By Franklin Sanders
In the early fall, a member of our vast editorial staff took a vacation on
South Carolina’s coast, on one of the sea islands near Beaufort. Travelling to
gracious Savannah, then surveying the ruins of Sheldon Church in South Carolina
that was burned first by the British and then by the Yankees, walking down
Meeting Street surrounded by sumptuous, elegant Charleston’s magnificent
churches and mansions, hiking the battlefields at Kings Mountain and Cowpens
where Southern men (mostly Tennesseans) won the Revolution, passing through the
Museum of Early Southern Design Art at Old Salem, North Carolina, and driving
through the countryside of Virginia, the astonishing grace and accomplishment of
Southern culture surrounded him, but left a hushed question behind.
Is it clean gone forever? Has Southern culture, even the unique folkways
and customs of Southerners high and low, disappeared? Or does Southern culture
yet live?
Much of it has been replaced with bogus government culture. In every hamlet
and county, the Yankee empire has planted “Arts Councils,” which have as much to
do with cultivating art as those high-school condom giveaways have to do with
cultivating chastity. Government money always decapitalizes the recipient;
government help always achieves a result opposite to the one claimed. Government
“help” for agriculture has driven farmers off the land, decimated rural culture,
and is even now driving the last of the tobacco farmers off the land. In the
same way, government art subsidies do not build but destroy Southern culture,
replacing our native culture with something shallow and alien. They work exactly
as their purveyors intend them to work.
Southerners tend to think of their culture as distinguished primarily by
manners, the gracious way we (are supposed to) behave toward each other. But
history shows that Southerners have from the very beginning been a people who
did all things well, even elegantly.
For the South, the word “culture” brings first to mind Southern literature,
from William Gilmore Simms to William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Next music
springs to mind. Yet an automobile trip through the South will not be long
stretched out before the eyes discover astonishing architectural treasures, and
I don’t mean those hideous metastasized warehouse-churches foisted by crazed
architects on tasteless church deacons. Dig further and you will find Southern
painters, silversmiths, cabinetmakers, quiltmakers, and artisans of every breed
and calling. For instance, how many silversmiths were in Tennessee before the
War? Dozens, several in every large city. How many are there today? I don’t know
of one, but that’s all right. Silversmiths alone don’t make a culture – an
appreciative audience is necessary first. Build the audience, and the
silversmiths will come.
That’s my great concern: is the cultural audience still in the South? Does
Southern culture yet live? Have we given up treading water, fighting to keep
Southern culture alive, and resigned ourselves to drowning in the tide of
American mediocrity?
Ahh, I can’t speak for the whole South, but I can speak for my little plot
in Tennessee. Where these Southerners stand, the South lives and will live, and
Southern culture will survive.
Southern culture doesn’t live in the jails of museums, opera halls, ballet
stages, or art galleries. It’s too delicate for that. It can only survive in the
hearts and minds and daily acts of the Southern people. To imprison it in those
alien places would kill it forever.
Maybe your artistry only shows up with a dog and a gun in a canebrake, or
maybe it blossoms in your holy kitchen. Maybe it appears in the infinitesimal
stitches of the quilts you made for your grandchildren. Or in the hoof rasps you
hammered into tomahawks over a smoking forge. Maybe Southern culture still lives
in the perfect jar of pickles, or in a ham the likes of which this world has
never thrown a tongue over, or in a garden where the rows are so straight that a
weed wouldn’t have the nerve to take root, or in the mysterious dance of pointer
and quail and Tennessee walker.
Maybe Southern art is in that magical run on banjo, guitar, or piano, in a
child’s first crayon drawings, in the stories that pour out of old men like
springs out of caves.
Living well is not only the best revenge, it also mothers the best art.
When our everyday and necessary tasks arise deliberately from praise and
thanksgiving, we offer back to God a dance of joy that not even angels can
share.
And that is culture indeed.
The Free Magnolia: The Voice of Southern Life and CultureA
publication of:League of the SouthPO Box 760Killen, Alabama
35645freemagnolia.org/
