Soured on the South

I grew up in Virginia, though my accent, apart from a few words and phrases, is almost indistinguishable from my friends from California, Massachusetts, and Michigan. For many Southerners, especially in the Upper South, all that remains of that once rich linguistic heritage are such expressions as “y’all,” “yonder,” and “if I had my druthers.” For that, we can thank nationally syndicated television and heightened levels of migration within the United States, among other national trends.

It’s a sad phenomena, one you might think that establishment elites would bemoan, given their obsession with diversity and inclusion, and their declared desire to protect endangered cultures. But, you see, as a sign of their not-so-subtle enlightened hypocrisy, it’s only some cultures that have value. And regional dialects across Dixie — especially if they are associated with working-class whites — are not high on the list of endangered sub-cultures worth saving.

Not long ago, I spent several hours with an old family friend who grew up in rural southern Virginia, in a county that straddles both the Piedmont and Tidewater. Even that distinction, I found, was one somewhat lost upon me, given that this woman, born during the Second World War, quaintly referred to the Tidewater region of the Old Dominion, as “the low grounds.”

The reason for the visit, I confess, was a bit selfish. Several years ago, the woman, whom I had not seen for more than a decade, left a voicemail on my phone, communicating a message for my mother, whom she was having trouble contacting. Hearing her accent as an adult, I was stupefied. Even my Georgia-bred wife was confused by it. It wasn’t just the non-rhoticity, though that certainly stood out — it was the curious pronunciation that was indelibly Southern but sometimes almost British or Canadian (this YouTube video gives an idea of it).

I was desperate to talk to this woman, who, having spent almost her entire professional career in Northern Virginia (beginning in the 1960’s when it was still the South), retained a form of speech that seemed a historical relic. Over homemade biscuits and later lunch at an old local diner in Northern Virginia, I sought to understand her story, one that straddled two very different worlds: one of an ancient, venerable Southern heritage that traces its lineage to early English immigrants, and another that has accommodated itself to colorless, conformist modernity.

Her father farmed. I asked if agriculture was his profession. “Well, I don’t think he would have called it a profession as such,” she chuckled. “It was more what he could do, what was available to do.” She paused thoughtfully.”  I’m sure if he had had the opportunity, he would have gotten out of there” (“there” was pronounced something akin to “they-yuh”).

She had little knowledge of her ancestry, though she was fairly confident that some had their origin in the Georgia penal colony. For generations thereafter, strange doings in the family would be credited to that disreputable past. And there certainly were some “touched” kin, including an uncle who lost his young bride, but refused to remove any of her possessions from his Virginia home. Whenever young female relatives would visit him, the uncle would comment on how they were not nearly as beautiful as his deceased wife. “Have you ever?” she decried.

My friend attended university in Richmond in the early 1960’s. She received a bad grade in one course, the professor writing in the margins: “You’re the reason the Russians are winning.” Reminiscing on her time in the former capital of the Confederacy, she commented on the removal of Confederate statues from Monument Avenue. “I understand why Lee, Jackson, and Stuart had to go,” she said. “But why their mounts? Those were some impressive horses.”

Her antipathy towards her own Southern heritage bears explaining. Her mother, though a churchgoer, was a notorious gossip and virulent racist. The local public high-school was not segregated until after she graduated. Local discussions of Brown V. Board of Education often occurred outside the local church, with mean-spirited comments directed at “those people.” As she grew older, and experienced more of the world, my family friend’s little town in southeastern Virginia seemed more and more parochial and ignorant.

There are many such people like this woman — indeed, there is a profitable cottage industry of books and movies about Southrons who have come to “see the light” regarding their home, full as it supposedly is of bigots and slack-jawed yokels. Some such folk — those who earn a living (and perhaps fame) by repudiating their own kin — are deserving of our censure. But I’d wager the majority of “reformed Southerns,” as it were, are pliantly (and compliantly) seeking to survive in a culture that has little but condescending (if hypocritical) disdain for Dixie.

Of course, for such people, as it is with my family friend, their most interesting (and charming) qualities are those defined by their Southern upbringing. Their manners, their tastes, and their accents all reflect a certain breeding that is found only in the old Confederacy. It is ironic as it is sad: embarrassed by a heritage snidely mocked by our elite class, “reformed Southerners” seek to assimilate to the characterless culture of the “nowheres,” even while it is precisely the “somewhereness” of repentant Southrons that makes them a curiosity, periodically trotted out to play a familiar caricature. “The South remains stuck in an archaic, contrived world of quixotic, unenlightened backwardness, and I should know, I grew up in it!”

I don’t doubt my family friend’s experience of Jim Crow Virginia was a troubled one. But spare me the attempt to place it in a category somehow dramatically different from Boston, Los Angeles, or Portland, all of which have their own checkered histories when it comes to race relations. I speculate the attempt by the elite institutions of our culture to place in the South in some unparalleled category of dysfunction has more insidious motives: to malign and cast in the dustbin of history a society still influenced by traditional beliefs about religion, government, and gender, among other things. To defeat the South is to conquer the last major holdout to our secularist, “rolling revolution” as scholar Scott Yenor calls it.

Despite my family friend’s distaste for her own Southern upbringing, I cherished my time listening to and learning from her. She comes from another world, one increasingly disappearing from our post-industrialist, anonymizing landscape of chain-store stripmalls and soulless suburbs. That her supposed cultural “allies” aren’t rushing to preserve her story — and so many others like hers — tells you all you need to know about the priorities of the supposedly “diverse” and “inclusive” Left. I wish she could see that for herself.

Casey Chalk

Casey Chalk has degrees in history and education from the University of Virginia, and a masters in theology from Christendom College. He is a regular contributor for New Oxford Review, The Federalist, American Conservative, and Crisis Magazine. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands (Sophia Institute).

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