I'll Take my Tree-Stand

Jack Temple Kirby, noted historian of the Southern rural landscape, was in town last week to deliver a lecture and then talk to a class I'm teaching with colleague Deno Trakas this fall at Wofford. Our course, called "Cornbread and Sushi: The Rural South and Southern Literature," is an exploration of the myth and reality found in depictions of rural Southern places and people.

The Watson-Brown Foundation out of Thompson, Georgia was kind enough to supply us a generous grant to bring in academic luminaries such as Kirby each week.

The title of our course comes from a comment novelist Lee Smith made at a conference in Nashville celebrating Southern literature. She said you're just as likely to find a good sushi restaurant on a Southern town square now as an old-time corn bread restaurant.

So far we've tried to set a context for our students before we move on to reading contemporary fiction writers such as George Singleton, Ron Rash, Dorie Sanders, and Lee Smith. We've even found a way to use visiting National Book Award Winner Ha Jin's novel WAITING in the class. His story, set in China during the Cultural Revolution, moves back and forth between the rural country-side and a military hospital. The first chapter-set in a rural Chinese village— works well as contrast to the Southern rural South.

We've also read W.J. Cash, Jack Kirby on the collapse of the agricultural South, and an encyclopedia article on the country store. Our first papers came in this week. The students had to either find an operating country store and write about it, or compare and contrast a Super Wal-Mart or a Mast General Store to the their informed idea of how an old country store used to function in a viable rural community.

With Kirby's visit the students seemed fully engaged with pondering the extent to which the rural South still exists and influences their lives. Most of our 20 students grew up in the Carolina suburbs, but many of them know that their houses were built on old farm fields. The shadow of the rural South is not far in the background everywhere they look. Kirby says that if your idea of rural is family-run agriculture, your idea is a memorial to something that no longer exists. Most of the farming done in the south today is big business- tree plantations and turf farms for the most part.

So what is the rural South today if it's not agricultural? What use are all those empty acres being put to out there along the interstates? Our students suggested that from their point of view "the new rural landscape" is mostly about recreation, freedom, and escape-deer hunting, fishing, four-wheeling. The 4th growth woodlots covering much of the "rural" piedmont are where people often go on weekends for these activities.

One student made a distinction between land owned by "people you know" and land owned by "rich people, government, or corporations." Land owned by people you know is treated differently, more respectfully, from other land. The large tracts with abstract ownership are where the teenage "recreation" takes place-mudding, bonfires, general teenage rowdyness.

Kirby liked this idea and we speculated that suburban teenagers often see land vacant of human occupation as a sort of "commons," just as their Southern ancesters once did as