Southern Happiness

From Walker Percy's The Last Gentlemen, a passage in which a young man returns to the deep South, circa 1966, after a seven-year absence:

The South he came home to was different from the South he had left. It was happy, victorious, Christian, rich, patriotic and Republican.

The happiness and serenity of the South disconcerted him. He had felt good in the North because everyone else felt so bad. True, there was a happiness in the North. That is to say, nearly everyone would have denied that he was unhappy. And certainly the North was victorious. It had never lost a war. But Northerners had turned morose in their victory. They were solitary and shut-off to themselves and he, the engineer, had got used to living among them. Their cities, rich and busy as they were, looked bombed out. And his own happiness had come from being onto the unhappiness beneath their happiness. It was possible for him to be at home in the North because the North was homeless. There are many things worse than being homeless in a homeless place—in fact, this is one condition of being at home, if you are yourself homeless. For example, it is much worse to be homeless and then to go home where everyone is at home and then still be homeless. The South was at home. Therefore his homelessness was much worse in the South because he had expected to find himself at home there.

The happiness of the South was formidable. It was an almost invincible happiness. It defied you to call it anything else. Everyone was in fact happy. The women were beautiful and charming. The men were healthy and successful and funny; they knew how to tell stories. They had everything the North had and more. They had a history, they had a place redolent with memories, they had good conversation, they believed in God and defended the Constitution, and they were getting rich in the bargain. They had the best of victory and defeat. Their happiness was aggressive and irresistible. . .

. . . He had got used to good steady wistful post-Protestant Yankees (they were his meat, ex-Protestants, post-Protestants, para-Protestants, the wistful ones who wanted they knew not what; he was just the one to dance for them) and here all at once he found himself among as light-footed and as hawk-eyed and God-fearing a crew as one could imagine. Everyone went to church and was funny and clever and sensitive in the bargain. Oh, they were formidable, born winners (how did they lose?). . .

I'll summarize what I find so interesting about this section. First, it describes a frozen moment: the closest the South ever got to rising again, just as air conditioning and strip malls released a wave of suburbanism that slowly and steadily worked against Southern distinctiveness. Second, the happiness of the South is rooted in history, local distinction, and money. Third, cities can be wonderful places for the rootless.

Of course, it is a blind sort of happiness. There were always those who wanted to ignore the evils of slavery's legacy: if you think of the guilt in your blood, it's hard to rest in your riches. Some Southern roots are poisoned, and the plants that grow from them will always drop poisonous seeds.

North Carolina, I think, must have been one of the happiest places in the South. Unlike Virginia, South Carolina, or Louisiana, we had no major port city, which left us poorer and less important. I could be wrong, but I don't think our wealthy class could compare to those of other Southern states before the twentieth century. Perhaps the defeat was not so bad here, especially in cities with very little history, such as my hometown Charlotte. We don't remember the sting of defeat like they do in Richmond, with its Civil War statues and Jefferson Davis memorials. (And will South Carolina ever do the right thing and take down that Confederate flag?)

Things are, of course, different now. Percy's books and a great deal of other Southern literatures are interesting because they wrestle with the fading of the Old South. Maybe we can say that Lincoln's victory continues to this day. It is a bitter thing, but it is the right thing.