THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 18, 1996 TAG: 9608190214
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JAMES E. PERSON JR.
LENGTH: 81 lines
1001 THINGS EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE SOUTH
JOHN SHELTON REED AND DALE VOLBERG REED
Doubleday. 310 pp. $34.95.
The ways and beliefs of Northerners are sometimes peculiar, and working among them can be eye-opening. Just the other day in Detroit, I overheard one confused soul tell a co-worker, ``Ya know, if ya go far south as, like, Cincinnati, you hear people saying ``you-all'' and talking Southern, if you know what I mean; and ya feel like just going up and shaking them and saying, like, `Hellooooo? Like don't you understand that intelligent people in this country don't talk like that?' '' I was, like, amused.
Many claim to understand the South. Few actually do, but the Reeds are among them. To set the record straight, they have compiled this encyclopedia of snippets about Dixie's Land. Their intent was not to proclaim the 1001 things one ought to know about the South, but rather a single set of 1001 essentials.
If their book doesn't tell you everything you ever wanted to know , it is at the very least a masterful sampling, featuring well-selected illustrations and served up in a wryly funny, memorable manner.
Here are 1001 short paragraphs, each devoted to one aspect or another of such topics as Southern plants, architecture, animals, musicians, writers, artists, sports figures, states, facts related to the War Between the States and other items of interest, large and small.
For example, the Reeds note that ticks and black widow spiders are mentioned in the book ``because the South has more than its share of tickborne Rocky Mountain spotted fever and poisonous spider bites. North Carolina usually leads the nation in both. The spiders are reportedly fond of nesting underneath the seats of privies and biting the unwary on the unmentionable.''
There is a section on ``Tacky Tourist Traps,'' in which the Reeds report on the strangest of the type. Personally, I am deeply shocked - shocked, I tell you - that it fails to mention The Lost Sea, a dank Tennessee tourist trap that must be experienced to be believed. (This vast underground lake, situated at the bottom of a cave, is a sentimental favorite of my Uncle Fenton, who once remarked, ``I don't ever want to go down into a hole like that again until they plant me six feet under.'')
The Lost Sea may have been slighted, but there is a handsome entry on ``Ralph the Diving Pig, who appears with a supporting cast of Indian braves and mermaids in a goofy historical pageant (at Aquarena Springs in San Marcos, Texas) viewed, in part, from an underwater theater.'' You can't make up this sort of thing.
It is tempting to gnaw on the nutty end of the fruitcake while dipping into this book. (There is a section on fruitcake, by the way.) However, the ridiculous is not all the Reeds have included.
They bake in descriptions of Southern cooking that make your mouth water as you read.
They profile numerous Southern authors, offering telling thumbnail portraits and anecdotes. The Reeds also rightly identify and discuss the characteristics of Southern literature, finding it to reflect a sense of history, a sense of place, a sense of community and family, a love of storytelling and language, a leisurely, conversational approach in the telling, a culture steeped in religion and race relations.
Of race in the South, the authors quote Reynolds Price: ``The core of the Old South . . . consists of a single thing . . . an ancient and ongoing dialogue between masses of white and black people. Desperately evil though long stretches of that relation have been and are, the South is a single region that has continued to avoid an emotional impasse of the sort that blights so much of the nation. And during those centuries of ceaseless interaction, millions of individuals moved together to form the heart of a life unlike any other on earth.''
With this the Reeds seem to fully concur, as is evident in their evenhanded treatment of black-white relations - and the persons who have affected those relations - in the South since 1619.
In short, ``1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South'' is not one of those tawdry ``teach-your-Yankee-friends-how-to-speak-Southern''-type books, but an informative, honest and lively volume that will be valued by readers of any background on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. MEMO: James E. Person Jr., a native of Virginia who now lives in
Michigan, is the editor of ``The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor
of Russell Kirk.'' by CNB