II
The foregoing figures tell little enough, to be sure, about the South; you learn nothing much about a sonnet by a footnote on its rhyme scheme. For it is a truism that there is not one South; there are, it is said, many Souths.
Eighteen hundred miles separate the Rio Grande at El Paso from the James at Hampton Roads. The intervening land is immensely varied. The South begins, at its western rim, in canyon country, red-walled, black-hilled; the bare and bony mountains stretch across the prairie like the skeletons of dinosaurs. This is hard country, burned by the sun and wrinkled by the unceasing wind; this is Texas, and almost everything men say of it is true. Oklahoma, to the north, is a pocket paper-back edition of its brawny southern neighbor. Both States offer moments of surpassing beauty and long stretches of surpassing dullness; they offer a splendid, lonesome emptiness of time and space, and then, abruptly, the sophistication of Dallas and the busy commerce of Oklahoma City and Houston.
Coming east, one finds Arkansas, and below it Louisiana; Ozark country, the endless foothills that never quite reach to the foot of anything, to the south the flatlands and bayous, the white cranes flying, the River, incredibly massive, the jeweled city one caresses as a mistress in his dreams.
Across the River, Mississippi and Alabama: cotton country, bottom land, mules and iron; small towns that evoke in bank and clock and feed store, in the inevitable bronze soldier standing guard in courthouse square, the image of small towns everywhere; progress and poverty, the hot breath of Birmingham, the Monopoly suburbs, their roofs all in line and neat bibs of crab grass under their chins.
On to the east, Georgia: red clay and cotton, the prosperous incongruity of Atlanta, resting on the homely landscape like a diamond stickpin on a shabby tie. To the south, the separate nation that is Florida, post-card blue, lemon yellow, an old man nodding on a St. Petersburg bench, a swamp child gazing from a quiet pier; Miami, and the Beach, the liquid ripple of Cuban tongues; the bonefish, silver as sixteenth notes in amethyst water. Back again to the north: Tennessee, timbered, taciturn, green-hilled, the great lakes of the TVA; Memphis and Knoxville and Nashville; the accent that thins a short e to a short i. Above Tennessee, Kentucky, tied inescapably now to the North and Midwest, hard politics, soft speech, burley tobacco, and good bourbon.
To the east again, Virginia and South Carolina, with North Carolina between them, “a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit,” or more accurately, a peak of giddy-up between two valleys of whoa. South Carolina is moss and small creeks, camellias, azaleas, the rugs a little thin, the white tapers gleaming, ancestors on the walls and Calhoun’s brooding spirit still alive, Camden and Columbia, and a classic capitol still pocked by Yankee shells. To the north, tobacco country; Charlotte, thrusting ahead, brief-cased, snap-brimmed; universities, schools, textiles, furniture mills, the black cypress quietude of the inland waterway.
Finally, Virginia, stretching four hundred miles from her coal country to her beaches; tobacco and peanuts; the gem that is Williamsburg, the plantation country, the somnolent Northern Neck, Mr. Jefferson’s University, the hunt country, the changelessly changing capital city where I write.
This land of ours is many-rivered, and the rivers have lovely names: the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee, Pee Dee, Yadkin, Tombigbee, Brazoo, Mobile, the York, the James, the Mattaponi. Our mountains are mostly old, worn down, the edges rubbed off: the Blue Ridge, the Alleghenies, the Great Smokies, the Ozarks. Our summers are hot and humid; the winters are uninteresting outside of Florida; but spring in the South is a cool rosé, and October in Virginia is a sparkling champagne. I speak to the court in this brief, as Your Honors will have noted, with an affection that ought perhaps to be brought back in bounds; along with the most beautiful horses in the world, we have some of the meanest mosquitoes south of New Jersey, an oversupply of shif’less dogs, and vast quantities of stinging nettles; we have sandflies, horned toads, and chiggers; we have our fair share of men who give short weight, of bigoted men, unkind, intolerant; we are given in a Cavalier South to drinking too much, and in the Bible Belt, to drinking not enough; we have men who honk at traffic lights, and women who giggle, and politicians who are full of wind; the Southern Shintoism that is sometimes a blessing is as often a curse; some of our cities are dirty, and most of our streets have lumps in them. But this is the many-faceted, cloudy, crystalline compound called the South.
Yet, no, it is not the South. The truism of “many Souths” will not stand too much weight. Every region in the country has its contrasts, its extremes, its anomalies, its measurable differences. An essential point can be missed in overconcentration on the Rural South, the Urban South, the New South, the Old South, the Liberal South, the Conservative South. There remains a great and well-understood meaning simply in the South; there is, in fact, a sense of oneness here, an identity, a sharing, and this quality makes the South unique in ways that New England, and the Midwest, and the West do not approach. The Confederacy was, as a matter of law, a state in being; but it was first of all, and still is, what so many observers have termed it: a state of mind. And running through this state of mind, now loose as basting thread, now knotted as twine, now strong and stubborn as wire, coloring the whole fabric of our lives, is this inescapable awareness: the consciousness of the Negro.