Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Front Porch

2010; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/scu.0.0101

1534-1488

Harry L. Watson,

Race, History, and American Society

Front Porch Harry L. Watson Click for larger view View full resolution "I once saw Jimmy Carter [here] face-to-face. It must have been in 1975, when his presidential campaign was getting started and he was trying to stir up student interest at a Chicago-area university." At brother Billy's famous service station during a campaign stop in Plains, Georgia, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress. [End Page 1] If there are truly many Souths, there must be many kinds of southerners. To be various they must be individuals, but as recognizable southerners, they must also fit some generalizations. Stereotypes from Dixie crowd American fiction, film, music, and consciousness, and we all know people who seem to fit one of the molds: lady, gentleman, belle, frat boy, bigot, church lady, hell-raiser, bad man, maybe even Uncle Tom. The stereotypes all can echo a reality, yet the South is as famous for its eccentrics and individualists as for its off-the-shelf conformists. And beneath the surface of conventionality, even the most predictable exemplar of a stereotype will surprise you with variations and peculiarities. The endless interplay between culture and personality, the role and its player, always keeps us guessing, making all of us distinct individuals and also recognizable members of overlapping tribes: family, community, class, occupation, religion, region, nationality, and on and on. This issue of Southern Cultures is about southern lives—individual southerners who are or were uniquely themselves and also reflections of something larger. We have a clown, a preacher, two activists, and three writers. They're all different, but they all embody something about the modern South or its recent past. As we get to know each of them, we learn a bit more about the region and the people they come from. I once saw Jimmy Carter face-to-face. It must have been in 1975, when his presidential campaign was getting started and he was trying to stir up student interest at a Chicago-area university. There must have been a short speech with questions, which I don't recall, but I did remember a comment I overheard as the audience filed out. "What did you think?" one student asked his buddy. "He was O.K., I guess," came the reply, "but I couldn't get used to the ACK-see-unt." They both laughed. I gritted my teeth. Many nonsoutherners never did get used to the way Jimmy Carter talked, but the president's First Brother Billy became a media sensation by flaunting some of the regional stereotypes that the president had to surmount. Billy Carter drank beer, grew peanuts, drove a truck, and spent four corny years as America's class clown, coming to us live from his filling station in Plains, Georgia. It's more than likely that Billy's antics made his strait-laced brother wince, and also his redoubtable mother, Miss Lillian. No matter. Until he finally crossed a line with overtures to the outlawed government of Libya, the irrepressible Billy was family and could not be disowned. José Blanco F. brings us a careful exploration of Billy Carter and his public face. He tells us that Billy was very conscious of playing multiple roles—father and farmer as well as deliberate buffoon. The author is a specialist in costume, and he pays special attention to the wardrobe Billy selected for performing the role he called "good ole boy" in preference to "redneck." Why did this upstanding citizen embrace the public persona of a Hee Haw yokel? Why did he taunt Miss Lillian's [End Page 2] model son by reveling in clownish stereotypes, repelling voters like my fellow students in Chicago as much as he entertained them? José Blanco F. does not probe the rivalries that drove Billy Carter to bring a little chaos to his brother's tightly wrapped presidency, but he does show how Billy pulled it off. Click for larger view View full resolution In "'My Idol Was Langston Hughes': The Poet, the Renaissance, and Their Enduring Influence," Margaret Walker Alexander (here, with admirers at a book signing ) tells us about a generation of writers who struggled to escape the...