Dixie Rising's Unanswered Questions

(Published in The State, Columbia, SC 7/4/97)

Peter Applebome's recent book Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics and Culture leads with an important question. Who is Southern, and who's not in an America that is increasingly Southern and a South that is increasingly American?Applebome suggests that the values that are becoming "America's values" are conservative, Christian, and economic.

In twelve electric chapters, he visits communities to prove his thesis, and does so in compelling fashion. For me, the book raises one more important question: Where am I and many of my friends in this survey of almost a dozen southern places (including Columbia)?

I have lived most of my life in the South. I publish books that reviewers have called "Southern," and I teach at a small Southern liberal arts college. Yet I am an unreconstructed liberal. "The Sixties? Forget hell," I like to say when my friends suggest I follow Bill Clinton and most of the Democratic party in their drift to the center and past.

When someone says the word "liberal" with a sneer, I often threaten production of a bumper sticker for Christmas presents that says, "Southern by the grace of God, and liberal by education and choice."
When Applebome's book first came out I posed a question to a table full of old-time liberal friends where I meet for coffee each morning: "How many old-time liberals survive in the South? "You know," I explained. "Southerners who still believe in government social programming, who are against capital punishment…"

"We all know what Dr. King would have said about that issue," one of my liberal minister friends interjected.

"Who think good family values are centered on tolerance of racial difference, religion, and gender issues, including homosexuality?" another said.

"Who think education is a secular calling," a teacher friend said, "And the watch-words of a good education are diversity of ideas, skepticism, and observation?"

Then one of my friends began to count concentrations of potential old-time liberals as if we were endangered black bears: "There's probably ten thousand in the research triangle area, and maybe a few thousand each in Athens, Columbia, Gainsville, even Oxford, Mississippi."
"And God, there's maybe fifty thousand in Asheville!" I said.

I started to think seriously about the possibility of looking at us old-time liberals as one would look at the Southern black bear. Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders, the co-editors of The Sacred Paw:The Bear in Nature, Myth and Literature, says the bear among the omnivores is "supreme… in his taste for diversity…" And when it comes to eating, bears are "True to this fellowship of the open mind."

We old-time liberals have always found our nourishment in the complexity and diversity of choice in the world. We survive by asking questions, not by knowing simple answers. Another Dixie may be rising, but we are still foraging among you, strong, resilient, waiting for the habitat to change again, as history has often shown it does.