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DEEP-SOUTH QUARTERLY GOODNESS
THE OXFORD AMERICAN S SUMMER ISSUE
AMERICAN
07*£H JOtNT
swing, the unique spoor of Grandma's snuff, the strip-mining of
the West Virginia Appalachians, and a brilliant Southern playwright
late of Athens. Lean and lyrical and endlessly evocative, the Odes
are like flipping through a photo album of a road trip along tree-
canopied side-roads where, as everyone knows, you find all the
best barbecue.
And "The Nightclub That Was”
The rest of the summer issue is fine fare as well, including
more dead-on work from poet and former UGA professor Kevin
Young, Madison Smartt Bell's hard-hitting look at witness in
timidation in the Baltimore underworld, an unflinching profile
of muckraking journalist William Bradford Huie, who actu
ally got Emmett Till's murderers to confess, and a disturbing
Southern gothic tale by Hannah Pittard called "Rabies Do Not
Talk of Love," about two sisters, in their young, feral, sinister
years, amusing each other while the family waits for their
grandfather to die:
Let them die and let them be alone and let us overtake
the outsides of that room slowly. First the downstairs, the
kitchen, the den, then the stairs. The stairs will become ours,
our territory to mark and walk and guard. Ours to decide who
stays up, who stays down. Let them lock the doors to the big
bedroom where the old man lies stinking, mumbling. We will
take the second floor next. We will take the bathrooms and
the faucets; we will plug the sinks and tubs. We will leave the
water running until it pools end sends stains to the ceiling
beneath. The stains turning heavy, yellow, green, purple. A
bruise on the ceiling. Let there be bruises all over this house,
and let Sasha and me be the cause. We will rot the floor out
from under them. We will dig our way into their room like
possums.
The issue's best piece, however, may be the reminiscences
of Hardy Brown Nelems, who ran a honky-tonk in the lawless
backwoods of Alabama in the early '50s. While by no means a
polished writer, Nelems was a terrific raconteur, and his stories
of facing down armed drunks and shakedown men, suspicious
fires and thieves in the night, make for fascinating reading with an
authentic voice, rough as whiskey and wistful as moonlight.
Obviously, OA prefers its South dark and with enough kudzu
to hide a body, more Deliverance than Sweet Potato Queens, and
that's just dandy. The line for Miss Julia novels and Crisco cook
books is long enough as it is. For those of us who have assimilated
Southern shame along with our Southern pride, we'll take The
Oxford American. It builds character.
John G. Nettles
W hen I was a kid back in my central Florida hometown,
my cousin Molly married a guy named Billy, who was
a shoe salesman by day and an Elvis impersonator by
night. Nobody in the family thought particularly highly of Billy—
his Elvis wasn't that great and he caused a stir when he showed up
at my great-grandma's funeral wearing his gold shades and big-ass
TCB medallion. But at family reunions at my aunt Annie Mae's
house, while the men talked football and sampled Uncle Clyde's
'shine and picked polk salad out of their teeth, and we kids ran
hyper on sweet tea and pound cake and compared strategies for
tricking tourist kids into putting red-ant-ridden Spanish moss
on their heads, three generations of Nettles and Baker and
Ferguson women gathered in the bedroom and sewed sequins
onto Billy's white jumpsuits. Billy was inarguably a loser, but
he was family, and that's how we roll in Southern families. We
take even the shameful parts and we step up and own them.
Essays to Odes and In Between
Like many Southerners, I find my life is often a tug-of-war
between shame and pride. Cousin Billy was a disaster, but
then so was the guy he impersonated—bloated and perverse
and self-destructive and tacky, but still the goddamned King
of Rock and Roll, and I'll fight for him against all comers.
The South, in whole and in parts, has found itself on the
wrong side of so many issues, from desegregation to evolu
tion, from the Confederate flag to the Confederacy, that it's
sometimes hard to defend one's regionalism as anything other
than knee-jerk bigotry, but we still do it because for every
boneheaded thing to come out of our corner of the Republic,
there's something noble and righteous that couldn't have come
from anywhere else. The same Mississippi that gave us Trent
Lott and Byron de la Beckwith gave us William Faulkner and
Robert Johnson. Bull Conner's Alabama is also Hank Williams'
and Booker T. Washington's. Lester Maddox's Georgia is Martin
Luther King's Georgia.
The best thing we Southerners can do is to internalize it all
under the mantle of character. Sure, Paula Deen's syrupy gentil
ity makes me want to take a melon bailer to my frontal lobe,
but Savannah wouldn't be the same without her, and I doubt
I'll run into her on the street anyway. And Athens will always be
my twisted, artsy home, no matter how the state legislature tries
to gerrymander the life out of us. Yeah, I may live in the reddest of
the red states, but I've got Flannery O'Connor and Harry Crews and
Ray Charles and Chet Atkins and R.E. by God M. to save my soul.
And I've got The Oxford American, the quarterly magazine of all
things Southern and good. Once the pet project of lawyer-novelist-
gazillionaire John Grisham, it underwent a scary and uncertain
hiatus a couple of years ago, but is once again going strong. As a
journal of fine writing, fiction and essays, poetry and think-pieces,
it pulls the plow in the same way The Atlantic or Harper's does. OA
is one of the few magazines I can read cover-to-cover, and though
its annual Southern music issue is a must-have every fall, I have
yet to read any issue that disappoints.
For the new reader, OA's summer 2007 offering is a fine intro
duction. This issue's theme (quest editor Jack Pendarvis opens
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with suggestions for future theme issues, including a salute to
theme issues) is "Best of the South Odes," a collection of short
portraits about small wonders all over the Southland, from the 30-
foot-tall plaster cowboy boots that tower over San Antonio to New
Orleans snoballs (care of fellow Flagpole contributor Donn Cooper),
which are not sno-cones or even close. There's a vast, yawning
battlefield of cement lawn ornaments in coastal South Carolina,
the best hidden catfish joint in rural Arkansas, and an overview of
"Cherrylog Road," James Dickey's mythic poem about death and
sex a.id rebirth in a North Georgia junkyard. There's a lost rope
$4 19 DOMESTIC
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1 SI NORTH 7*CK{ON (next to Toppreg
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AUGUST 22.2007 ■ FLAGPOLE.COM 9