THE SOUTH IS ANOTHER COUNTRY
Julia Reed says they do things
differently in Dixie, with guns, God and 'Yellow Mama'
New Orleans MY favourite American newspaper page is the daily wire-service round-up in USA Today called 'Across the USA: news from every state'. It provides a steady stream of evidence that there is still a South, despite the tedious efforts of underemployed, mostly Southern academics to convince us otherwise. The theory is that strip malls, fast food, suburbs, cable TV — not to mention the end of the South's political isolation more than 30 years ago — have made us all but indistinguishable from the rest of America. Or that, since most of our national leaders (currently the President, vice-president, and majority leader of the Senate) now come from the South — as do two of the things most often cited as caus- es of the country's increasing homogenisa- tion, CNN and Wal-Mart — the rest of America is becoming more like us.
I have kept a file of the USA Today page for years, so that I will always have on hand brief but forceful proof that neither asser- tion is true. For example, on the same day in 1994 that the Tennessee state senate in Nashville okayed a bill that would allow handguns to be used in self-defence — even by convicted felons — a citizens' group in Seattle, Washington, put forth an initiative that would increase the prison term of any- one using a gun to commit a crime. On 14 August 1995, the big news in Colorado was that the citizens were upset about the noise from Denver international airport, while in Arkansas a six-year-old girl shot herself in the chest with a gun she found under her mother's pillow, and in Middlesboro, Ken- tucky, police were probing the death of a woman who died of a snake bite inflicted during Sunday services at the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church. It was, the paper reported, 'the second church-related snake- bite death this year'.
On 4 August this year, a judge in Kansas was reprimanded for allowing his secretary to hold a second job. The same day, a judge in Arkansas was busy upholding the conviction of a preacher who had burned down his own church in the hope that it would unite his flock. And finally, this very morning, nothing much is happening any- where else in America, but officials in Mis- sissippi are making it harder for prisoners to escape from the state penitentiary by installing 12-foot spans of razor wire and an electric fence capable of delivering a fatal shock. And in Tennessee, the attor- ney-general asked a judge to set an execu- tion date for a man who shot a Memphis police officer in 1981.
If there is a theme here, it is that South- erners are still the most violent people in America, but we are also the most religious. (The stats bear this out: in 1999, violent crime was way down in every region of the country but the South. Southerners own more guns per capita, but we also have the most churches and the most churchgoers Southerners attending church once a week outnumber northerners by almost two to one.) This has been true for some time. Confederate general Stonewall Jackson was such a devout observer of the Sabbath that he wouldn't dare to mail a letter if he thought it might be in transit on Sunday.
A long-standing Southern tradition encompassing religion and violence was out- lawed by the Supreme Court last summer, when the justices ruled that schools were no longer allowed to broadcast the Lord's Prayer before Friday night high-school foot- ball games. The ruling prompted the imme- diate formation of organisations such as 'We Still Pray', which encourage student bodies across the region to engage in a pre-kick-off `organised spontaneous outbreak of prayer' in the bleachers. To the distress of civil lib- erties groups, the movement has been enor- mously successful, which brings up another characteristic of the Southerner. We do not like to be told what to do, especially not by the federal government.
When the Supreme Court ruled 23 years ago that capital punishment was once again permissible, Southern states, still irritated that the court had taken away the right from them, were the first to pass laws rein- stating the death penalty. Since then they have executed more people than all the other states combined. In Alabama, where the electric chair is called 'Yellow Mama', 27 people were sentenced to death last year alone. Alabama, like its neighbours, appar- ently does not think 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' applies to the state. In general, however, the Ten Commandments are very popular. When a high court found that Alabama judge Roy Moore's display of Moses' com- mandments on his courtroom wall — in plaques the judge had himself carved out of pine — violated the Constitution by pro- moting religion in a government setting, the governor rushed to the judge's defence. He said he would call out the National Guard if anyone tried to remove the plaques from the wall. Like the late Missis- sippi writer Willie Morris said, it's the jux- tapositions that drive you crazy.
We may not listen to the feds, but we do listen to God, especially when He is talking directly to us, which seems to be a lot. A man in Lucy, Louisiana, found a cross- shaped sweet potato in his vegetable gar- den 15 years ago, and, in a news article celebrating the 15th anniversary of the find, he said that the now shrivelled potato had brought him 'closer to God. You change. It's all for the better.'
A few years ago in Atlanta, a 41-year-old body-builder and mother of two was trying to decide whether to remain in her church choir or do some secular singing. She asked God for a sign, He told her to look up from the wheel of the car she was driving down Memorial Drive at a billboard for Pizza Hut. In a forkful of spaghetti advertised as the new lunch special she saw 'the Michelangelo version of Christ'. She not only decided to keep singing in the church choir, she called the Atlanta Constitution to report what she had seen in the spaghetti. It turned out that dozens of motorists had already called, and before long hundreds of believers clogged the road for days to check it out for themselves.
And then there is the family from Floyda- da, Texas, who got rid of all their worldly possessions including their money and their clothes, crammed themselves inside a 1990 Pontiac Grand Am, and drove to Vinton, Louisiana. When they ran into a tree in Vin- ton's main street, 15 naked adults got out of the car, and five naked children got out of the trunk. The driver, a Pentecostal preach- er, told Vinton's police chief that the Lord had told them to do it. I plan on submitting this news clip at the next 'Is-there-still-a- South?' seminar I am forced to attend. Because I don't think the Lord is telling people from anywhere else the same thing. Or if He is, it hasn't made the papers.
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