their signifying nomenclature. For example, Peed makes passing mention of “signing” for turtles, a hand-fishing technique that relies on attention to little bubbles on the surface of the water, indicating a turtle in the mud below. It is knowledge that demonstrates the intricate play between culture and environment, the sort that reveals itself only through time and with careful attention to what people say and do. Peed’s descriptions of the African kettles he uses and the turtle meat preferences among white and black residents in the region connect his foodways to “complex social networks along the Eastern Shore of Virginia for 400 years” (66).
Herman explores his personal experience of trapping eels along the Shore. With his characteristic attention to the details of process, he reveals how trapping and smoking eels mark the advent of the winter season in this place. His description of a day on the water, pulling traps in, icing eels into a coma, bludgeoning, dressing, smoking and eating them demonstrates how entwined local knowledge and natural ecologies are. “I think the eel tastes exactly like winter holidays and the advent of the sleeping season,” writes Herman (137). This kind of embodied experience—a significant way of knowing—is integral to his theory of place.
In “Panfish,” Herman continues the story of complex local ecologies through one plentiful Eastern Shore fish: the spot. Herman presents local classificatory systems for determining if a spot is truly a spot (size, status, procurement), thickly describes “the art of eating fish,” and succinctly notes the ways real estate development and recreational boating impact the place identity inherent in spot culture. The spot—like the drum, like eels—is not just an ingredient, it is a form of local knowledge and a barometer of cultural and environmental rhythms and changes. “The taste for spot,” Herman notes, “is linked to time and place” (102).
In this homage to field corn, Herman describes a summertime meal with friends on Occahannock Neck, Virginia. The field corn that comes steaming out of a short, hot bath is tasty to human pallets for only one day. How, Herman asks his hosts, do you know which day to pick it? By looking at the corn silks? By checking the color of the kernels? “No,” say the hosts. “It’s the scent of the corn.” What follows is another evocative essay about subtle ways of being in place. Herman’s description of field corn for supper with his friends brings up ways of knowing that go beyond the calendar or visual cues to olfactory sense. This is classic Herman, writing about the place he loves, and fetching correlation from past experience—a day many years ago when he smelled good-to-eat field corn but didn’t yet know what it meant. His essay tells us about the power of the senses to trigger memory and to tell us where we are and what to do.
Food
“Ms. Jean and Mr. Wyard chatted. She was cool in her summer dress; he was cool with his precisely delineated head of painted hair.” Our foraging friends on Occohannock Neck, Malcolm and Carol, assured us that there was a summer moment in which field corn achieved perfection for the plate—and then as quickly reverted to »
Herman’s essay is an excellent introduction to food studies. His interviews with and photographs of local residents in coastal communities of Northampton County, Virginia help illustrate “taste of place,” or the concept of “terroir.” Their talk of stews made of drum fish, heirloom potato cultivation and cyclical celebrations point to deep relationships with indigeneity, environmental complexities, perseverance, regional occupations, and the past. Herman writes: “Terroir is experience and emotion, embodiment and immediacy, custom and invention, destiny and storytelling. It manifests itself in a constantly evolving style and synthesis of ingredients, recipes, preparations, and eating, from fancy holiday meals to work day lunches” (38). Part of his ongoing work with foodways and cultural heritage, Herman’s essay demonstrates the nuanced insights that are made possible through ethnographic engagement. (For more, see Herman’s other food essays in Southern Cultures.)
Looking closely at the historic experiences of individual Delta families, Cohen Ferris’s essay explores the culinary, spiritual, and social world of Jews in small-town Mississippi. She traces the history of the Delta’s Jewish community to their beginnings as rural peddlers in the late 19th century and through to their establishment of businesses and successful cotton farms. Jewish foodways emerge as significant expressions of identity and belonging for a group who often found themselves walking the socio-cultural line between white and black worlds. Everyday practices of Delta Jews, such as bringing back bagels, lox, corned beef and dark loaves of pumpernickel bread from Jackson, Memphis or Birmingham, are defining of “a unique expression of American Judaism” (58). Cohen Ferris’s essay demonstrates well how to write the social and cultural history of groups through the food they treasure. (For more, see Cohen Ferris’s other essays in Southern Cultures.)
Baker uses Rhoda Halperin’s framework of “multiple livelihoods strategies” to examine how southerners made ends meet after the Civil War by harnessing natural resources in their regions (i.e., blackberries, fish, and nuts). The article draws attention to the importance of the commons and to informal economies, “invisible” things that continue to be important to communities across the South. This essay includes a close examination of the blackberry itself—what it is, where it grows, how to prepare it (including a couple of recipes)—and illustrates well how a thing like a blackberry (and food more generally) can be “good to think with.” Read an excerpt online, or access the full piece via Project Muse.
Grandmother MacDuffey, with blackberries picked from nearby swamps, Irwinville, Georgia, 1938, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.
Writing against assumptions about the mere utilitarian nature of food preservation, Christensen gathers published testimony from southern women who describe home canning as pleasurable. Poor or well-off, rural or urban, women take pride in the aesthetic dimensions of canning, describing the variety and quantity of foods they process as well as the look of food within jars and on shelves. Christensen also draws attention to the ways in which the exchange of home grown and processed foods in communities reinforces social ties. Her essay provides an excellent example of how to attend to aesthetic and expressive dimensions of socio-cultural phenomena. (To demonstrate how food processing has been an important home industry for women, leading to social and material capital, pair this with Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt’s “Canning Tomatoes, Growing ‘Better and More Perfect Women,'” Southern Cultures, Vol. 15, No. 4: The Edible South.)
Englehardt reveals the story of how tomato clubs transformed girls’ lives across the South in the early twentieth century by providing them with the skills to cultivate, can and sell their own tomatoes. Englehardt uses the papers of one of the pioneers of the tomato club movement, former North Carolina teacher and women’s club member, Jane S. McKimmon, as well as historic photographs and historic newspaper coverage to reconstruct the atmosphere of the burgeoning home demonstration movement in the early 20th century. Englehardt includes details only available from archived primary sources to show just how productive the club activity was: “In this first year, McKimmons’s 440 girls produced 10,000 cans and realized an average profit per girl of $14.75 (in today’s money = $330)” (82). This essay provides a good model of how to do social history by looking for particular manifestations of individual and small-group engagement in larger social movements (in this case agricultural extension and home demonstration). Larger issues: food industry; women; agriculture; home economics; home demonstration. Read the complete piece online for free.
The southern culinary staples of “greens and grits” come from American Indian food culture, though almost no credit is given native people for their contributions to southern foodways. Green’s essay offers a corrective to this omission, tracing the historic significance of southeast Indian agricultural and culinary practices in the region. Beginning with the Indian Removals of the 1830s, which resulted in the cessions of prime Indian farmland, Green analyzes the ongoing phenomenon of Indian marginalization in the Southeast. She advocates for the reintroduction of Indian food to menus and farmer’s markets where “chefs that care so deeply about the restoration of southern food might want to join forces with the oldest farmers” (124). This essay is informative and provides a fine example of how history (and food history in particular) can function as advocacy. (For more, explore the entire Southern Cultures First Peoples issue.)
This essay provides a way to open a conversation about the relationship between land and food. Lewis introduces readers to the ecology of the ramp, a wild onion central in the springtime Cherokee diet, land rights and the idea of the commons. Lewis writes: “What started out that Monday as a seemingly minor case about picking onions unfolded into an astonishing story of land disappearances, mismarked boundaries and the legitimacy of indigenous scientific knowledge” (116). Lewis’s essay also addresses the land conservation movement, which may seem like a positive no-brainer to those living in mainstream, suburban culture, but which can actually be quite controversial in rural communities.
In his essay on this southern staple, Opie defines molasses, describes how it is made and by whom and how it was used in southern cooking. He examines its nutritional value (rich in vitamins and minerals) and the contexts in which it was eaten, establishing it as a working-class staple of African American, Indian and white southerners. Making use of WPA photographs, historic interviews and recollections of his own, Opie focuses most substantially on the development of molasses as an integral part of the African American diet. He includes multiple first-hand descriptions of common meals that included molasses: “Louis Armstrong recalled living for six months on a ‘supper of black molasses and a big hunk of bread’ at the Colored Waifs Home for Boys in New Orleans” (89). In the vein of Sidney Mintz’s classic sugar study, this essay provides a model of how to write food history.
Sharpless examines the social and economic significance of rural-urban food networks in the early twentieth century. Southern farm women—landowning, mostly white—with surplus vegetables and animal products (chickens, eggs, milk) could sell them in urban curb markets, to grocery chains, and, most significantly, to middle class town women. Sharpless’s essay points to the ways local sourcing developed a cache in this era, citing period recipes calling for “sweet country butter” and the grocery-store chain Piggly Wiggly touting “home grown very fancy cabbage” for sale. Sharpless writes: “Whether or not the quality of food goods was higher outside the city, the perception reflected continued southern—indeed, American—sentiment of rural superiority” (54). This essay demonstrates how to write social history with food and provides a good analogue to contemporary farmer’s market and local sourcing trends.
Farmer’s market, Weatherford, Texas, May 1939, photographed by Russell Lee, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.
This essay provides a wide food lens for thinking about the multi-cultural South. Olsson examines the history of the Dekalb Farmers Market in Atlanta, which employs people from a wide range of national and ethnic backgrounds and attracts shoppers and diners from as many. What began as a small operation that catered to the tastes of a biracial South “was transformed by an immigration revolution that continues to redefine the dynamics of the urban South” (46). This story of the Dekalb Farmers Market offers a way to talk about food markets, food flows, the urban South, and entrepreneurship. It could also open conversations about farmers markets in particular: Where are they located? What are they selling? Who shops there? Why? (To more fully explore locally sourced foods and farmer’s markets from different perspectives, pair this with the above-listed Southern Cultures articles by Sharpless and Green.)
Food
“When I try to describe the rich dark flavors of the firm yet creamy meat, words fail me. As our neighbors remark, ‘This tastes like more.’ I think this eel tastes exactly like winter holidays and the advent of the sleeping season.” Part I Eels rolled in crushed black pepper and chopped parsley cook in »
“This was an anxious time for American Jews, stung by the anti-Semitic quotas and discrimination of the interwar years and the growing horror regarding the fate of European Jewry as the Holocaust came to light in the 1940s.” My first experience at a southern Jewish summer camp was not easy. I felt out of place. »
“There’s only one piece of white meat in him, and that’s his neck. The rest of the meat is dark meat. If you fry it, it’s still like a white piece of meat, like a chicken breast. The rest of it looks like a chicken leg.” Two events mark the fall social season on the »