The New Mind of the South by Tracy Thompson

Author:Tracy Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

6.

The Sorting Out

Driving south from eastern Arkansas into the heart of the Mississippi Delta, I entered a landscape of two-story-high tractors, flat vistas, and no people. It was February, and the fields were still bare and soggy from recent rains. Huge flocks of black starlings wheeled and swooped across the sky, looking for last season’s leftover seeds. It was mid-morning on a weekday, but in one fifty-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 61, I counted exactly twelve cars, two tractor-trailers, and, except for the birds, no other signs of life. From time to time I drove through a small town, identifiable by a gas station, a few businesses, and a town limits sign; sometimes it was just the remnants of a small town, with dried kudzu vines covering a rusty Citgo sign. After a while, I began to get the creepy sense that alien robots disguised as John Deere tractors and grain silos had staged a secret invasion and devoured all human life while nobody was looking.

If there are alien robots out there, they could probably get away with it. Rural America is invisible to us urban-suburbanites, except when there’s a presidential election, a natural disaster, or—in the South—some kind of gothic event like a church burning or an all-white high school prom. This invisibility is why, outside a small network of academics and policymakers, very few Americans have ever heard of something called the “rural brain drain”—the steady mass migration of people out of rural areas into urban and suburban areas, caused by the encroachments of industrial farming and the loss of manufacturing jobs. From the interstate, you wouldn’t notice. But from the back roads like the one I was on this day, it was hard to miss the boarded-up gas stations, the falling-down barns, the desolate small-town main streets, the overall sense that some slow-motion catastrophe was under way—which it is.

The rural-to-urban population movement is a global phenomenon, but in the South it has transformed a part of the landscape that has been an integral part of Southern identity for generations. Southern identity and an agrarian way of life are two concepts so intricately linked that it’s still hard to contemplate one without the other. Have you ever heard of a “big-city Southerner”? Me neither. Southerners may live in the heart of Manhattan, in a penthouse in Paris, or in a condo in Buckhead—but if they identify themselves as Southerners, it means that somewhere, and probably not very far back, they have a close personal connection with the land: relatives who still live in the rural South, a grandfather who farmed, a small town that is the ancestral family home, a cousin up in some holler who still talks with a twang. Lifelong residents of, say, Kansas may also lay claim to agrarian roots, but they don’t celebrate it the way Southerners tend to, laboring as so many of us do under the delusion that we have a special, mystical attachment to The Land. (And this is a delusion:

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