The South is a Neolithic Fort

Throwback Thursday

This was my first “note” accepted for a publication. It had started life as a poem, written 25 years ago, before evolving into this final form. It was included in my book, Kayaking with Lambs. I am still very fond of it.

The South is a Neolithic fort.

It is in a Steak ‘n Shake in Georgia, standing in a swirl of moderns with their faux tribal tattoos and piercings, that a small girl protectively holds the weathered fingers of her grandfather. He stands erect in his worn overalls, both hands slightly curled, as if gripping the wooden handles of a plow, looking out of place.

The image strikes me that all of the people, the building, and the parking lot are intruders and interlopers, a mirage: the old man is standing in the same pose, in the same place in a tobacco plot, hands gripped just so around the plow handles, two mules out front and a granddaughter by his side.

The South is like this. Sometimes it is a Neolithic fort in the landscape, a slight rise in the ground indicating the presence of a past for those who can read it, a place full of relics and behaviors that are deemed out of place in a culture easily bored and distracted. It is not a landscape effortlessly read by the digital world or understood by soundbite.

It has a people, black and white, who are looked down on and discarded because they have not adapted quickly enough, modest people who don’t know that a paved parking lot has more value than a small field of their own. It has an agrarian soul and a heart that still beats.

This South is a run-down home, chickens scratching around the yard. Its roosters crow at all hours, riling the neighbor from up north who built a McMansion next door, an outsider who did not know pigs can stink. It is a make-do world where fences get built out of scaffolding discarded by a now defunct warehouse, a world often stubbornly ignorant of the rewards of 9-5 and cultures bought and traded on Netflix.

It is a world that doesn’t easily discard anything, even the burdens of the past, a world easily mocked with sitcom humor by a world in which advanced degrees in identity politics measure a culture to the failed standard of a “New Man” emerging.

Drive down the backroads of our valley and find gatherings of men sitting on shaded porches in the midday heat. Surrounded by well-tended gardens, with chickens scratching and kids in the dirt, they talk sedition and plot the downfall of the moderns using an elaborate plan called Waiting Them Out. Meanwhile, they buy nothing new, grow their own food, slaughter their own chickens, hunt their own game, and grip the handles of the plow.

Join them if you wish … or not. They don’t care.