Front Porch (2016)

Front Porch Harry L. Watson, Editor Click for larger view View full resolution Eudora Welty’s home library, Jackson, Mississippi, by Kate Medley. Alas for the South! Her books have grown fewer— She never was much given to literature. In his notorious 1917 roast of southern backwardness, “The Sahara of the Bozart,” H. L. Mencken used this jingle by South Carolina rhymester J. Gordon Coogler to represent the region’s artistic vacuum. Mencken’s japes stung at the time and long afterward, but the real joke was finally on him. He unwittingly wrote on the eve of the Southern Renaissance—that continuing wave of literary energy and accomplishment that seemingly burst out of nowhere after World War I and made southern literature a hallmark of American high culture over the century that followed. From the manifestos of the Fugitive Poets to the masterpieces of Faulkner, [End Page 1] O’Connor, and Welty, and on through the works of Walker Percy and Reynolds Price, twentieth-century southern writers enthralled readers with their anguished consciousness and consciences, their richly embroidered prose, and their intricate entanglements in competing values and relationships. The southern modernists who got the most attention were white men and women who challenged conventions of artistic expression as they also struggled with one aspect or another of the South’s bitter past, with emotions that ranged from unpersuasive nostalgia to angry ambivalence. The best of them used southern themes to depict what Faulkner famously called “the human heart in conflict with itself,” and to explore the tangled human relationships (and “grotesque” human beings) that history left behind. Black authors such as Charles Chesnutt and Ralph Ellison were likewise crucial voices in twentieth-century southern literature who fearlessly resisted the death grip of Jim Crow, or like Zora Neale Hurston, celebrated the solidarity and endurance that enabled black southerners to survive it. And we now know better than Mencken ever guessed that the Southern Renaissance grew out of the rich soil of southern storytelling that included fertile layers of black, white, and Indian folklore, the courage of the slave narratives, the affectionate slapstick of the southwestern humorists, and the sardonic realism of Mark Twain. In this issue’s “Mason–Dixon Lines,” our regular poetry feature, poet Atsuro Riley expresses our debt to the southern oral tradition with “Call,” an evocative homage to storytelling by flickering torchlight. But if the modern South was actually much given to literature, the same has not been true of Southern Cultures. With academic roots in social science and history, the founding editors recruited initial contributors from their own circles, and as the twig was bent, so it inclined. We welcomed discussions of literature when they came to us, but steered clear of the art itself, figuring that established “little magazines” were better suited to its genres and the conversations they stirred. Over time, that boundary wavered as we added our prized poetry feature, “Mason–Dixon Lines,” and later included cds of recorded music in our special music issues, but we still resisted the pull of fiction. Now that rampart has fallen too, and it’s high time. Passing years brought new talents to the fore, themed issues grew ever more popular, and the theme of literature seemed ever more compelling. Finally its lure proved irresistible, and the gifted hands of guest editor Patrick Horn have steered Southern Cultures to its first issue on southern fiction, which includes critical essays, an authors’ roundtable discussion, and six original stories. But this is not your grandmother’s southern fiction. Events of the Obama years have exploded the inane notion of a “post-racial” America, but the Souths of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor—not to mention Margaret Mitchell—seem, well, gone with the wind. In the last half-century, the “bulldozer revolution” foretold by C. Vann Woodward in the 1950s has marked the southern landscape [End Page 2] almost past recognition, leaving strip malls and freeways where live oaks and tenant farms had prevailed. Flying over Mississippi, the cotton fields seem turned into catfish ponds, brilliantly winking at 30,000 feet. Factories stand derelict where cotton mills once loomed as the cutting edge of modernity. Epic population movements...