The New South: A Response to Scott Greer
Thank God, it's still the same.
A buddy of mine once took a whiz on Sherman’s monument in the Capital City. He was there, with his father, when nature called their names. Though, I reckon more than nature called that evening; it could have been any one of a number of their ancestors who witnessed Sherman lay waste to their home.
The story goes as such:
Late in the shadow of monuments just north of the Potomac, upon scanning around and finding no other tourists, my friend brazenly declared,
“Well, Daddy, I sorta need to take a piss.”
Looking up to meet the stare of Sherman’s bay, my friend’s father grinned,
“Ya know… Me too, son.”
The rest… well the rest is history.
In that moment, something happened between my friend and his father; something unsaid; something shared. Something, too, that may still be called communication, burdened with the weight of history, memory, and education just like words. Call it what you will: Vulgar, irreverent, hilarious, justified, unnecessary, spiteful. For the sake of what’s ahead, I will call it civilization.
. . .
Now, I recall this story not merely for the sake of the story—though it is a great one—but because of a piece recently written by
over at Highly Respected, entitled “Understanding The New South.”Mr. Greer deals intelligently with a conflict that has troubled the South since at least the War Between the States. Namely, the question over its very Southerness. After suffering defeat, the final decline of its aristocracy, total destruction of its economy, and the subsequent military occupation, reconstruction, racial turmoil, disenfranchisement, and industrialization of the postbellum years, what of the Old South still remains? Never mind the changes to come in the twentieth century with the urbanization of the country, technological progression beyond belief, sexual revolution, waning social institutions, centralizing political forces, wars, and the final technological boom at the turn of the twenty-first century that further fueled an already advancing age of media, consumption, automation, globalization, and hegemonic culture.
Whither the Southern Agrarian in the face of this? Let alone the gentleman, honor, and manners.
Mr. Greer would say the grave, if they aren’t already decomposing. And while some of what he claims is true, I do not agree with his final assessment of the New South.
He starts with Donald Trump’s commencement address to the 2025 graduates at the University of Alabama, where the President boasted in “the first graduating class of the golden age of America.” Trump did not harken to the old ways of the South, quote General Lee, or make mention of Confederate heritage. He spoke primarily of sports and business, topics Mr. Greer finds most appealing for the crowd.
“Trump depicted the South as a sports-obsessed region with a dynamic, modern economy,” Mr. Greer claims, and thus “captured the true spirit of the New South.”
The moonlight and magnolias image of the South presents a “mythical version” of the region that non-Southerners and romantics fall prey to. For Mr. Greer, stars indeed fell on Alabama—but they crushed it. Again, he makes the case intelligently and he’s not the first to do it. It’s a topic that has been discussed again and again, from Robert Lewis Dabney, to Henry Grady, to Richard Weaver.
In the piece, he delves into how some of the aforementioned events changed the South. You should read it in full, it’s well structured and impressively concise. Mr. Greer is, after all, an accomplished journalist. So, I’ll only mention his points.
To begin with, he argues that the South is no longer a crappy-backwater with agriculture as its only industry. Now it has, well, actual industry. In many ways the South is now the country’s industrial heartland. The South is also rapidly growing, especially in its major cities. Places like Atlanta, Nashville, Charlotte, Huntsville, Dallas, and Austin are seeing increasing populations, corporations, and construction. Mr. Greer claims that this has immensely affected the culture of the South, and he’s right. Technological change has accompanied industrialization, seeping into Southern society and altering it from the inside out.
Along with the business came pro-sports teams like the Atlanta Braves. Later, multiple NFL teams arrived. College football has also become increasingly popular, with SEC schools earning more devotion than churches. A Crimson Tide fan may hop from baptist church to baptist church, but he’ll die before he says “War Eagle,” “Geaux Tigers,” or, heaven forbid, “Hotty Toddy.”
Mr. Greer then mentions the declining symbols of the Confederacy. For many Southerners the rebel flag is too closely identified with being a “redneck,” and for most non-native residents of the South there are hardly any other images so symbolic of hate. It is no more a matter of heritage.
While he does admit that there are still regional distinctions in the South, like the accents, the food, the football rivalries, the weather, evangelicalism, and conservative politics, because of the outlined changes, the Old South is a fantasy:
“This is upsetting to many right-wingers who wish the South to resemble their own myth. In the imaginary South, honor culture reigns supreme, the people cherish their past, agrarianism is still a way of life, and the people eschew atomizing neoliberalism in favor of front porch communitarianism. It’s a fantasy drawn from Gone With the Wind rather than real-world experience.”
It is not “the trad, reactionary fantasy it's often imagined. It’s now more like the rest of America, for better or for worse. Most southerners are happy with that.” Accordingly, as Mr. Greer finishes, “if you want to fit in the New South, don’t bother reading a biography of Robert E. Lee. Read a history of SEC football instead.”
Now, it is important to say again that I agree with some of what Mr. Greer outlines. There is undoubtedly a New South, distinct from the Old. However, I cannot go as far as to say that the images conjured up at the thought of the Old South—agrarianism, honor culture, reverence for the past, and communitarianism—are fantasies. I tend to adopt the plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose approach to the New South. The more it’s changed, the more it's remained the same.
. . .
Like Mr. Greer, I too am from the South. I was born and raised just outside Rome, Georgia in the Northwestern foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, what the Cherokee called ᎤᏍᏂᎩᏗᏂᎬᎿᏅ—“Enchanted Land.”
My people have known nothing outside of the South. On Mama’s side, my 8th great grandfather, Captain John Andrew McCreary, came to Staunton, Virginia from Ireland almost three hundred years ago. His daughter, Anne, married Colonel Benjamin Kilgore, another Virginia Irishman. They moved to South Carolina shortly thereafter. In the direct line to me, Mama’s family never even left the original Southern Colonies. A few cousins went to Mississippi, one cousin, James Bennett McCreary, was twice governor of Kentucky, but my grandfathers and grandmothers were in and around Greenville, South Carolina for a while, where the Kilgores served in the state senate for many generations, built the oldest house still standing in Greenville County (Kilgore Lewis House), sent John C. Calhoun to the U.S. Senate, nullified the tariff, and signed the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession. My third great grandfather moved to Marietta, Georgia just before the war, but he came home in ‘65 to find it destroyed. So he moved to the Enchanted Land.
Daddy’s side came to Louisiana from Poitou, France three hundred years ago, through my 9th and 10th great grandfathers, Jean Jacques Veillon and Jean-Baptiste Pierre Veillon. Jean-Baptiste passed away in New Orleans, was buried under the Cathedral, and Jean Jacques moved to Southwest Louisiana; Opelousas, specifically. There the Veillons planted roots and stayed for about two hundred and fifty years, farming and getting murdered in bars. Then, in 1979, Daddy was born in Mamou—Big Mamou, according to Cocaine Wayne.
When Daddy was nineteen, he moved to Rome and married Mama. They had me two years later. Though I am a son of Georgia, Louisiana helped shape and furnish my imagination. It was a place of mystery and dreams, and until I was twelve years old (when Daddy’s parents moved to be with us in Georgia), I spent the bulk of my summers running around Mamou, Ville Platte, and Eunice, frogging and crabbing and plucking figs from Grandma’s orchard. And then there were Grandpa’s horses. I still remember watching him ride, watching as he mounted and the horse began to gallop; and that’s when it happened—the miracle, that is, where he and the horse were one thing married in perfect movement within a veil of dust, and it was like he didn’t even have legs, or rather that they shared legs with each other; shared instinct and impulse and breath. Supposedly the Aztecs figured the Spanish cavalrymen centaurs upon first sight and I sympathize with them greatly. I could’ve been convinced that Grandpa and that buckskin mare shared muscle, blood and sinew. He raised horses for us boys, too, and we got to name them. Funny enough, I named mine Cherokee; one of my little brothers named his “Brown.”
So, I must say that the life I have come to know and love—the South I have come to know and love—is quite different from what Mr. Greer describes, despite the facts and numbers. Indeed, to my mind that is the chief problem with his analysis: It’s mostly facts and numbers.
Flannery O’Connor said that “in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.” And though the statistics Mr. Greer points to are true—all of them—they offer a cursory glance at the South that feels like the whole if you only frequent places like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Nashville.
I’ll say more to his point, though. Those statistics apply even to rural areas, but in a different way.
The agrarian lifestyle of the gentleman-planter in the Old South is largely dead. It’s true. There are not really any gentlemen-planters left. The once great aristocracy in the South has diminished almost to the point of extinction, and few people rely solely on agriculture. Though I will say, and I find it important to note, that the key figures of the regenerative farming revolution are from the South: Wendell Berry in Kentucky, Joel Salatin in the breadbasket of the Confederacy, Will Harris of White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia, and let us not forget Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, perhaps one of the last vestiges of the gentleman-planter statesman.
Still, even in its decline as the economic backbone of the South, agriculture has not lost its hold on her.
It was always the ideal in the Old South, with acknowledged roots stretching back into the ancients. Cato the Elder, speaking of his ancestors in On Agriculture, stated that “when they would praise a worthy man their praise took this form: “good husbandman,” “good farmer,” … It is from the farming class that the bravest men and the sturdiest soldiers come, their calling is most highly respected, their livelihood is most assured and is looked on with the least hostility, and those who are engaged in that pursuit are least inclined to be disaffected.” In On Duties, Cicero claims that there is no occupation “more becoming to a freeman” than agriculture. Virgil, in the midst of Roman civil wars upon the death of Caesar, wrote his Georgics, where we find
Indeed he’s blessed, who’s comfortable with country gods— Pan and old Sylvanus, and the sorority of nymphs. High public office doesn’t turn his head, nor regal pomp, nor civil strife when friends and allies are at odds, nor the Dacian league descending from the Danube, nor even all concerns and cares of Rome, or any one provisional domain. For those with wants he feels a sorrow, not envy for the ones with none. The fruit on trees, all the country offers for the taking, he’ll gather. To cruel codes of law, or madding market places, or the public record office—he simply gives no thought.
The gentleman, the aristocratic free man of the South, was thus expected to be comfortable with country gods. He was not a merchant, nor an industrialist. Indeed, a merchant could become a gentleman, but not by his merchandise. He would need to acquire property and enter a league of trust with the landed gentry. The aristocracy was, in this way, stable but not too tightly fixed; and it was a spell that fell on all.
I would argue it has yet to cease to fall. Again, the “numbers” do not show this. They show that Southerners are working in factories and plants and at office cubicles and desks, but they do not show them coming home to property. They do not show the great agrarian aspiration felt by almost everyone I know. To be a landowner, to have property, is still the ideal of the bulk of Southerners. For instance, on my road alone where our family farms on seventy acres there are a few smaller properties and all of them are farms in some capacity, though the owners are teachers, mechanics, plumbers, linesmen, lawyers, and so on. So, they don’t show up on the census as “farmers.” Still, though none of them have more than five acres of property, they all have goats and chickens and some have a few cows and a mule. Most, of course, have verdant gardens where they grow the vegetables they eat. When I drive further into the county and away from downtown Rome—which still has its historic, Southern Main Street thanks to General Forrest—way back on Calhoun road where I went to school, there are only farms everywhere you look. Some are large operations, with hundreds of acres, but a lot of them are smaller: Fifty acres here, twenty there, five to the left.
It is very much an agrarian place, though the charts would tell you otherwise. And while not everyone farms, and the numbers now, even if these hobby farmers were counted as such on a census, are certainly lower than in 1860, because it still has a hold on the place almost everyone in the rural South knows a farmer, or is kin to one and spends time on the farm, being cultured by it in turn.
The South still has a potent rural culture.
Shoot, for example, on Easter Sunday a few weeks ago I came home from mass and found one of my cousins fishing in our ponds. I went down to fish with him. As we were talking he was complaining that the area around us was getting too populated. He was thinking of moving out on more rural land in Alabama. Sitting on a farm, fishing, with a single car passing on the road every hour, he was not in a place rural enough.
And I am to believe the rural South is now a myth? Or at Sunday dinner with thirty-five members of my family gathered in my father’s house with Mama’s cooking on the table and my little nephews running through the door barefooted, asking to hunt “swirls,” am I supposed to bang my fist upon the table and proclaim “The South is Dead!”?
It strikes me as a little delusional.
Now, because of the rural character that persists in the South, the Southerner still lives in relationship with nature and the created order. This naturally affects his religion, and to this day he has not completely conceded the natural world as something other than God-given, or consented to a theory of man as something equal to God. It’s not perfect, and it has relaxed a great deal since the writings of men like William Byrd, but it exists almost out of necessity. A people still tethered to the earth cannot believe themselves to be gods. The cosmos grows beneath their feet and out beyond their understanding.
This, in many respects, gives way to the Southerner’s conservative disposition; a disposition which Mr. Greer acknowledges, but doesn’t seem to dwell on long enough. It isn’t merely a quirk in his character, it stems from his inherited appreciation of the world as ordered and subject to natural laws; laws man has no say in; laws he must cooperate with. He does not reckon he could go about smashing institutions and still flourish, or remake society in the name of an ideology. Heaven is a place he knows he’s going, not that he can make on Earth; and yet he has his Eden more than any puritanical urbanite closing down interstates and protesting through city streets.
His Eden, too, is not without sin and death—not without tragedy. Richard Weaver argued that one of the key characteristics defining the South against “America” is its understanding of tragedy through suffering such a consequential defeat, being the only region that has endured such loss and devastation. I’ll add more: Due to its rural way of life and closeness to the natural order, the Southern education in tragedy is all the more terrific. This goes beyond the “nature” part of the natural order and into its familial aspect (which I’ll soon touch on again). Because of an intimacy with many family members beyond his immediate generation, the Southerner encounters death in early youth. Anyone familiar with country music is aware of the litany of songs dealing with the death of a grandfather. I had just turned fourteen when I witnessed my Grandpa endure his fatal stroke. It happened right before me. I saw the strength of man fail as he slurred and vomited trying to reply to my father, nearly paralyzed on the ground. I watched the reality of death settle into Daddy’s eyes. Human vigor crumbled like old barn wood.
Many of my friends have similar stories at a similar age, but even when we were younger we witnessed death. In most places across the South, when a funeral procession of vehicles goes by, everyone stops their cars in solemn solidarity with the grieving. Even when it’s on the other side of the road. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of this ceremony. It doesn’t just take place on backroads, either. It’s on the highways and in town. I remember being shocked in the mid-Atlantic when a funeral procession went by and not a single person stopped to blink.
Though in the midst of a mechanical and industrial age, the Southerner still looks out for death and finds it often, contributing further to his belief that man is not God; he knows too much of loss.
And yet, even in the face of death, he still finds satisfaction in his Eden, providing room for the leisure and easy living that slow down both his pace and speech. By this, the graceful manner of the Southerner has aged truly as a grace—extended out to his fellow man, who he has obligations to and who he may not always understand and almost never can control.
As Mr. Greer mentions, historically among those manners of the South is honor. Now, this, too, has undoubtedly loosened its grip upon the region; there are no longer J. E. B. Stuarts cavaliering around in plumed hats (though there still abides an abundance of eccentrics). While honor may not be talked about as honor, I would argue the South retains it. Recall, the Southerner still believes there is a way he ought to act. He behaves in harmony with a standard that defines his character. Accordingly, there is a dishonorable way to act; there are things he just simply cannot do, along with things he cannot fail to do.
The greatest men of the South were fashioned in this manner. When Robert E. Lee was called upon to command Union forces he saw clearly what it would require: Turning his sword upon his family as he invaded his home country and waged war upon his friends and neighbors. So he replied, speaking of the Union he dearly loved, “I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation.”
So we find honor as something deeply woven into the family, the core unit of society out of which individuals are made. It is in this light that infamous events such as Mr. Sumner’s beating should be viewed. Sumner had made a career out of libel, slander, and publicly ridiculing and humiliating Southerners, calling them the “drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization.”
In his “Crime Against Kansas” speech, however, he took a step too far in the eyes of not only Southerners, but many Northern Democrats. In the speech, Sumner took aim at Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, calling slavery the great harlot with which he commits adultery. Now, this was a profane act, but he and his fellow abolitionists had been insinuating that men like Butler supported the institution of slavery only so they could rape slaves for some time. So, the sexual imagery was not necessarily new, though it was inflamed. Sumner really overstepped in making fun of Mr. Butler’s speech impediment—one recently acquired by means of a stroke. This was simply too far. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois even said of Sumner during the speech, “this damn fool is going to get himself killed by some other damn fool.”
Senator Butler’s first cousin, South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks, was infuriated by Sumner’s speech. He deliberated on challenging Sumner to a duel, but was instructed against it because Sumner was not a gentleman. The social rank of the combatant was integral to the duelling code, and only gentlemen could meet on the field wielding pistols. Alternatively, a gentleman could chastise someone for grave insults with a whip or a cane. Brooks chose the cane, entered the Senate chamber, and waited for all ladies to leave the room so as not to witness the act. When the gallery was mostly empty, Brooks approached Sumner at his desk and calmly announced “Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.” He proceeded to profusely beat Charles Sumner with his cane, breaking it into pieces with which he beat him further still.
Think what you will of the act, maybe it is barbaric. Institutionalized barbarism lies within every civilization—but ask: Is it more barbaric than a society which practices freely and with ease the arts of slander and libel, or idly watches as corruption and lies claim their reward? I’m not so sure it is. Governor John Lyde Wilson of South Carolina in his famous duelling manual, The Code of Honor, took deep pride in the fact that the habitual personal abuse printed in Northern newspapers would call men to mortal combat in the South. Again, think of it what you will, but it was a code as deeply interwoven into a Southerner’s DNA as his genetics.
It still is, in many respects. The first occasion upon which I witnessed it was in the first grade. “Yo Mama” jokes were being passed around the lunch table like love letters. Not a boy there was spared save for one, a quiet kid named Dontavious.
My friend Connor, sensing an inequality, launched his attack.
“Dontavious, yo Mama so fat…”
WHAM.
Dontavious put Connor’s face into his lunch.
“Don’t talk ‘bout my Mama,” he said quietly, almost in a whisper.
None of us were on Connor’s side, and in a way we sensed something heroic had happened. Something monumental, at the very least. We learned that words have meaning—that there’s something in the air we breathe holding us together in a code of rules, thicker than the humidity and maybe older.
The first time I witnessed it “as a man” was when I was sixteen years old. I had smarted off something awful to my Mama in the Kitchen, ending my remark with an assertion of my manhood because “I could now drive.” In a flash my Daddy’s finger lingered right before my face.
“Yeah? Well, if you’re a man now, son, then don’t you dare speak to my wife that way again.”
He spoke in the low tone of a mountain, and I felt my bowels drop just as low. His third degree black belt hanging in Grandma’s house quickly came to mind. I knew then in an instance that if I was a man then I had entered into the laws of men, and in the South men still defend their ladies. Sure, it may not be the same as in 1860—but by God it exists. I’ve felt it, seen it through terrified eyes.
Honor is not completely dead for the Southerner. It remains in his bones, governing his inclinations; revealed in the subtleties of moral reflex.
. . .
There’s so much more to say, truly. I wanted to get into the storytelling and strangeness that persists in the South. Why do you think Theo Von, a son of Covington, Louisiana exists? Nowhere could produce a mind like his save the Deep South, particularly around the Mississippi Delta, where Faulkner’s mind was steeped in that same strangeness.
However, I will do my best to finish where Mr. Greer finished: SEC Football.
It is certainly true that the South has attached itself to College Football more than any other region in these United States. Along with that has come an entertainment culture that can easily be described as cheap and homogenizing, seeping into the Old Southern culture and softening it like all pop and entertainment cultures tend to do. I concede all of this to Mr. Greer.
However, I’d like to make note of a few things. First among them is the not so inconsequential fact that it is college football that first seized the South and not the more professional, National Football League. The bulk of SEC institutions are antebellum—the University of Georgia is older than the Constitution, founded in 1785 as the first public university in the confederated republic; The University of Tennessee was founded in 1794; The University of South Carolina was founded in 1801 as South Carolina College, one of the chief classical learning institutions in America; and it continues: Alabama in 1831, Mississippi (Ole Miss) in 1848, Florida in 1853, Auburn in 1856, LSU in 1860 (though its roots stretch to around 1806) and so on.
So these are much older than things like the New England Patriots, pulling Southern football fans into something a bit deeper and saturated with a bit more tradition, though it's still commercial entertainment. It is also important to note that the chief achievements in athletics used to happen in college. To be a professional athlete was frowned upon. So, the nature of SEC football and its culture is much more about grit, passion, glory, and yes, even honor, than anything in the NFL, which is a lot more about professionalism and financialism. Though, of course, NIL threatens this completely.
But it is also about place and family; not merely in the devotion to the schools and teams themselves—most of the people support their state university, even if they didn’t attend, or that of their parents—but in the very culture around the sport.
Every Saturday, somewhere between 15 or 40 family members and friends will come together at our house for college football games, particularly the LSU game that day. Now, the games are on the TV all day, but the guys are out working on the farm with Daddy into the late afternoon and the women are running around with kids, chickens, or helping my Mama cook for the evening game.
By the time evening rolls around, we all file in for the bounty on Mama’s supper table. Then the game will come on (LSU usually plays at around 7:00 pm EST) and we watch it, but primarily, we are together as a family. We’re talking and laughing and running outside at halftime to play some sort of game in the porch light, or being begged by my little nieces and nephews and cousins to start a fire for some s’mores.
This is what I grew up on, and it goes beyond the football season. It happens all year round and many people in the South can say something of the same.
This brings me to the Confederate imagery Mr. Greer mentions is constantly cast by the wayside for things like SEC football success and controversy evasion. Undoubtedly it is, and for many reasons.
But the South is not just Confederate images and reverence for the past is not just wrapped up in flags. These are symbols, thereby symbolizing something. The Confederate soldier didn’t march under the rebel flag so as to create a culture based on family and place—he marched under it to defend it.
Take, for example, the atmosphere that molded Robert E. Lee. Douglas Southall Freeman describes, early on in his four volume biography of the General,
“Although Robert lived among the Lees, the atmosphere of his home was that of the Carters. His mother corresponded with them, talked of them, and at least once a year endeavored to take her younger children on a visit to Shirley. It was a gracious place… Young Robert had a multitude of close Carter cousins, for hundreds, literally, were descended from the twelve children of “King” Carter. The size and endogamy of the Carter tribe made it socially self-contained. Every true Carter liked everybody, but most of all he liked his kinspeople. Often and joyfully they visited one another… It was at Shirley, amid the infectious laughter and the kindly chatter of his cousins, that the youthful Robert developed early the fondness for the company of his kin that was so marked in his maturity.”
That is what cast the great men of the South, who sacrificed all under the banners of the Confederacy. Though, as Mr. Greer keenly points out, the banners have declined, what they symbolized has not.
Speaking of the New South, in an address at the annual commencement of Hampden-Sydney College in 1882, Robert Lewis Dabney, Confederate army chaplain and chief of staff to Stonewall Jackson, said,
“A ‘new South’ is inevitable and therefore it will be right for you to accept it in the same way that it was our duty to fight to prevent it. It may be the son’s duty tomorrow to “bury the dead mother out of sight,” whom it was the father’s most sacred duty yesterday to endeavor to keep alive.”
Though the dead mother that the father fought to preserve may be buried by the son, it is the son’s duty to go forth into the world without her and continue her legacy. To continue building here in this land of woe. The burials will not stop—but, by God, neither will the births!
. . .
While, again, much of what Mr. Greer describes is true, to my mind his pessimism does not capture the New South. One must go deeper to understand what of the Old South remains in the New. Upon going deeper, you find much of what is lamented as lost, though of course it's not the same. It cannot be the same. Indeed, it is never the same. Tomorrow will not be the same as today, which is not the same as yesterday.
So, sure, don’t read Southall Freeman’s four volume biography of Lee to understand the South. Read a history of SEC football. Or, better yet, go watch the game with your neighbor and his family—you’ll see the bonds of kith and kin that made R. E. Lee.
Shoot, you can even go to an SEC game. Go to the stadium. Go to Baton Rouge and watch LSU play—you’ll hear, after the sun has found its home in the western sky on a Saturday night in Death Valley, the fiddle start to play. Garth Brooks will begin to sing. That first verse will read “I spent last night in the arms of a girl in _____” and for a moment all breath will linger before one hundred thousand men, women, and children holler “LOUISIANA” at the top of their lungs.
Then pause for a moment. Feel the love of place burning in your chest. Feel the spirit of a people whirl across your skin, and know it is for that all those Cajun boys marched with General Taylor so many years ago.
Ended, a story is history;
it is in time, with time
lost. But if a man’s life
continues in another man,
then the flesh will rhyme
its part in immortal song.
By absence, he comes again.
There is a kinship of the fields
that gives to the living the breath
of the dead. The earth
opened in the spring, opens
in all springs. Nameless,
ancient, many-lived, we reach
through ages with the seed.
- Wendell Berry, “Rising.”