Is there a mule in it?
--Jeanne McDonald

"Is there a mule in it"? That's the question It was asked at Nashville's recent Southern Festival of Books just after the session on "The Southerness of Southern Writers." My husband Fred Brown and I felt privileged to have been asked to participate in the conference, and we shared the podium with James Watkins from Berry Collegein Georgia, whose book Southern Selves: From Mark Twain and Eudora Welty to MayaAngelou and Kay Gibbons, meshed perfectly with ours, Growing Up Southern: How the South Shapes Its Writers.

Noticing my hesitation, the man who asked me the question explained that he thought every southern book had a mule in it. Well, ours didn't, though a few books discussed at the conference did. Terry Kay, for example, talked about working a mule-drawn plow as a child growing up in the South. But southern literature is changing. There are more malls than mules in current
southern novels, and scenes formerly set in parlors in decaying mansions have given way to scenes now set in beauty parlors. How do all these changes affect the figure of what we lovingly call southern literature? As James Watkins astutely phrased it, "Southern literature as we know it will survive because we perpetuate the image of it."

That image was alive and well in Nashville a couple of weeks ago, and the list of publishing houses printing books with southern themes proves that the mystique of the southern novel is still revered, even in the North. Terry Kay says that when a New York editor wants to cut part of a novel he submits, he looks thoughtful, grunts, and rubs his forehead for a while. "Something wrong?" asks the editor. "Oh, no, no" murmurs Kay, pettishly, unconvincingly. Then he leans back in his chair, stares at the ceiling, frowns. "Come on," says the editor, "something's wrong."

Kay looks wounded but replies, "No, no, everything's fine, fine."

By this time the editor is really frustrated. "Please, I insist. What's wrong?"

"Well," says Kay, "this part that you want to cut?"

The editor leans forward in his chair. "Yes?"

"It's southern."

Guess who gets his way.

Terry Kay (Dance with the White Dog, The Year the Lights Came On)
named four major influences in southern writing: place, family, religion
(and the drama of the church), and oral history, which, he claims, is really
gossip. When you hear somebody in the South begin a sentence with, "I
heard tell," says Kay, "you know a story is coming."

Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller, began her powerful reading of "Two or Three Things I Know for Sure" with "Let me tell you a story." She kept her audience in thrall throughout her dramatic plunges of volume and her sometimes brusque, sometimes tender, disclosures: "'Let me tell me tell you a story,' I'd begin,and start another one. When we were small, I could catch my sisters the way they caught butterflies, capture their attention and almost make them believe that all I said was true. 'Let me tell you about the women who ran away. All those legendary women who ran away.' I'd tell about the witch queens who cooked their enemies in great open pots, the jewels that grow behind the tongues of water moccasins. After a while the deepest satisfaction was in the story itself, greater even than the terror in my sisters' faces, the laughter, and, God
help us, the hope."

For some southern writers, a miserable past makes for a
good story. That was true in Allison's case, who suffered abuse at
the hands of her stepfather, but Kay insists he's not typical. "My
problem as a southern writer was that I grew up in a family, that
was not dysfunctional."

Kaye Gibbons, however, admits that she lives on Xanax (an anxiety-calming
drug) and caffeine. How else do you manage a house and a young family and
keep turning out best-selling novels? Then there are other writers, like
the incomparable Lee Smith, who seems to thrive on being busy and involved
with hundreds of people and hundreds of activities. Currently, a
Nashville dance company is putting Fair and Tender Ladies to music
and country singers Matracea Berg and Marshall Chapman are collaborating
with Smith and Jill McCorkle on a production called Good Old Girls.

McCorkle, ex-student of Lee Smith, has Smith's kind of dry humor. When editor Shannon Ravenel at Algonquin told McCorkle that she thought one of her characters was too sophisticated to say, "I might could,"; McCorkle replied,"Well, she might would."

Above all, that sense of humor. even in the face of adversity,
endures as one of the strongest characteristics of the southern
writer.

The Nashville Southern Festival of Books fairly buzzed with inspiration
and excitement. The readings made me want to drive home and start writing.
Most of the other writers there felt the same way, and readers and writers
alike left with bags full of new southern books. It was a way to carry home
a little of that inspiration. There were dozens of other writers there--Wendell Berry, Clyde Edgerton, Abraham Verghese, Elizabeth Spencer, John Edgerton, Hal Crowther, Wilma Dykeman, Chet Flippo. Sharyn McCrumb, and others too numerous to name.


As James Watkins says about the future of the southern novel, it will never
die as long as we continue to imagine the South as we love it. I've thinking
about the mule question, though. Would I ever write a novel with a mule
in it? It's unlikely, but then again, I might would.