The Great Monster Compendium of the South

James "Son" Thomas

Having trouble deciding what to send old Aunt Flo for Christmas? I’ve got two perfect answers: The smaller size is the “Slice of Southern Life” gift pack (hominy grits and other infra-Mason Dixon snacks and goodies), a steal at $24.95 from the Center for Southern Folklore, at its brand new 152 Beale Street digs, Memphis TN 38103. (901) 525-FOLK.
 
The larger, non-economy size is the momentous, nine-pound behemoth known as the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture ($53.50 postpaid, from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi, Oxford MS 38677).
 
Over 1,600 pages devoted to almost 1,300 topics divided into 24 categories, this is a ten-year labor of love for almost a thousand specialists in particularities of Southern U.S. culture, organized by co-editors Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, respectively a professor of history at Ole Miss and a professor of anthropology and founder of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
 
Ferris (his persona is aggressively demotic, from the days of his tape recording materials on the Delta Blues at considerable risk to his person in those pre-integrated days) and Center for Southern Folklore director Judy Peiser met while working for Mississippi Educational Television and discovered they shared a passion for saving the old ways from cultural macadamization.
 
If we’ve long admired the South for its storytelling propensities, we must now learn to love this latest generation of Southerners for their media moxie. As these two ideal Christmas presents suggest, they know how to get the message out.
 
My fascination with Southern peculiarities began in 1945-46 when I was stationed as a swabbie in Gulfport, Miss., Corpus Christi, Tex., and Pensacola, Fla. As a Detroit troublemaker, I used to rile the feathers of the locals by sitting at the back of the bus when I went on liberty. And gawk awkwardly at the Sophie Newcomb girls hanging out at the Edgewater Gulf Hotel, there to be picked up by officer types (not by the likes of us acne’d sailors).
 
My interest broadened as I pursued a Ph.D. in American culture, with an emphasis on literature. The serious study of literature was dominated by Southerners, not the least of whose power was wielded from Duke University, where the scholarly quarterly American Literature was published.
 
Does the encyclopedia have Pecolia Warner? It sure does, putting my visit to her and her husband Sam in Yazoo City in finer focus. Does it have James “Son” Thomas? Sure enough. I met James in Peiser’s screening room, where it slowly dawned on me that he was one of the two blues singers in the film I was watching.
 
The other singer had just died, and James had dropped by to take back the soundtrack to assuage his loneliness at having lost a good friend. He asked me and my companion to visit him the next day in Leland, Miss., where he popped open some cold beers and gave us a private concert in his living room.
 
There’s a fine piece on Hodding Carter, an instructive one on James Kilpatrick, and an enchanting essay on that Carolina Israelite, Harry Golden, with his preposterous tactics for solving the integration crisis.
 
I have a few nits to pick, as in the amusing gaffe in the Rosa Parks piece calling the girl who was arrested before her “Claudette Colbert” (it’s Colvin). Some flaws come from a low level of information, as in misnaming the Trost Brothers—those architectural pioneers in concrete construction in El Paso—“Frost and Frost.”
 
And no Matthew Nowicki, the Polish émigré who designed the State Coliseum in Raleigh and trained many as dean of the School of Architecture. And I can’t believe that an encyclopedia with room for Colonel Sanders can’t find space for John Portman, the Atlanta hotel designer who had done more for Southern tourism than all the finger-lickin’ fast food entrepreneurs in America.
 
I was pleased to see that Ted Turner got a good entry. I think he’s the best thing to have hit TV since Pat Weaver took early retirement.
 
But there is a filiopietistic side that makes me uneasy. Sam Walton surely deserves attention for parlaying small town five-and-dimes into the formidable Wal-Mart Empire. But there’s a down side to his achievement that a scholarly resume must include. I remember a tasty Southern-dominated dinner conversation on Amtrak last Christmas between New Iberia and Houston during which two Montgomery exiles just returning from trips “home” deplored the way the Wal-Mart phenomenon had eviscerated the center of small towns.
 
There are other gaps that puzzle me. No Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center. No Millard Fuller for Habitat for Humanity. Appalshop gets an entry—but not the Center for Southern Folklore. I think it deserves one just for the vandal-proof oral history plaques it has mounted on Beale Street.
 
And no Mud Island! Roy Harrover’s innovative walk-through sculpture of the lower Mississippi is the most important piece of tourist architecture in the history of the country. I was so dazzled by it when it opened in Memphis in 1982 that I sought out the architect and listened to him explain how, energized by his contact with Yale’s Vincent Scully, he transformed the mayor’s order to get the hippies out of blue-rinse Overton Park and onto the mud flats that came and went with the imperial whims of the river.
 
He made Mud Island into a participatory monument to the history of the Lower Mississippi. I don’t mind giving Graceland its due, but shouldn’t a scholarly tome also come down on the side of seriousness as well? Folklorists bend over backwards so far they can’t see the sequoias for the jack pines!
 
But it’s a great achievement, and I make these suggestions only to further its inevitable second edition. Meanwhile, start your Yule with Penn professor Hennig Cohen’s luminous gloss on folklore and literature. You’ll bless that South Carolinian all 12 days of Christmas.
 
From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, December 13, 1989