Growing up Southern

Sunset on the Outer Banks

“If you raise children in the South, you produce southerners.  And a southerner is one of God’s natural fools. “

Tom Wingo’s saying from Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy

In The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy’s story changes time and place, moves back in time then jumps to the present, picking through story after story. Long, elliptical stories. His main characters are three siblings described through the eyes of Tom Wingo, of their growing up and the rambling stories of preceding generations. At the heart of it, Conroy weaves tales and conversations worth their unraveling.

Building a myth to fit the name of the book.

I took a flyer on this book, thinking it might help my own writing. Essentially an authorial spirit nagged that I should read it, and I listened.

Got great reviews, but no one talks about Conroy any more, I don’t think. Barbara Streisand made a notable movie from Conroy’s screenplay, and Nick Nolte did a whale of an acting job as Tom Wingo, Conroy’s alter ego. Conroy was a best selling author back in the 1980s, but I wonder if he’s still discussed in modern lit classes–or if he ever was. Tom is a man doing a rear guard action against feminist politics, even as a feminist, though he couldn’t pass today’s PC purity test.

“I loved your sister’s poetry long before I ever knew I would be her doctor.  I loved it and still do.  Just read her poems, Tom…”

“What?” I shouted, lifting myself out of my chair and moving angrily toward Lowenstein.  “Just read my sister’s poetry?  I said I was a coach, Doctor, not an orangutan.  And you must have forgotten that other minor detail in my pitiful curriculum vitae.  I’m an English teacher, Lowenstein, a wonderful English teacher with astonishing, outsized gifts for making slack-jawed southern morons fall in love with the language they were born to damage.  I was reading Savannah’s poetry long before you were having dialogues with hopeless neurotics, my friend.”

“Excuse me, Tom,” she said.  “I apologize.  I don’t think of you reading it because of the subject matter.  Her poems are so personally written for and about women.” 

“They are not.”  I sighed wearily.  “Goddamn it.  They are not.  Why is everyone in this fucking city so stupid?  Why does everyone say the exact same thing about her poetry?  It cheapens her work.  It cheapens any writer’s work.” 

“You don’t think it’s written mostly for women?” she asked.

“No, it’s written for people.” 

From The Prince of Tides

When setting out to write fiction, one begins with humans then works back through their sex, age, place of birth, life experiences and so on. A primary attribute, but sex doesn’t define us in our entirety. QED, Mr. Conroy. The rest of the scene—what comes before this and what follows—is brilliant dialogue. It was difficult to winnow this fragment.

Conroy insults New York City before he sets about to redeem it, which made me smile. You feel he spent enough time in the city to become familiar with it. Only thing he takes to are the restaurants–a totally reasonable position to take. He equates the city with his sister’s life in an insane asylum. Again, close enough for rock and roll.

Last weekend I caught the second half of “Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream” a documentary on an old Jewish family matzos factory operating on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The documentary’s plot involves living too close to where the rollicking flow of developer money is happening in real time.

Evidently, the Streit family has been producing matzos since 1925 but the cost of staying put in Manhattan was drowning the operation in debt. LA Times on the documentary. While watching these end-of-an-era descendants decide what to do with a legacy of old, clanking machinery for making matzos and strictly up-to-date land values, I tried imagining how anyone could love such a pile of iron and concrete surrounded by greed. Greed’s an old vice that seems to be making a strong comeback.

I’ll concede the Lower East Side’s history of Jewish culture seems like the sprawl of a good 19th Century novel. It is a tightly woven union between place and people. Which is a marvel to a southern boy—to think people would choose to live with New York’s cacophony. In grad school, I recall saying something of this sort to Lou Davis, of Davis & Brody, a highly regarded New York architectural firm. His response was that he couldn’t see living anywhere else. We’re an adaptable species.

People hold up the city as an exemplar of urbanity. Conroy, in Tom Wingo’s voice, says at one point, the tidewater estuaries still lay buried beneath New York concrete. Way too buried for my tastes, although the pizza is almost as good as New Haven’s. New York City is like this home of an eccentric scientist who scurries from one project to the next, forgetting to ever go back to clean up the previous mess; the whole backyard is a junkyard, with bits of shiny new things here and rusting skeletons everywhere else.

Southern writers are by reputation innately able to produce quotable slangs, slams and observations. Conroy’s every third paragraph hits on another one. You need to read it slow if you don’t want to miss out, following the novel’s rhythms like taking a cross-country train. No need to rush.

My brother-in-law is from an Italian family, yet his drawl is about as southern as it comes. And he has this deep-voiced, sardonic twist on life so you’d think his family had southern roots deeper than a live oak. The boy is laughing while he’s crying–a longstanding avocation in the South. His grandfather was from that old country. It doesn’t take more than a generation or two to make a southerner out of the right stock. Italians love food, and love to tell stories, so it was a good fit. The fact his grandmother was a Georgia peach with aristocratic ways probably hurried along the process. For a while he and my sister lived with a gator in the backyard in the low country. My brother-in-law had a name for the damn thing, ‘cause he’d climb gator-graceful up onto the Bermuda grass to sun himself quite regular, and he had to call him something.

I don’t know what it’s like to grow up anywhere else–South Carolina is mostly all I knew as a kid. I spent my time avoiding Catholic schooling by running around in the woods back of our blue collar neighborhood until they cleared the land to make more of the same. I was either in the woods or playing backyard football and baseball with Barry, my next door neighbor. We were a year apart, and he was by far the better athlete.

Barry saved my skinny butt at least once. I was thirteen, maybe fourteen and this bully thought I’d been getting too close to his girlfriend down the street, a project I was making progress toward. So he chased me on his bike into my front yard one day, he and some mates had me surrounded, and I knew a pounding was about to commence when Barry steps out from his house next door to check out the scene. By this time Barry was filling out like a full size football player whereas I was not. Barry didn’t even have to fight to make his point to the redneck. Barry ended up playing high school football, went on to get an urban studies degree, so he wasn’t slow, either.

Houses in our part of Sumter were one story ramblers with no basements, small rooms, nothing fancy. Some like ours had screened porches where we kids sometimes slept in the summer. A high water-table discouraged digging down too far, and land was cheap; basements were expensive. We lived at the edge of town, just inside the city limits of 25,000 souls and a scattering of farms and tiny shacks within biking distance of my family’s house. When Conroy mentions wearing tennis shoes to school instead of Weejuns costing a lot more, I recognized that tune.

You couldn’t say Sumter was tidewater like where Pat Conroy grew up, but it for sure wasn’t in the highlands. Low, flat country, skeeters, swamp cedar and pine groves. When I had to rake the yard full of pine straw and cones in the fall, I thought the stuff was a royal pain, and it smoked like bloody hell so kids never burned it unless we were really bored and had run out of firecrackers and money to buy more. Now when I smell fresh pine straw, I like to slow down and inhale it like perfume. They sell big pine cones for decoration up north, whereas in the low country we just liked throwing them at each other.

“Did your family use the word nigger when you were growing up?” 

“Of course, Doctor,” I said wondering what this topic had to do with Savannah.  “I grew up in South Carolina.” 

From The Prince of Tides

There were black neighborhoods in Sumter, but I couldn’t tell you where they were. Nothing stands out in my mind. Not like where we lived was so fancy; far from it. White and blacks kept to their own back then, the blacks no doubt to avoid problems, and the whites to make themselves feel better about being redneck poor. Dog run was a term I only learned in graduate school, though I’d seen plenty of them growing up. Dog runs meant a coon dog could run from the front door straight out the back and only pass through a couple rooms. Nobody had air conditioning that weren’t window shakers. Mostly had fans blowing the summer air around.

The saving grace about growing up poor in rural America was you weren’t choking on a million others’ trash. Walking a dirt lane through farms and swampland beats walking anywhere in a city. I suppose if I had grown up working at a matzo factory, I’d have some affection for its familiarity, for the block after block of storefronts and so forth. My childhood friends would be sons and daughters of immigrants, people I’d watch get married, have kids, yadda yadda yadda.

Growing up, I never felt Sumter was where I belonged–I was certain I belonged in Wilkes-Barre. Pennsylvania was God’s country in my mind. Now, of course, I know better. Even sons of Yankees can grow up southern.

An adaptable species–indeed we are.