The Mind Revisited - An Essay by Hal Crowther - who lives in NC, an observer for a long time
Published on June 25 2013
By Hal Crowther
OA columnist Hal Crowther lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife, the author Lee Smith.
"Klan Country, South Carolina" by Dennis Darling
Books discussed in this essay:
The New Mind of the South, by Tracy Thompson, Simon & Schuster.
In Love With Defeat: The Making of a Southern Liberal, by H. Brandt Ayers, NewSouth Books.
Since the dawn of introspection, which predates Homer at least, what collective mind has been more exhaustively or passionately psychoanalyzed than the Mind of the South? In the decades since W. J. Cash probed and disparaged it in his historic 1929 essay for The American Mercury, “The Mind of the South” has been revised and revisited by armies of Southern scribes and scholars, and still most of us are unconvinced that we’ve got it right. The Southerner’s tireless search for his identity has been viewed ironically by outside observers—no one has ever written about the “Mind of the Midwest”—and there is no Fellowship of Northern Writers who meet and drink and apply Freud’s tools to the works of Hawthorne or Melville. But I’m in no position to join the ironists; I devoted large sections of two books to this unique obsession, and have addressed it repeatedly in the pages of the Oxford American.
As a troubled South pursues its self—its soul—deep into the twenty-first century, there’s no better place to start than Cash, that doomed and prescient native of Gaffney, South Carolina, who is still remembered by Southern diehards as a traitor to his people. It’s significant that his original essay was published just before October 29, Black Tuesday, when the stock market crashed and launched the Great Depression, the national ordeal that distracted America from so many of the terrible things that happened in the Jim Crow South. Another significant footnote is that Cash’s editor at the Mercury was H. L. Mencken, whose notorious 1917 diatribe, “The Sahara of the Bozart,” argued persuasively and hilariously that the South possessed very little mind worth analyzing.
For the rest of the essay, and more about Hal Crowther go here:
http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/authors/crowther-hal/articles/
