The North of the South: The Natural World and the National Imaginary in the Literature of the Upper South by Barbara Ladd

Author:Barbara Ladd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Georgia Press
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THREE

Backwater

Westering

I used to think backwater meant

Remote or backward, out of date,

a place of stagnant poverty.

But found the term in history meant

across the mountain watershed

where rivers run the other way

to west to wilderness, to where

the future waits to open out

its shining promise, destiny.

Backwater meant new water then,

where greatness waited tilted toward

the sunset rivers of hope where

the worst of us, the very worst

of all, might find a seventh chance.

—ROBERT MORGAN, “BACKWATER”

This powerful poem by the North Carolina poet Robert Morgan embeds hope in melancholy. Contrary to nationalist mythmaking, narratives of westering are as likely to record melancholy stories of loss and failure—suggested here in the imagery of “sunset rivers,” “might,” and “seventh chance”—as they are to record the “shining promise” of hope.

In the previous chapter I explored the Virginia origins of Poe’s melancholy natural world of swamps, storms, mountains, cliffs, forests, waterfalls, and gorges—the dizzying height and deep abyss of his mindscape as a conversation with, and troubling of, the New World optimism of the Revolutionary era, represented by Thomas Jefferson.

In this chapter I’d like to pick up on the troubling of New World optimism and look a little more closely at westering in the work of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Cormac McCarthy (briefly), and Toni Morrison. All are writers of “the North of the South,” if in different ways. Roberts is from a Kentucky family, while McCarthy comes from Rhode Islanders who moved to Tennessee to work with the Tennessee Valley Authority. Morrison was born in Ohio, but her parents were from the Deep South (her mother was from Alabama and her father was from Georgia). Her imagined world, wherever it is geographically, is always “South,” if by that we can mean that it is shaped by, colored by, and fundamentally inseparable from the region we know as the U.S. South. The natural world is central in the work of all three writers, and all engage with “westering” in the predominant mode of melancholy.

In the 1820s, Captain Basil Hall toured the United States. While in South Carolina, he visited an orphan asylum:

While looking at this Orphan Asylum, my attention was called to some curious features of American society, which contra-distinguish it from that of old countries. All the world in that busy land is more or less on the move, and as the whole community is made up of units, amongst which there is little of the principle of cohesion, they are perpetually dropping out of one another’s sight, in the wide field over which they are scattered. Even the connexions of the same family are soon lost sight of—the children glide away from their parents, long before their manhood ripens;—brothers and sisters stream off to the right and left, mutually forgetting one another, and being forgotten by their families. (165–66)

So much for the famous southern sense of place, sense of family, depth of memory. If we believe him, the national reality, even in South Carolina, where Hall made these observations in the early years of the Republic, seems to have been forgetfulness, loss of place, loss of memory.

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