Tuesday, August 23, 2005
A Trip Home
This post from Gadfly's Muse was a wonderful trip home for me.
There are some occasions when all that was best about the "Old South" floods back over your awareness like a gentle changing tide on the Mississippi river. You just sense the lift and the inescapable pleasant contentment that it brings. Only someone who knew her and loved her can ever truly understand the bittersweet experience. The "Old South" will always be feminine in our remembrance, because, I suppose, Southern Ladies epitomized all about which I am speaking. There was a gentleness, a sense of propriety, a firm conviction in the "way things ought to be", that characterized the externals of Old Southern society. And it was not the least bit hypocritical, though it is easy to think it was by those who never knew her. But that which made the gentleness, the sense of propriety and conviction more than mere gloss, was the tempered steel which provided its foundation. The Old South, at its best, was the conviction that civilization meant moral conviction and apart from that conviction, barbarity reigned. And barbarity simply was not allowed. It 'twasn't nice. Nowhere was that more evident than in Southern womanhood and hence, the Old South is "she."I was born in Mississippi, where both my parents attended Ole Miss and most of the maternal side of my family still resides. I don't talk of it often because as the Muse says
There are those, usually who did not grow in that era, whose views of the South are colored only by the caricatures most often used to depict it. This is especially true of Mississippi.Please read this post -- it is wonderfully written and it wraps you in the warmth that REALLY is the South.
