The "There" Down There: A Southern Sense of Place

By A. J. Conyers

Someone has said that the expression 'Deep South' is as much a metaphysical statement as a geographical one. I had a sense of this in my conversation one evening with the eminent Emory University philosopher, Donald Livingston. We happened on the topic of what seems to be an inveterate Southern habit of thought: that the idea of 'place' bears some weight and importance in the consideration of serious subjects. Among Southerners, he agreed, this value for place manifests itself more than it does among the denizens of other regions of the country.
That is not to say that other peoples do not also value this sense of 'place.' For, after all, it is a truly human value to which Southerners, perhaps more than others, give witness. Everyone, at various levels, responds to this same sentiment. But not everyone has resisted, to the degree Southerners have, the modern tendency to abandon the more concrete and 'given' aspects of life for the sake of general principles and commodities useful in the mass market. On this subject George Panichas once wrote to me of the "frightening efforts, nationally and globally, to blur and even to extinguish the holiness of place and identity."

Southern places are likely, for instance, to be wedded to the songs and poetry of the people and their bards. When one hears of the Sewanee River the Shennandoah Valley, the marshes of Glenn County, Georgia, Rocky Top, Tennessee, the Mississippi Delta, the Brazos River in Texas, the Red River Valley, one is likely to think at the same time of songs and poems: "Way Down Upon the Sewanee River," "The Marshes of Glenn" by Sidney Lanier, "Rocky Top, Tennessee", "Old Man River" (the Brazos), "The Red River Valley"—and on it goes.
There are, of course, famous places in Northern literature. We can think for instance of "Paul Revere’s Ride" from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s "Tales of a Wayside Inn." The scene is Cambridge, Boston, and Concord, places barely mentioned in the poem and only then as points of reference for the historic drama. The river over which Paul Revere flew was the Charles. But who ever sings of the Charles? Not the nineteenth century’s most famous Northern poet. Longfellow was more likely to write of foreign places, as France, Spain, and Germany. And even his famous "village smithy" who plies his trade "under a spreading Chestnut tree," lives merely in a village, not unlike, one supposes, any other village.

By contrast, Southern writers, poets, and storytellers tend to write about Southern places. Flannery O’Connor writes of Georgia. William Faulkner writes of a fictitious place named Yoknapatawpha County, but a place with a definite setting in Mississippi. William Gilmore Simms wrote of the Low Country of South Carolina and the frontier in Mississippi. DuBose Heyward wrote of his own city of Charleston, inspiring (as David Aiken has taught us in Fire in the Cradle ) a renaissance of Southern letters that extended from Faulkner, to Wolfe, Andrew Lytle, Donald Davidson, Eudora Welty, and Robert Penn Warren.

They tell me that school children in South Carolina used to learn that the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, those two courses that frame the peninsula of Charleston, "flow together to form the Atlantic Ocean." Now that’s doubtful geography; but it is a strong sense of place. Where do you hear such wit about the Hudson, or the Delaware? If you visit New Orleans you know you have been some place: it is rich with character. It oozes with character, and you pick it up with all the senses: sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. New Orleans stays with you, just like my mother used to say that oatmeal was good for you because it stuck to your ribs!

But if you go to Chicago—and I very much like Chicago; it is a pleasant place in my experience—it escapes your consciousness the moment you fly out of O’Hare. You remember the museums. But in New Orleans or Charleston the idea of a museum seems almost superfluous. In Chicago, it seems they need to import something worth remembering from places that actually had a culture, or a sense of place. Chicago has museums for the same reason the University of Chicago has scholars who interpret Flannery O’Connor. You can tell when a place has deep roots and rich soil and when it does not.

When I was in the Seventh Grade, Mrs. Edna Cotton required us to learn Sidney Lanier’s The Song of the Chattahoochee. That was the river and the valley I knew most in my childhood. I had seen the river as it coursed broad and murky through Atlanta. I had fished in its clear waters in North Georgia. As a young man, I fished and camped with friends on one of its tributaries, known as Warwoman Creek. And I could hear the river sing, because I had heard it sung from the time I was a child—and I knew the words of its song, passed down through generations.

There is a story in my family that illustrates the power of ‘place’ in a rather negative way. On the eastern rim of the Chattahoochee basin is (or one might almost say ‘was’) the town of Cassville, Georgia, in present day Bartow County. In the early 1860’s Cassville was a small prosperous town with two colleges—a Male and a Female college—and, they say, a lively artistic community. In May of 1864, there was a brief skirmish there between the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Joseph E. Johnston and the invading army under William Tecumseh Sherman. Later General Sherman sent back a contingent of Ohio cavalry to burn the two colleges and all but three of the fifty-something residences.

My great-grandmother—newly married—loaded her precious wedding gifts into a buck-board wagon, including a large ‘secretary’ that now stands in our living room. She drove the mule-drawn wagon into the woods, near an ancient cemetery, and there unhitched the mule-team and drove them away. Then she piled brush over the wagon and its contents, crawled beneath the wagon, and remained in hiding for two or three days without food or water, there saving herself and the few provisions that survived the holocaust.

Forty years later, this same woman, no longer the young bride who hid in the woods from Sherman's soldiers, wrote of a visit to the now desolate place that had once been her home. The piece, entitled "A Walk Over Sacred Ground," was published in 1905:

During a recent visit, the first in nearly ten years, of my sister from southern Georgia, we left the breakfast table one morning bare headed asin childhood, for a stroll about the yard and garden; but as the morning was cool and cloudy we extended our walk far beyond our first intentions.

We left the grove and went up the way that was once a back street of our village, and at the end of it had a plain view of the old college hill, up which we had so often climbed in company with the friends of long ago. And as we viewed its steep and now rugged pathway, and faces and names were recalled, an irresistible desire seized us to tramp once more in the footsteps of early friends and classmates departed. As we reached the brow and turned to look back at the little village at its decline, we were reminded of Goldsmith's deserted village "Once the fairest of the plain," but now only modest homesteads mark the place where once were many prosperous, lovely homes. Across from this hill stood another, dearer to us still. Then greater became the longing as we again stand upon the spot that was home to us when days were always sunny and skies bright.

As we neared the grove, before reaching the exact place where the dear old house stood, we marked many trees under which we had played, gathered chestnuts and upon whose gnarled roots we sat for an hour's quiet study when an extra lesson, or one of unusual length, or difficulty, had to be learned. We found where once rested the sills and hearthstones of our then cherished home; a garden had been made and vegetables in profusion were running riot o'er the sacred spot. I did not wonder at the luxurious vegetation, for twice had houses of good size been burned on the same spot and the fertilizing properties of the ashes lent to the perfection of nature. .. . . Scarcely would we have been able to locate the walks about the place, but for the brick with which they were laid, the gate posts even having been charred and almost gone. . . .

The sweet-shrub hedge, from which our childish fingers plucked the fragrant brown blossoms and treasured for days to inhale their rich aroma, was entirely gone, but there "the orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wild wood, and every loved spot that our infancy knew." An old peach tree at the edge of the yard where once we knelt in prayer for the restoration of an idolized brother was still standing, but with bent form, that reminded us forcibly of our first real sorrow.

As we looked and thought of the past, almost mute with sorrow the falling rain arrested our musings and we noticed the gathering clouds and knew that we must seek shelter. A colored family now occupied the once large kitchen a few paces from the "big house." And under its roof we found refuge, but here again came memories thronging , both sad and gay. On the spacious old fireplace had been cooked my wedding supper and there within those walls my sister had stood at the hymneal altar. The first just before the war, when things to cook and servants to prepare them were both plentiful, and the last just after, when kitchens and barns were converted into homes for the returning refugees.

The shower was soon over and after a visit to the old well at the foot of the hill, then known as Cassville Heights, we drew again from its cool depths and quaffed once more, and we knew for the last time together, its limpid water. Then wended our way back, the trees still dripping, as if in sympathy with tears that were falling and with voices too tremulous with emotion for conversation. It was an almost silent walk to Spring Brook, the adjoining farm and home of LILA LAND CHUNN. (The Cartersville News, August 24, 1905).

When Lila Land Chunn spoke of Cassville, she spoke of a place that she remembered, as did a few of her generation. Cassville is still there; but it is in many ways the deserted village that she alluded to, and there are no longer any alive who remember what it was like before that Ohio cavalry set the torch to its settled homes, its churches, its opera house, and its two colleges. Whatever one might say against General Sherman, one can say in his favor that he recognized the power and the significance of ‘place.’ And he was intent on leaving his enemies as few of those places as possible.

Yet when Mrs. Chunn speaks of Cassville, I think I am not mistaken to say that she speaks to us all: to all who have memorable places in their background, to all who can grieve, to all who feel the loss of that which can never be regained, to all who have a sense of that which can never in any real sense ever be lost. There is something about a particular place that is, as Flannery O’Connor would refer to it, on the order of the sacramental.

The Christian doctrine of the incarnation speaks directly to this view of life. The ancient Gnostics, who despised the idea of the incarnation above all, were opposed by Christians such as the writer of First John who said, "Beloved do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world." And how does one recognize those false prophets? "By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God" (1 John 4:1,2). The truth of the incarnation is that the eternal and the particular are forever tied together. What God has joined together let not man put asunder!

A. J. Conyers is Professor of Theology at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary. His most recent books include Eclipse of Heaven (St. Augustine Press, 1999) and The Long Truce: how toleration made the world safe for power and profit (Spence, 2001).