A Stranger Comes to Town

Last Tuesday my friend Chris Dickey called to say he was at a Bojangles on I-26 in the middle of a late-afternoon chicken snack. He and two of his journalist colleagues, videographer Lee Wang and photographer Seamus Murphy, were headed to Spartanburg on the last leg of their 10-day, modern-day "Sherman's March" through the South.

The three were on assignment for NEWSWEEK, writing a cover story and supplying a website about our region and its reaction to this historic presidential election. The United States would decide in less than 100 days whether to elect a black man president. NEWSWEEK wanted to know what a slice of the old Confederacy thought about this possibility.

Besides the Obama campaign, the lead angle would also be Chris Dickey's return to the South.  The family line of Chris's famous poet/novelist father, James, is deeply rooted in the mountains of North Georgia and Tennessee, and so that's where the NEWSWEEK crew started their political and social litmus test.

As serendipity would have it, first thing the crew ran into was a troupe of Civil War re-enactors at Lookout Mountain.  One of the play-acting Confederates said he leaned Obama's way because Obama couldn't be "much worse than what we have now."

Another re-enactor's tiny son wasn't so sure electing Obama was such a good thing since at his elementary school the rumor was that the Democratic candidate had been caught smuggling Iraqi soldiers into the U.S.

The march continued to Georgia: Atlanta, Kennesaw, Monroe, Crawford, Milledgeville, and Savannah. In Kennesaw Chris interviewed the proprietor of a little shop of horrors of the Old South— an establishment where you can buy secessionist bumper stickers and gaze on a dummy dressed in Klan hood and white robe. The owner is an unreconstructed Rebel, holding his own against the Yankee hordes 140 years after what some still call "the Great Unpleasantness."

In Monroe they'd witnessed a yearly reenactment of the last multiple lynching (1946) in the South.  In Savannah they'd checked into a downtown hotel full of African-American Baptists and attended their church service.
By the time the crew reached the Newberry Bojangles on Tuesday, it was clear they'd gotten a good taste of "the mind of the South," and it wasn't a quick study.

Out there in the old heart of the Confederacy there was great hope among  progressive Southerners, African-American and white, that Obama would prevail in November. There was also a little fear and trepidation among the majority of "Red State" conservatives that the solid political ground of the South was on the verge of turning swampy for the first time since Reconstruction.

In Spartanburg the NEWSWEEK crew stayed at the Inn on Main. We took them to dinner, and our white college-age waitress surprised us by providing a compelling narrative of support for Obama. Her boyfriend's health problems and the mess in Iraq had convinced her we need a Democrat in office.  (Her testimonial made it into an early paragraph of this week's NEWSWEEK cover story.)

After the evening was over, Chris still had one missing piece he needed. He wanted to visit a community that was predominantly Hispanic. Did I know of such a place in Spartanburg they could visit before heading to Charlotte?
That night we scouted the community of Una, a place I call our Sherwood Forest, where Upcountry outlaws have hidden out for over 100 years. Disgruntled textile workers used to live there. An express bus to Mexico City occasionally leaves from the area.

The next morning we parked in a gravel lot at the corner of Sibley and New Cut Road. In a 360 degree panorama there was little English, and all I could see was deep poverty. "La migra! La migra!" ("immigration police" in Spanish) a little girl yelled when Chris, Seamus, and Lee left their vehicle and fanned out into Una's trailers and dilapidated houses.

They say the two most powerful stories to tell are a man or a woman takes a trip and a stranger comes to town. Each is packed with tension and possibility for change. As I sat in Una and watched a paragraph or two of the NEWSWEEK cover story take shape in Chris's mind, I realized we really need a change in the South.  You can see it on the NEWSWEEK website in Seamus's images and Lee's video.

This path we're on isn't working. It's time for a change. Sometimes it takes friends from far away to help you see to the heart of your own place.