The South I Keep Finding
Three weeks on the back roads between Selma and Athens, and what remains.
I set out, in early June, to drive the back roads between Selma and Athens with no particular column in mind. Three weeks and roughly 1,800 miles later, this is the column, and it is not the one I thought I would file.
What is not the story
The story is not the collapse of the small town, which has been over-reported to the point of caricature. It is not the resurgence of the small town, which has been over-reported in the opposite direction by the same magazines. It is not, mercifully, a story about barbecue.
What is
What is the story is the ordinary continuity of the places between the places we report on. The Wednesday-evening service at a Presbyterian church in Marion, Alabama, that has functioned continuously since 1834. The single stoplight in Waverly Hall, Georgia, that has, for reasons no one on Main Street could explain, been out of service for three months without inconveniencing anyone. The particular quality of light on a live-oak avenue in Marengo County at seven in the evening.
The South that shows up in the reporting on the South tends to be the South that is doing something — losing something, gaining something, voting for something. The South I keep finding, on the road, is the one that is not doing anything in particular. It is the one that persists.
Why persistence is a story
Persistence, in a country that has learned to reward disruption at every scale, is itself a form of news. The places that have not changed are not, as a rule, the places that failed to change. They are the places that decided, over and over, that whatever they had was worth keeping.
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