A friend and reader of my column (thanks to all the readers!) lent me a copy of Tracy Thompson’s book, “The New Mind of the South,” to better inform future columns. Ms. Thompson, a Georgia native, laments and celebrates in turn the progress the South has made since her childhood.
First, she defines the South in a way I can agree with: the states of the old Confederacy minus the D.C. suburbs in northern Virginia and minus west Texas, which is the West, not the South.
She points out right at the beginning that the South has been changed by waves of immigration and there is no going back. One of her chapters, “Salsa with Your Grits,” describes the effect of Hispanic immigration into the South. She visits Asheboro, NC, where Hispanics now make up 20 percent of the population. North Carolina and Georgia both now boast an eight percent and growing Hispanic population. To her mind, probably quite accurately, whether or not the Hispanic youth consider themselves Southern will partially determine the survival of Southern culture.
However, I agree with the New York Times’ Dwight Garner that Ms. Thompson’s book is too “breezy.” She points out quite a lot, but delves into very little.
She focuses quite a lot on how “Southern” has traditionally meant “agricultural.” Traditional Southern identity, for black and white Southerners, has meant some connection to growing crops. However, one of the major problems in the South today is the loss of manufacturing jobs. Southern state and local governments are offering massive incentive packages to manufacturers to locate to the South. Charleston has poached Boeing from Seattle, and after a raft of gun control measures up north, many gun manufacturers came south.
Maybe because of her focus on agricultural identity (and what happens when all that farmland becomes strip malls and suburbs), she talks about almost no southern city besides Atlanta. Nashville, Charlotte, Charleston, Richmond and New Orleans all get glossed over. In her book, the South is either farmland or Atlanta.
Thompson’s book is a series of vignettes: she makes an appearance at a Children of the Confederacy convention, she explores Atlanta, her hometown, and she talks of a lot of friends who grew up in the North and moved to the South and a lot of friends who grew up in the South and moved North.
Overall, the book can be a fun read. Because it is so breezy, you probably need some preexisting knowledge of the South to make sense of it. Almost every chapter of her book could be expanded into a book of its own. However, it can be a good crash course. Maybe put it on your summer reading list. See what you think.