Horizon

Coon Hunting in Theory, Part Two

I love the Raleigh-Durham airport. I probably fly through it three times every two years, and have found something in RDU I've never seen anyplace else: an excellent used bookstore. Space is at such a premium in an airport, and travellers are so busy that the bookstore at Gate A-16 has been relentlessly culled. You won't find any bargains, but you're guaranteed to find several titles that tempt you.

A few years ago at that bookstore, I picked up a $3 copy of W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South. Somewhere in the eighty pages I read on the flight back to Austin, there is a rejection of John Crowe Ransom's theory of southern leisure as a "settled," European phenomenon:

He had much in common with the half-wild Scotch and Irish clansmen...; but with the English squire to whom the legend has always assimilated him, and to whom the Southern Agrarians have recently sought to reassimilate him, not much.

The whole difference can be summed up in this: that, though he galloped to hounds in pursuit of the fox precisely as the squire did, it was for quite other reasons. It was not that hoary and sophisticated class tradition dictated it as the proper sport for gentlemen. It was not even, in the first place, that he knew that English squires so behaved, and hungered to identify himself wiht them by imitation, though this of course was to play a great part in confirming and fixing the pattern. It was simply and primarily for the same reason that, in his youth and often into late manhood, he ran spontaneous and unpremeditated foot-races, wrestled, drank Gargantuan quantities of raw whisky, let off wild yells, and hunted the possum: because the thing was already in his mores when he emerged from the backwoods, because on the frontier it was the obvious thing to do, because he was a hot, stout fellow, full of blood and reared to outdoor activity, because of a primitive and naïve zest for the pursuit in hand.

There you have it. The core of Southern culture is longstanding, European-style settlement. Or maybe the frontier. As Dan Savage said at the end of a classic (but NSFW) column, "I hope this was helpful".

Posted by Ben Brumfield at August 10, 2005 08:03 AM