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    South Toward Home: Adventures and Misadventures in My Native Land
    South Toward Home: Adventures and Misadventures in My Native Land
    South Toward Home: Adventures and Misadventures in My Native Land
    Ebook232 pages3 hours

    South Toward Home: Adventures and Misadventures in My Native Land

    By Julia Reed and Jon Meecham

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    About this ebook

    In considering the pleasures and absurdities of her native culture, Julia Reed quotes another Southern writer, Willie Morris, who said, “It’s the juxtapositions that get you down here.” These juxtapositions are, for Julia, the soul of the South, and in her warmhearted and funny new book, South Toward Home, she chronicles her adventures through the highs and the lows of Southern life—taking us everywhere from dive bars and the Delta Hot Tamale Festival to an impromptu shindig on a Mississippi River sandbar and a coveted seat on a Mardi Gras float. She writes about the region’s music and food, its pesky critters and prodigious drinking habits, its inhabitants’ penchant for making their own fun—and, crucially, their gift for laughing at themselves.

    With her distinctive voice and knowing eye, Julia also provides her take on the South’s more embarrassing characteristics from the politics of lust and the persistence of dry counties to the “seemingly bottomless propensity for committing a whole lot of craziness in the name of the Lord.” No matter what, she writes, “My fellow Southerners have brought me the greatest joy—on the page, over the airwaves, around the dinner table, at the bar or, hell, in the checkout line.” South Toward Home, with a foreword by Jon Meacham, is Julia Reed’s valentine to the place she knows and loves best.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 31, 2018
    ISBN9781250166364
    Author

    Julia Reed

    Julia Reed grew up in Greenville, Mississippi. She is a contributing editor at Newsweek and is the author of the essay collection Queen of the Turtle Derby. She lives in New Orleans.

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    • 4/5
      A semi entertaining and humorous mismatch of essays portraying the many idiosyncracies to be found in the South. The authors love for the home of her birth, the Mississippi Delta does shine through. Essays touching on food, family, school, though her viewpoint is often viewed through her priviledged background. A church where guns are welcome but they are offended if one brings alcohol onto their grounds. Politness hiding much of a person's thoughts, generally thoughts not favorable.Enjoyed some of these essays thst point out the lowest and highest points of being Southern. Had to laugh when she classified Honey Boo Boo as being one of the lowest. Never watched that show but knew who she was from reading the Enquirer when standing in line at the grocers. Can't understand the appeal, but then again can't understand the fascination many have for anything Kardashian. So a mixed bag, but a nice diversion, easy to pick out an essay here and there, though this collection seems to lack cohesion. Just my opinion, some I probably just didn't get, not being Southern myself.

    Book preview

    South Toward Home - Julia Reed

    Introduction

    In 1967 Willie Morris wrote a memoir, North Toward Home, in which he recalled his childhood in the Mississippi Delta, a place with its share of dark history, but also one of abiding grace and goodness, humor and eccentricity. Like Willie, I grew up in the Delta, in Greenville, about seventy miles up the road from his birthplace in Yazoo City and, like Willie, I went north, first to Washington, D.C., and then to Manhattan, not toward home exactly, but for a career in journalism and what I hoped would be a rich, full life. It was. But a few years after Willie returned home, I came back South too, first to New Orleans, where I have lived off and (mostly) on since the early 1990s and, more recently, to my beloved Delta, where I’m building a house.

    Until I came back, I don’t think I realized how much I’d missed the landscape and the sense of community, the humor and the good-heartedness, the agricultural scent of earth and chemicals more powerful to me than any of Proust’s madeleines. Most of all, I’d missed the fact that fun was so damn easy to get up to. I had some fun with Willie a time or two before he left us in 1999, but his prose is what I remember best. I frequently quote his line that it’s the juxtapositions that get you down here, because they sure as hell still abound.

    A couple of years ago, for example, I found myself slap in the middle of some typically jarring contradictions when my good buddies Roy Blount, Jr. and William Dunlap and I served on a panel together in Jackson, Mississippi, the city Willie ultimately called home. Our assigned topic was fairly loose, but we knew we’d be touching on possums—Roy and I have both written about them (there’s an essay about the misunderstood marsupial on these pages) and Dunlap has not only painted one, he is the creator of the tasty opossum cocktail (vodka, a splash of cranberry juice, a dash or two of orange bitters, and an orange slice as garnish). As a prop of sorts (and perhaps a spot of inspiration), we decided to bring the cocktails with us onto the stage, which was actually the chancel of a Methodist church that had been commandeered for the occasion.

    As it happened, a few months before the event, Mississippi governor Phil Bryant had signed a bill into law that allowed handguns inside churches. For an added flourish, Bryant chose to do so with his own personal handgun, a Glock, atop the large family Bible on his desk, a newspaper image greeted with an alarming amount of equanimity by a large segment of the populace. Roy and Dunlap and I, on the other hand, did not fare so well with the locals. Weeks after our panel, we learned we’d caused something of a scandal for drinking alcohol in the Methodist sanctuary. Too bad we weren’t packing heat instead. No one would have flinched.

    This is the kind of stuff that keeps you pretty much constantly on your toes. It also provides ample fodder for people like me who make a living documenting the various goings-on in these environs. The particular goings-on in this volume were all penned for Garden & Gun magazine, where I’ve been writing since its happy inception more than a decade ago. Its very name is a juxtaposition, taken from a fabled, sadly long-shuttered bar in Charleston, South Carolina, where I was lucky enough to be taken as an underage college student visiting the city for a friend’s debutante party. There were ceiling fans and balconies, sailors and socialites, the occasional drag queen and the frequent sockless Gucci wearer. It was an eclectic, high-low mix of folks, one not entirely representative of the South, but close enough that the founders of a magazine about Southern culture chose to take its name.

    My column in the magazine is called, appropriately, The High & The Low and I have a great time brainstorming its wide-ranging topics with my intrepid editor, David DiBennedetto. I write about our music and our food (two of the region’s best gifts to the rest of the country), our critters (and our penchant for hunting and making a meal of them), our drinking habits (prodigious), our talent for making our own fun (highly necessary), and some of our more embarrassing tendencies (including our seemingly bottomless propensity for committing a whole lot of craziness in the name of the Lord). I still get mighty embarrassed by the behavior of some of the folks in my region, but it also has been my fellow Southerners who have brought me the greatest joy—on the page, over the airwaves, around the dinner table, at the bar or, hell, in the checkout line.

    Willie contended he could best write about the land of our birth from the distance Manhattan afforded him. I find it useful—and endlessly entertaining—to be right here in the thick of things. What I love most about where I live is that my fellow residents have always had an enormous capacity for laughing at themselves—for good reason, of course, but it’s a quality we could all do with a lot more of in these fraught times. It’s hot and even more humid, the mosquitoes are murderous, and we might all be half crazy, but I am grateful every day that I ended up returning South toward home.

    Part One

    Personal Notes

    Grace Under Pressure

    Function in disaster, finish in style is one of the mottoes of the Madeira School, the all-girls boarding school in McLean, Virginia, where I happily spent my junior and senior years. Festina lente (Make haste slowly) is the official motto, the one engraved on our class rings, but as anyone who knows me can tell you, that’s not really my thing. I prefer the informal one, the one that was drummed into the student body by Lucy Madeira Wing, who founded the school in 1906, ten years after she graduated from Vassar. When my mother was at Madeira in the 1950s, Miss Madeira was still alive and pretty much kicking and she delivered the line to the assembled girls almost every morning.

    I have been thinking about Miss Madeira and her guiding principle a lot lately. Perhaps because so few in our midst seem to be living by it. On a particularly bad summer day this past summer, for example, I was driving from the Hartford, Connecticut, airport to the Vermont graduation of my good friend Ellen’s son, late and speeding (in defiance of the charge of the ring on my little finger), and listening to an especially incessant drumbeat of doom on NPR. My friend and favorite senator from Mississippi, a total class act and by far the best advocate for our poor state, was under siege from a primary challenger whom I’ll refrain from characterizing here in a Herculean effort to be a class act myself. War was escalating in so many places at once I was reminded of my Madeira Modern European History class and the lectures of the good Dr. Brown on the events leading up to World War I. A particular wing of the Republican Party seemed not to have taken even an elementary school civics class, much less modern history of any kind, and the administration was, well, being the administration.

    The center does not hold, I thought. Common sense does not prevail. No one is functioning in disaster, much less finishing with a modicum of style. But then I made it to the graduation at the Burr Burton Academy atop a gorgeous green hill. The young women and men were all dressed up beneath their caps and gowns—my friend’s son, the handsome Eli, wore a fetching pale orange button-down shirt, a green tie, and a conservative but well-cut poplin suit. The leadership award was won by two beautiful girls who were best friends. The valedictorian talked about responsibility, integrity, service, and grit (grit!). And the speaker, a case study in Miss Madeira’s mantra, was Kevin Pearce, the snowboarder who suffered a traumatic brain injury and had to learn not just how to walk and talk again, but also how to swallow and brush his teeth. Now, he runs the Kevin Pearce Fund to help people with injuries like his. He told the kids he was living proof you can overcome what you’ve been dealt, that they should focus on this moment and be proud.

    So we all did and we all were. We went to dinner at the nearby Downtown Grocery, owned by my fellow Mississippian Abby Coker and her husband, the brilliant chef Rogan Lechthaler. We had delicious rhubarb margaritas, bought a round of Miller ponies for the kitchen staff (per Abby’s menu instructions if we liked what we ate—and we loved it all), lit sparklers at the table, and generally had a huge warm time.

    Pretty much everybody that day had finished in style, and it made me realize once again that the best center to hold is your own. Which brings me back to Miss Madeira. Her simple definition of education was discipline of the mind, and I can tell you that in my two years at her school I worked and thought harder than I ever have since. She agreed with Robert Louis Stevenson’s opinion that the world had best hurry up and return to the word duty and be done with the word reward. She decreed that there would be no class rankings and grades would not be posted. She taught the public affairs and Bible courses herself (in my day, the latter had morphed into ethics, but a close friend who took that small and intense class ended up with a Ph.D. in theology and ministered to folks at a church near Ground Zero on 9/11).

    My mother remembers that Miss Madeira was wild about the young queen Elizabeth and implored the girls to emulate not just her dignity and quiet poise but her proper low-heeled English shoes. She hated the Capezio flats we all wore, my mother says, adding that she thought them sloppy. Miss Madeira, described by Time in 1946 as one of Washington’s last New Dealers, told the magazine that she regretted the fact that most of her students came from economic royalist families and put them all in the same outfits lest they try to outspend each other. In spring, my mother reports, the girls dressed in green jumpers with white cotton blouses, while in winter it was the same blouse with a gray skirt and a yellow or green sweater. For dinner they changed into white piqué dresses, and in the senior portraits of my mother’s yearbook, every single girl has on a string of pearls.

    I arrived well after the era of white piqué, in time to enjoy the hangover of the far more lax rules of the sixties, which would come to an abrupt end almost as soon as I left the gates. We had no adult supervision in our dorms and elected our own dorm mothers from our peers. We smoked pot in the woods and cigarettes on the outdoor smoking terrace or in the unspeakably grungy senior clubhouse. I kept a fifth of Scotch in my underwear drawer, and one of my dorm mates was in possession of a blender with which we made the occasional birthday daiquiri. The queen, who is now among my own heroines, was not much on our radar screens.

    The equitable Miss Madeira would have been appalled at the charge accounts we had with the local taxi service, which we sent on runs for Häagen-Dazs and Chinese takeout (accompanied by six-packs of Tsingtao beer). A great many of us got around the lone dress code requirement of a skirt at dinner by wrapping our plaid gym kilts around whatever we were already wearing, which in my case was usually a pair of Levi’s pulled over the Lanz nightgown in which I awoke—the only outfit that would enable me to make it to chapel (barely) on

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