Where should I send you to know the soul of the South? I think I`ll send you to the Mast General Store.
To get there, you leave the bustling mountain town of Boone, N.C., behind you, drive west a ways until you cross the Watauga River, and turn to the right into as pretty a Blue Ridge valley as you will ever find. After a while, you come to the village of Valle Crucis. The Mast Store is about the only thing there, a two-story frame building with a kerosene pump beside the front door. Park your car and come on in. Don`t be in a hurry; you`re going to be here for a while.
The store stocks pretty much the same merchandise as when it opened in 1883. Namely hoe handles, vegetable seeds, Mail Pouch Tobacco, thermometers, duck decoys, horseshoes, harmonicas, shaving mugs, kettles, long johns, flyswatters, lanterns, butter churns, cow bells, shovels, pokers, cast iron skillets, overalls, corn shellers, flour sifters, hunting knives, boots, suspenders, country hams, peanuts, weather vanes, pine tar soap, rocking chairs, calendars, nails, rope, peach preserves, fishhooks, brooms, washboards, feather dusters, milking stools, camisoles, apples, string beans, biscuit cutters, tin cups, andirons, wooden matches, mailboxes, cradles, shotgun shells, tulip bulbs, poultry feed and penny candy.
The village post office stands in one corner of the store, and that is where the old-timers of the community gather in late morning to collect their mail and pass the time of day.
”Looks like rain, don`t it, Clyde?”
”Yep, there was a right smart of cloud over the mountain when I come out of the house this morning.”
”Well, I hope it does come a good soaking. It`s so dry down yonder at my place that the speckled trout have gone to climbing out of the creek and coming up to the house to get a drink at the pump on the porch!”
You are welcome, stranger, to enter into this conversation. Just devise a question–say, ”Could one of you gentlemen tell me which road to take to get to Banner Elk?”
When the reply comes–”Well, you take the road outside the store and go thataway, but why would you want to go there when everything you want is right here?”–then you have become part of the late morning roundtable at the Mast General Store.
This store, with its creaking, hundred-year-old pine floorboards and its cluttered aisles and its garrulous patrons, in no hurry to get on with whatever it is they should be doing this morning, is figuratively, and more or less geographically, the heart and soul of the South. You cannot get to know the store or the people in it if you are in a hurry to reach the bright lights. In its essence, the South is rural, slow and charming, cluttered and eclectic, rich in old tales and old artifacts and human friendship; the South cannot be hurried through. Vacationers who take the interstate from New York to Miami miss the South completely.
In 20 years of traveling the back roads of America, I have come to a wondering appreciation of all her regions.
I love the flinty hills of old New England and those angular, laconic, economic people, who never use two words when one will do, or spend $2 for a thing worth 50 cents. I love the Great Plains, where sturdy, dusty men wearing seed company caps lift a finger of greeting from the steering wheels of their tractors when you meet them on the section roads. I love the mountain west for its pure trout rivers tumbling and its white-faced cattle grazing under the gaze of the horseman on the rise, the cowboy, the romantic, sunburnt survivor. I love the cliffs the Pacific Ocean breaks against, and the people who live on the land behind the cliffs in a New America of their own devising.
But it is the South that attracts me and calls me home. It is my native region, and the one that I know best. Working in a room in Manhattan, I have just written two books about the South, and I carry a couple dozen more around in my memory. Probably every Southerner has book-length memories of family and friends and small-town acquaintances, of the breeze in the pines, of love and longing. The South is where our best stories come from, and some of our best storytellers.
I have passed the time with a fiddle maker in Arkansas, a mule-back mailman in Kentucky, a Georgia blacksmith and a Florida oyster-shucker. I have listened to the song of the gandy-dancers on a stretch of Mississippi branch- line railroad, and tapped my foot at many a West Virginia hoedown. Such a wealth of carvers, quilters, loggers, preachers, farmers, truckers, horsetraders and bench-sitting yarn-spinners resides in the South that a bemused traveler from outside the region can hardly help making the acquaintance of some enthralling characters on even a short foray below the Mason-Dixon line.
And as to the sophistication of the natives, do not be too quick to judge. A rough exterior masks many a scholarly intellect on the back roads of the South. A city slicker friend of mine fell into conversation with a slow-talking old gent in a country store at Flat Rock, N.C., years ago. The man gave his occupation as goat-raiser (which was true as far as it went) and seemed to be sort of genial and dim-witted, surely not a man with any book-learning. My friend found later he had been talking with the nation`s most formidable poet and historian, Carl Sandburg.
So leave preconceptions behind when you enter the South, and watch out for eggheads in overalls.
Let`s see. I left you in conversation with the regulars at the Mast General Store. Maybe it is time to move on down the road. Just beyond the store`s screen door are some of the most appealing roads I know. They lead past the homes and shops of mountain weavers, woodworkers and basket makers, and crafters of furniture and wooden toys. The hill country of North Carolina and Tennessee offers the South`s best hiking, climbing, camping, canoeing and white water rafting, too, if you are of the strenuous persuasion.
For those whose idea of exercise is a walk from the car to a good table in a restaurant, this is country ham and buttermilk biscuit country. A number of fancy restaurants have sprung up lately to serve veal cordon bleu to the folk who reside in the elegant golf course condos and ski lodges that also have sprung up lately. But when I`m in the Blue Ridge country, I make my lunch (dinner, it`s called) of barbecue and beer, and my dinner (supper, it`s called) of chicken and dumplings and butterbeans and roasting ears of corn. Some of the best eating places don`t advertise; ask the guy in the gas station where he eats–not when his in-laws from Asheville come to visit, but when he takes his wife out on Saturday night.
Here`s a good mountain itinerary for you: Start in Galax, Va., at the Old Fiddler`s Convention on the second weekend of August and head south on the Blue Ridge Parkway, top speed 45 miles an hour, with the fiddle tunes still playing in your head. Leave the Parkway every place you can to shoot the breeze with the folks in Roaring Gap, N.C., and Glendale Springs, Blowing Rock, Linville, Spruce Pine, Little Switzerland, Biltmore Forest, Brevard, Highlands, Cashiers, Franklin, Murphy. There. If you did it right, you just used up your three-week vacation, and you had a wonderful time.
Oh, there are a thousand roads to choose among for the traveler seeking the true South. They are all two-lane blacktops without very much traffic:
— La. Hwy. 14 from Lake Charles to New Iberia, and on to St. Martinville, Lafayette and Breaux Bridge. This is Cajun country–live oak, Spanish moss and crawfish country. I spent one of the happiest days of my life with a fisherman from Thibodaux, back in the bayous setting fishtraps. Late in the afternoon, we sat ourselves down to a great steaming mound of boiled crawfish and dined there out of doors until the sun had set and the Louisiana moon appeared through the trees. A friend of the fisherman produced a guitar and sang, softly, a Cajun song:
”Get up in the morning, baby, you find me gone, I`m on my way to the crawfish pond. Crawfish ain`t skeered of a six-mule team, But run from a Cajun time he see `im. Look all around a Cajun`s bed . . . You don`t find nothin`
but crawfish heads. . . .”
And many other verses I`ve forgotten, until the moon was high and there was nothing around our table but crawfish heads.
— Ark. Hwy. 5, from Three Brothers to Wild Cherry to Calico Rock to Ben, Ida, Rosebud and Romance. A man from this White River country in the Ozarks offered me a sip of his corn liquor.
”What does it taste like?”
”It tastes like two cats fightin` in your mouth.”
”Does it improve with age?”
”Well, I kept a jar of it a week one time, and I couldn`t tell that it was one bit better than when it was new and fresh.”
You could learn a lot about Arkansas cabin crafts by stopping in Mountain View at the Ozark Folk Center, or you could pass the center by and learn the same things by just meeting some Ozark folk.
— Va. Hwy. 31, from Jamestown to Williamsburg. This road is only 10 miles long, but it carries you more than a century and a half from 1607, when a lonely and inept company of Englishmen landed in a swamp on a river they called the James (Captain John Smith to the London Company in 1608: ”I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons and diggers up of trees . . . than a thousand of such as we have.”) to the start of the colonists` final break with Mother England (Patrick Henry in 1765: ”If this be treason, make the most of it!”). At one end of this road is the beginning of the English colonial period in America, and at the other, the end of it.
— The Natchez Trace from beautiful, antebellum Natchez, Miss.–with breaks in the trail–to the booming, amplified steel guitar city of Nashville. At the dawn of the 19th Century, boatmen who had floated their goods down the Mississippi used the old Indian trail known as the Natchez Trace to return home. There were constant skirmishes with highwaymen, and it became the custom, when an honest traveler was lucky enough to outshoot an outlaw, to ornament a pole beside the trail with the bandit`s head. The National Park Service is paving the Trace and turning it into a charming parkway, thoughtfully omitting heads on poles.
This road leads through Choctaw and Chickasaw country, Hernando DeSoto country, slave plantation country, and right past some of the storied battlegrounds of the civil rights movement of 25 years ago. The Old South, to a fare-thee-well. There`s only one problem with starting this journey in Natchez: You might be so enchanted by the gardens and mansions of that impossibly romantic town that you`ll never make it onto the road north. I thought I knew all about ”Southern hospitality” until those gentle Natchez ladies, the ones in hoopskirts who show you through the Greek Revival houses, turned their smiles and accents upon me.
— Ga. Hwy. 23, south from Folkston. Water lilies and wild Iris, herons, ibis and sandbill cranes, bobcats and alligators. Ga. 23 is the way in to the fabulous Okefenokee Swamp. The people who live on the fringes of the Okefenokee are a part of nature there, as much at home as the cypress trees. Conversation at breakfast in a Folkston cafe:
”Will, how come you still vote Democrat?”
”My granddaddy was a Democrat, my daddy was a Democrat and I`m a Democrat.”
”What if your granddaddy had been a horse thief and your daddy had been a horse thief?”
Will studied that one for a while, stirred his grits into his eggs and looked up at his adversary with a triumphant grin.
”Then,” he said, ”I`d have been a Republican!”
Go to the Okefenokee for the wildlife, but linger on to become friends with the wry, nature-loving, politics-loving, talkative creatures who live back up on the dry land. They`re the easiest people to be friendly with I`ve ever come across.
Well, that`s a fair Southern sampler–and I haven`t even sent you through the Kentucky bluegrass country when the colts are romping in the spring, or down the barrier islands of the Carolinas when the bluefish are feeding in the fall, or up to Sistersville, W.Va., or down to Key West.
And you`ll notice we`ve been to hardly any big cities at all. You already know that the unique city of America is New Orleans, don`t you? You know about Charleston and Savannah and St. Petersburg and Mobile, those seductive destinations. And I didn`t want to get lost in the skyscraper maze of Dallas and Houston, though they are Southern cities, too.
They say the South is changing fast, by which is usually meant it is sprouting tall buildings nowadays. But to know the South in all its grace and with all its faults, to know its charming distinctions, you have to get out from under the skyscraper shadow and off the interstate`s ribbon of concrete and meet a few people and hear a few stories and get some dust on your shoes. Back in the days when the radio station call letters all stood for something, WSB in Atlanta used to say its initials were a greeting: ”Welcome South, Brother!” To which we would add today, ”And you too, Sister!”
You`ll feel the warmth of the greeting out there on the back roads as nowhere else in the country:
So welcome South.
THE BARBECUE BLUES SOURCE: By Charles Kuralt. Excerpted from ”North Carolina Is My Home” by Charles Kuralt, (copyright) 1986 by Fast & McMillan Inc.; Universal Press Syndicate.
The waiter brought the champagne and discreetly popped the cork
In a fancy French restaurant on the east side of New York.
The patron sipped it glumly with his caviar souffle;
I could see his heart was heavy, and his mind was far away.
He said: ”I was raised on black-eyed peas and barbecue,
And butter beans and turnip greens and brunswick stew.
And every time I drink champagne, I yearn
For buttermilk from Grandma`s butter churn.”
Then they served his pate from the liver of a goose.
Then they served his quiche Lorraine and his chocolate mousse,
When they brought his cognac, he just shook his head
And looked at me in sadness, and this is what he said.
He said: ”I was fed on cracklin` bread and country hams
And sausage meat and hominy and candied yams.
I have dined on all the world`s cuisines;
I wish I had me a mess of collard greens.”
He said his butler always serves him breakfast in bed.
Said he orders buttermilk biscuits and gets croissants instead.
Said they give him Belgian waffles no matter how he begs
For country ham, ham gravy, grits and eggs.
He said: ”Now excuse me, friend, but tears come to my eyes
Each time I think about my Mama`s apple pies
And sourwood honey from my Papa`s hives.
Oh, sometimes men leave home and ruin their lives!”
He said: ”Friend, you get awful tired of Brie.
If you`re goin` down home, tell `em this for me.
Just one thing, tell `em, I implore ya.
They don`t serve chicken and dumplin`s in the Waldorf Astoria.”
He said: ”Oh I`ve had those escargots that they serve in France.
You pay your francs and give your thanks and take your chance.
And when I eat lasagna down in Rome,
I`m thinkin` `bout that livermush back at home!”
Then he nodded to the waiter and sadly paid his bill
And took his leave of me. And I can see him still
With his head bowed down as he wandered forth . . .
A Tar Heel starving in the North.
He said: ”Now I`m eating sturgeon eggs they serve on toast,
And thinkin` `bout the good food that I want the most,
Like barbecue and roasted ears of corn
From that North Carolina farm where I was born!”
Young folks, think on that man`s folly,
Before you board that bus in Raleigh
And head north for fame and fortune.
Just beware . . .
They have limousines
and designer jeans
And diamond rings
and such-like things . . .
But there`s nothing to eat up there!
WHO IS — AND WHO ISN`T — A SOUTHERNER
SOURCE: By Charles Kuralt. Excerpted from ”Southerners: Portrait of a People,” by Charles Kuralt; (copyright) 1986 by Oxmoor House, Inc.; Universal Press Syndicate.
They say the South is at last entering the mainstream. Well, as somebody pointed out, one-third of Americans call themselves Southerners. That is a mainstream.
There`s no doubt in anyone`s mind that people born and brought up in Georgia, in Mississippi, in Alabama, in Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina or South Carolina are Southerners and always have been. They are tied together by strong bonds of family, land, language and history.
But there are so many different kinds of Southerners. Where do you draw the lines? Is a Texan a Southerner? If he hails from east of the Pecos, he surely is. Are you a Yankee if you happen to live across the Missouri state line, even if you love grits and turnip greens? You`re not. Do we count people in Maryland, who speak like Southerners, but whose forebears gave a frosty reception to Robert E. Lee? We do.
We should also speak of West Virginians as Southerners, assuredly, even though that state was created by Abraham Lincoln after the people within its boundaries sided with him against the Confederacy.
If we measured Southerners by the standard of who stood with whom in a war now over a 100 years gone, of course, hardly anybody in the western part of North Carolina would be considered a Southerner. In those parts, as in sections of Tennessee and Alabama–and most of the border states as well–most people were Republicans, and for Lincoln, and opposed to the Civil War. Up there in those hollows, people thought quite rightly that the war was a terrible waste.
But an afternoon`s drive out from Asheville into those very hills will convince you in some indefinable way that you`re in a Southern land, among Southerners.
It is worth noting that people in extreme southern Illinois have always considered themselves Southerners, in spite of their place on the map. They act Southern. Their sympathies were with the South in the Civil War. They farmed as Southerners. All of the people they traded with were Southerners. They felt themselves much closer to the South than to, say, Chicago or Gary. To this day, Cairo, Ill., is as Southern a town as you would ever wish to visit.
And you do find Southerners in Missouri–not Southerners just by virtue of the fact that they came from the South or their folks happened to come from the South. They feel Southern.
I guess a Southerner is just anybody who says he is.
