The South and Selling of the South

Larry T. McGehee, an educator and syndicated columnist for southern newspapers, once referred to a southerner who was foiled in teaching the South to a northerner: “The effort of Quentin Compson, the young Harvard student narrator of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, to make his Yankee roommate understand the South ended in frustration and in a commonplace declaration that ‘You have to have grown up there to understand it.’” ¹ William H. Nicholls has commented similarly; “Only a Southerner born and bred can fully appreciate the intensity of feeling with which most Southerners hunger for possessing the soil, love outdoor life, and appreciate leisure.” ² If that is the case, can I—as an emigré to the South 350 years later than the first families—understand the South? Truly, I may never be able to understand the South in the same way and with the same intensity as do native southerners.