There is a crack in my name . . . Before, it just sat there, whole and untroubled on the corner of my desk, painted around the side of a white porcelain mug that is at least a century old. It is flanged out at the top and bottom, gilded around the rim and hand-painted with my grandfather’s name, a name he disliked so much that he chose to go by another, which became my name.
Now, the mug is broken. While writing a section of this book about the importance of family history, I clumsily knocked it off the shelf and onto the floor, where it shattered into pieces. Across the broad side of the mug, where you would wrap fingers around to warm up a cold hand, a fracture cuts across the name. What pieces of the keepsake I was able to salvage are now gathered into a Ziploc bag and tucked away somewhere less vulnerable. At some point, maybe, I will be able to put it back together.
I came by it by default. No one else in my family wanted it, so I adopted it just as I have other items that once belonged to my grandparents and other members of my family: pieces of furniture, plastic cups, stereographs, old cameras. I even have a packet of Knox gelatin and a small jar of McCormick’s peppercorns that they held on to for a comically long time. For some reason, I have become the de facto custodian of these things to which no one else in my family seems to attach much value, and why I do is still a mystery to me.
This tendency to hang on to things could be a genetic trait; it could also have something to do with the fact that I come from a region that is obsessed with it. The American South is a story-rich and storyteller-rich environment. Hanging-on-to and handing-on-to is what we do. The term “storyteller” is almost an honorific here, denoting a certain—perhaps fading—social status that few of us can pretend to. We even hold contests to decide who is the best at it this year. Not many of us can claim that mantle, but the truth is that whether we are good at telling stories, every human being is a story bearer. All of us, no matter where we call home, are bearers of a finite number of stories that make us who we are individually, and those stories are part of much bigger local, regional, and national stories, and ultimately a part of an infinitely varied story of all things.
What makes Southerners unique as a breed of storyteller is that we have never really shied away from trying to tell a story of the whole region. I must confess ignorance on the subject, but my suspicion is that head scratching, hand wringing, or soul searching over what constitutes “the Northern mind,” or the “Pacific Northwestern way of life,” is a rarity. The eternal quest for Southern self-understanding, such as it is, is usually framed over against “the North,” that perennial other that is both the South’s great bogeyman and a useful antagonist in a national culture that both pushes back against and thrives on dualisms.
Not too long ago, serious writers regularly took their own shots at a sort of Southern metanarrative that would distill the “essence” of the South, or attribute to it a single “mind.” For over a century, the narrative of the South (at least as told by white people) was of a region nobly devoted to a politico-religious Lost Cause whose lostness was, the story went, no fault of its own. Quite the contrary: that lostness was a function of devotion to a supposedly unimpeachable moral goodness, which is reflected in the oft-repeated refrain that the South, both during and after the Civil War, was put down and kept down by a less righteous but more heavily armed force. There is a great appeal in this kind of story, not only because it casts its protagonists and their descendants, its storytellers, as innocent and morally pure victims, but also because it is easily digestible: the South means X (a convenient variable that also translates visually to the Confederate Flag as representing some idea of “heritage” as opposed to a symbol with a concrete and deeply troubling history).
There are plenty of people who still believe the story. Those who don’t tend to be aware of how damaging it is to the humanity of those whom that story often erases, especially Black Americans. But it is also damaging to those who tell it, because of the deliberate acts of intellectual, psychological, and spiritual self-amputation required to sustain it. The price of maintaining the integrity of this version of “the South” is a potentially catastrophic loss of personal integrity, because an honest sense of one’s own history is necessary to human well-being, and that honesty is often the first casualty of “the Lost Cause.” It may well be that an aspiration to comprehensiveness is itself untruthful, since no single person in themselves can tell, embody, nor even remember any story in its wholeness. It is, I believe, better to tell a story in many true fragments than to tell an all-encompassing one that is false.
To tell the story of the South truthfully requires a multiplicity of voices, perspectives, tones, accents, styles, vocabularies, and dispositions. One problem with big, comprehensive stories is that they do not allow you to be troubled by them, so long as you are inside them. From outside, the Lost Cause story is quite obviously troubling on so many levels, but only to those who aren’t telling the story to begin with. One of the gifts Southern storytellers have given us is their ability to unsettle, to displace us from what we thought we knew as home, to make the world appear stranger (and all the more wonderful and mysterious for it), and ultimately to make us confront the conflict that is internal to every human heart, which is one reason why the Lost Cause version of Southern history—or any of its multitude of reboots and remixes—is not a very good story. If you are inside of it, the story itself does not give you the resources to interrogate the source of your need to believe it. If you are to ask why you need to believe this story, you will have to break it apart from within, and look outside of that story.
I am a white male of privilege who has descended from some very gifted storytellers (if not fabulists and mythologists), and I have inherited a version of that large, overarching story of the South. I only became aware, more or less by accident, how many stories that Official Version left out—or indeed how many fragments the violence of an Official Version produced—and how much more interesting, more difficult, more necessary, are some of those other stories that have been left largely unmarked on the thoroughfare of American public memory. A Deeper South is an attempt to gather some of those fragments into something resembling a more complete story of the place.
This is a gathering of stories about the South. But it is also a set of stories about me, about my attempt to reassemble the pieces of a fractured self. When I left academia eleven years ago, I felt that I had become a truncated version of myself, and that the highly insular culture of academia had discouraged me from interests that have really driven who I am from a young age. That sense began to set in early in my first semester as an untenured assistant professor, when a colleague not at all subtly wondered aloud to me, with a distinct tenor of suspicion, why I was writing an article about Johnny Cash; it culminated a decade later when I found myself seriously considering taking an anonymous reviewer’s advice to make my writing more boring and anodyne, so as to appeal to that handful of scholars who might or might not care about my argument. That moment brought a small but consequential revelation that I was less than the person I wanted to be.
My work in photography, narrative nonfiction, and even my flailing attempts to write a comic novel or two belong to a larger attempt to reassemble the pieces of a self dismembered by both academic culture and my own blindness, to recover the fragments of personality and reassemble them into something more like a whole.
This process has taken a number of different forms that are simultaneously creative and personal. My wife and I moved our family back to the Southeast. I began relistening to the music I had enjoyed as a younger person, perhaps in an attempt to recover who that person was before I had become disintegrated by academic life. Through regular visits to the library they left behind, I began to try to understand my paternal grandparents, who were themselves both disintegrated by Alzheimer’s disease before I really got to know them. I tried this in the only way I really know how: by writing about it.
But returning to the backroads of the American South along with my good friend John Hayes, with whom I had begun exploring the region in 1997, meant recovering stories and fragments of stories of both my region and myself that I did not even know existed, and writing about it has been less a kind of reportage from the road than an ongoing discovery post-factum. The mysteries of the American roadside and the genie-souls who lurk there continue to reveal themselves long after we have shaken that very particular dust off our shoes. I came to learn that there were, particularly in my native Georgia, broken shards of stories about my own family that had been buried so deep that by the time of my parents’ generation they had been effectively lost from collective memory. Recovering some of those stories has meant not just being able to tell a fuller picture from the outside but from within, coming to learn a perspective on myself, my family, my city, my region, and my country, that parts ways with the typical Southern posture of self-justification or defensiveness.
Although it cuts against my years of training in the you-make-a-better-showing-with-your-mouth-shut school of Southern decorum to admit it, my own family, on my father’s side, was prominent in the development of the “New South” and influential in the shaping of twentieth-century Atlanta. The Candler name is all over the place there, its ubiquity in inverse proportion to my own knowledge about “my people.” Until this project began, I only knew them like game pieces for Clue, with little more than titles to differentiate them from one another. If my family’s story were a play, it might begin with a list of the dramatis personae who sometimes seem to represent character types more than actual people:
· William Candler, “the Colonel”
· Martha Beall Candler, “Old Hardshell”
· Milton Anthony Candler, “Uncle Milton”
· Asa Griggs Candler, “Asa”
· Warren Akin Candler, “the Bishop”
· John Slaughter Candler, “the Judge”
· Asa Warren Candler, “the Major”
· Allen Daniel Candler, “the Governor”
For decades, this was all I knew about them. My children, who have been raised in a different school of Southern behavior than I was, and also because they are too young to be burdened with that enveloping cloud of insecurity that prevents you from fully disclosing yourself to others, do not share my learned reticence about these people. They think of them as interesting people who did interesting things, human beings with complicated stories that we should keep telling because they understand intuitively that their stories are ours, too. My wife and children have been as responsible as any other factors for helping me to break out of that tenacious cloud and to breathe more naturally.
My great-great-grandfather, The Judge, is a paradigmatic case of how white Southern amnesia is erosive of the memory of both vice and of virtue. What that regime of forgetfulness withheld from me was a mountain range of stories about him that were by turns disturbing and ennobling, somber and hilarious, but almost always illuminating. By the time I had received them, many of those condensed histories had already gone through generations’ worth of dulling, softening, and flattening-out, a process that had deprived them of their power to reveal.
When the name-bearing mug broke, I contacted a friend of a friend who is a kintsugi master, skilled in the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken tea vessels with gold. In that tradition, such vessels are more valuable as broken and restored than they were in their original state. I asked him if he could repair the mug for me. Yes, he said, but it would be a while.
That waiting was providential, in its way. In the interim I learned that the mug was not for him to repair. It would be my job to put it back together. Or maybe not. I am told that some Japanese families will hold on to a broken tea bowl for generations until the time is right for them to mend it. In the same way, the mug’s time was not yet. The hour of its reconstitution lay still in the future then, as it still does now. It may fall to generations after me, to my children’s children.
The same is true for me, and for the South: while I still pursue a version of myself, my region, and my country that is more whole because more honest with itself, less bashful about its own injuries and less cagey about its own sins, to gild the wounds of that fractured name and story is not for me, not yet. This work is, I hope, an attempt to gather some of those fragments into one, and like those families in Japan, simply to hold them together.
I cannot offer here a mended story, much less a mended name. I do not promise a resolution, nor do I know if it is even wise to hope for one. What I can do in the meantime is to gather the broken shards of a once whole yet illusory story, to collect what I can find from among the fragments, that what has been discarded and forgotten can, even as fragments, show us something true about ourselves, in the hope that someday a more whole story awaits its arrival upon ears that will be ready for it, hearts that will be open to receive it.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is excerpted from A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road, from the University of South Carolina Press (2024). All rights reserved.
