In her book “The New Mind of the South,†Tracy Thompson tours the region and analyzes the forces â€" both familiar and new â€" that are shaping the way its residents live and relate to each other. In a recent e-mail interview, Ms. Thompson discussed the classic book echoed in her title, her geographic definition of the South, race, class and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
Q.
W. J. Cash’s book “The Mind of the South,†first published in 1941, is a classic analysis of the region and written in a distinct style. How direct an inspiration was it on your work
A.
His book is sitting on my desk right now with little sticky notes all over it. You can’t write about the South without reading “The Mind of the South,†and many of the themes he identified are still around. But I made a conscious decision not to re-read his book while I was working on my own. I was approaching the South as a native who has viewed it from a small distance for 20 years, and I wanted to preserve that slightly arm’s-length perspective. Still, I found myself dipping into it all the time; hence all those sticky notes.
Q.
What would Cash find most surprising about today’s South
A.
The first would be the widespread acceptance of interracial marriage, which in 1941 would have been totally taboo to white Southerners â€" at least in the social sense, though of course in practical terms, interracial relationships have always been a fact of life in the South. The other is immigration. For a bunch of reasons, the South never knew any significant immigration until the 1980s, when the Mexican migration began. Cash spent much of his newspaper career working for papers in North Carolina, where today nearly 10 percent of the population is Hispanic, and where you can see flyers advertising Mexican bands stuck in the windows of the local Curves franchise. I think that would astonish him. And universal air conditioning!
Q.
How did you choose which states you would focus on for the book
A.
Anybody’s definition of “the South†is going to be idiosyncratic. I started with the 11 states of the Old Confederacy, and lopped off portions of that area that, due to major demographic changes, don’t really qualify as Southern anymore. So anything west of a line drawn between Dallas and Houston was the West; east Texas was the South. Florida is the South down to about Orlando, at which point it becomes something else. Northern Virginia is not really the South any more, but south of Prince William County definitely is. This left out some places that are identifiably Southern, such as the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the entire state of Kentucky, as well as parts of Oklahoma. But you have to draw a line somewhere.
Q.
You say that Southerners are conservative, but that not everyone understands why. What’s missing from the common explanation
A.
Southerners tend to be politically and socially conservative â€" but what everyone, Southerners included, often fails to take into account is how adaptable we are. We’ve had to be. Between 1800 and 1850, the South went from being a colonial backwater to being a global economic powerhouse, based on the cotton economy. Then there was the Civil War. Then decades of legal apartheid, followed by a transformative civil rights movement â€" and while all that was going on, you had the “bulldozer revolution,†in which an agrarian region became a region of shopping malls and cities and suburbs. Now we have immigration â€" not just from Mexico, but a significant Asian influx as well. I think Southerners place so much store by history and tradition because we all have this constant, nagging sense that everything familiar to us is about to disappear. And it probably is.
Q.
In your account, large parts of the South have stubbornly clung to thinking that the Civil War was not really about slavery and have not come to grips with the systemic violence against blacks that occurred as recently as the 1960s. Yet you also write that Southern cities are less segregated than their Northern counterparts and more openly discuss issues of race and class. How do you reconcile those things
A.
They aren’t hard to reconcile; the fact that many white Southerners believe some distorted version of history doesn’t have anything to do with where they live or what they think about their neighbors. White Southerners are entirely capable of believing that slavery was a benign institution while at the same time living on cordial terms with the African-American family next door, or for that matter with their African-American son-in-law.
As for open discussions of race and class: I’ve never met a Southerner, black or white, who could not tell you with great specificity what class of people they came from, whether it was redneck prole, coastal aristocracy, black bourgeoisie, trailer trash, plain old country people or whatever. Honest discussions of race can be hard to find in the South â€" they are rare everywhere â€" but on a day-to-day basis, black and white Southerners are very comfortable with each other. We’ve lived together a long time, and we are big on being polite.
Dayna Smith Tracy ThompsonQ.
There’s been a large remigration of African-Americans to the South in recent decades. How much of this is driven by the practical demands of the economy versus a more emotional longing to return home
A.
Impossible to say. William Falk, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, is studying this very question, and he has identified two separate streams of returnees â€" a smaller group of older African-Americans returning to spend their retirement in the region where they grew up, and a much larger group of younger African-Americans who seem to be motivated mainly by economic opportunity. But how many in the latter group have grandparents or great-grandparents who once lived in the South, and how much of an ancestral memory do they have That’s the fascinating, unanswered question. It’s worth mentioning that polls show that African-Americans who live in the South are actually slightly more likely than whites in the South to identify themselves as Southerners.
Q.
Some Southern states in recent years have created commissions based on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created by Nelson Mandela in South Africa. What exactly do these groups aim to do, and what kind of progress are they making
A.
Only two states â€" Mississippi and North Carolina â€" have tried that route, with less than earthshaking results. But they’re part of a larger grassroots effort to deal with the South’s legacy on race, and the aims of all these other groups vary. One group helps people explore different racial branches in their own family tree. Others lobby for a historical marker to commemorate some long-forgotten but historically significant lynching. Another one helps racially polarized neighborhoods talk to each other so they can cooperate on community projects. Others are explicitly religious.
Q.
You write about Atlanta: “Somehow, something essentially Southern has managed to survive here, like grass growing in cracks in the concrete. But is that evidence of its persistence, or just the dying remnants†After writing this book, how would you answer that question
A.
Here I think I’ll just quote Cash: “Of the future, I shall venture no definite prophecies.†All I can say is I hope it’s the former and not the latter. I think â€" I know â€" that’s the way he would have felt, too.
Donna Alberico for The New York Times Canoers on the Gowanus Canal in 2010.
