![]() I’d left the South in 1981, five years earlier-the same year the Klan lynched a young black man named Michael Donald, hanging him from a tree on a quiet street in Mobile, Alabama. What was with the South and sex? And race? And death? Why did we live there? (Why do we live at all?) I was four thousand miles from home, writing a dissertation on William Faulkner and trying to untangle in my mind the knot we’d made of our past and present. The enervated English sun crept through the high windows of the Bodleian Library as I sat in a hard oak chair, three towers of books in front of me, trying to understand the American South. Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949) ![]() Beyond the mountains was the North: the Land of Damyankees, where live People Who Cause All of Our Trouble and at the end of the North was Wall Street, that fabulous crooked canyon of evil winding endlessly through the southern mind which was like the dark race, secretly visited by those who talked loudest against it.” All this is the South we remember, curving gently and more and more steeply until stopped by mountains. ![]() ![]() ![]() Swamp and palmettos and ‘sinks’ and endless stretches of pines slashed and dripping their richness into little tin cups that glint like bright money. ![]()
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