“We were behind one another praying to get out of that water.” When Hurricane Floyd visited North Carolina almost exactly two years ago, it was the worst natural disaster in the state’s history. According to the North Carolina Division of Emergency Management and the Charlotte Observer, Floyd and its floods left fifty-one dead, sixty-six counties »
“Perhaps no other part of the natural environment is more closely identified with the South than this invasive and fast growing vine.” City leaders in Tallahassee, Florida, recently started a program that uses sheep to graze on large, troublesome patches of kudzu within the city. Several summers ago, Greenville, South Carolina, hosted the filming and »
“The taking of the Hatteras Light is a powerful statement about our society’s reluctance to accept change and loss, and our refusal to embrace the consequences of living in a world shaped by natural forces.” One mild Saturday morning in November 1998, my six-year-old son and I went to a party at the famous, black-and-white »
Essay
In the cotton counties along the river in Mississippi, where there are three black skins for every white one, the gentlemen are afraid. But not of the Negroes. Indeed, the gentlemen and the Negroes are afraid together. They are fearful of the rednecks . . .who in politics and in person are pressing down upon »
We are drawn to water for many reasons: for our health and survival, for rites and rituals, for athletic endeavors, and often for the pure pleasure of social engagement. Water cleanses and invigorates. It is both life-giving and an unstoppable force. In the heat of a southern summer it cools us and invites recreation and »
“Charleston’s antebellum proclivities only opened the path that the rest of the South would follow soon enough. There’s plenty of haunted madness to go around.” Few people besides Charlestonians and literary experts know that Edgar Allan Poe spent about a year in 1827 and 1828 on the outskirts of the Holy City, while stationed on »
“‘I never did see Decatur Street with an ice pick, with a pistol . . . But I saw men and women walking up and down the street—ice picks, and pistols, and knives—and then talk about the street. The street ain’t never cut nobody’s throat. It was you! It was you!’” Reverend J. M. Gates »
“Folk humor is a key to both American culture and its literary tradition.” During his first visit in this country, Carl Jung noted the distinct style of American humor. Jung was struck by the “real American laughter, that grand, unrestrained, unsophisticated laughter” and felt it showed “remarkable vivacity and ease of expression. Americans,” he wrote, »
Nothing about the South is harder to fathom than how European and African American traditions mixed in the lives of nineteenth-century people. Although some Black and white southerners have flatly denied cross-cultural influences, even those who want to find connections must dig deeply for evidence. In what follows, I suggest we mine a neglected source—southwestern »
“Humor, in the end, seems to be one of those ‘idiomatic imponderables’ (in Edgar Thompson’s phrase) that continue to set the South apart from the rest of the country.” This is Southern Cultures‘s first “special issue”—that is, its first devoted to a single topic. The topic is southern humor, and the articles come from a »
“a pool, lighted tennis, Jacuzzi, and serene pond . . .” This collage or assemblage of place names, phrases, descriptions, etc.—“found poetry,” as it were—was taken directly from advertising copy scattered throughout a recent issue of Apartment Finder, a guide to rental housing in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area. I “wrote” the piece one Sunday afternoon »
The following letter was written by fourteen-year-old John Steele Henderson to his father, Archibald Henderson, reporting on a Whig political rally in piedmont North Carolina on the eve of the presidential election of 1860. The Hendersons were Democrats, and John didn’t much like what he heard at the rally, but like a true connoisseur, he »