{"id":20144,"date":"2011-08-31T08:00:58","date_gmt":"2011-08-31T12:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=20144"},"modified":"2011-08-31T11:46:02","modified_gmt":"2011-08-31T15:46:02","slug":"southern-gothic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/08\/31\/southern-gothic\/","title":{"rendered":"Southern Gothic"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Anonymous, 'The Ghost of Bernadette Soubirous,', 1890, black-and-white photograph.<\/p><\/div>\n

To grow up in the South is to be fed a steady diet of grits and ghost stories. Ask any household in Alabama, and they\u2019ll tell you about a friend or family member with a rogue phantom that blows out candles or stomps around in the attic. Being haunted is a permanent condition below the Mason-Dixon, one that defines the region as much as the voracious kudzu and the iced tea so sugary it hurts your teeth. William Faulkner, who was known to spin particularly scary fireside stories, described the Deep South in Absalom, Absalom! <\/em>as \u201cdead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts.\u201d<\/p>\n

No one knew that better than Kathryn Tucker Windham, an Alabama folklorist who spent much of her life collecting and patiently preserving Southern superstitions, recipes, and, most of all, ghost stories. Before passing away last June at the age of ninety-three, Windham published four cookbooks, eight ghost-story collections, and more than a dozen works of regional mythology, memoir, and fiction, most of them featuring her own household ghost, a Slimer-esque jester whom the Windhams affectionately named Jeffrey.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Windham\u2019s voice is unforgettable. In high school, I would listen to All Things Considered<\/em> every couple weeks to hear her explain, in her rolling, sticky Southwest Alabama accent, the canoe fighting of the Creek Indian War or the boll weevil statue in Enterprise, Alabama,\u00a0erected in honor of the pest that forced local farmers to diversify their crops. She hunted through cemeteries, traced old wives tales back to their sources, and described the grandeur of crumbling mansions spared by the Union army only to rot from neglect.\u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t care whether you believe in ghosts,\u201d Windham was fond of saying. \u201cThe good ghost stories do not require that you believe in ghosts.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ghosts that Windham believed in weren\u2019t the green spectral presences captured by bounty hunters armed with flotillas of infrared photographic equipment, nor are her tales the ax-murderer campfire lore used to make children jump. They\u2019re extensions of local history, real events pickled in tall tales. After all, Windham\u2019s talent for a good yarn came out of her experience as a journalist: fresh out of college in 1939, she became a police reporter at The Alabama<\/em> Journal<\/em> at a time when a woman in the newsroom was, as one remembrance put it, \u201cas rare as Unitarians in our state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Windham chronicled the civil rights movement for the Selma Times-Journal<\/em> through the fifties and sixties, churning out articles and photographs that documented the internal crisis of the South. In her day job, Windham wrote scathingly about the worst that Alabama had to offer: racist taunts, KKK gatherings, tear gas and billy clubs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But in her books, she celebrated the state\u2019s best: folk artists, snake handlers, and magnificent chefs.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>

Edouard Isidore Buguet, 'Spirit photograph portrait of Camille Flammarion,' 1874, black-and-white photograph.<\/p><\/div>\n

13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey<\/em>, Windham\u2019s first in a series of state-by-state anthologies detailing the local\u00a0\u201cghosts of distinction,\u201d came out in 1969, when Birmingham was better known as \u201cBombingham.\u201d It\u2019s a charming book, the best of her \u201c13 Ghosts\u201d series,\u00a0but it\u2019s also a remarkable historical work. (It is, in fact, required reading in many state elementary schools for their local-history course.) 13 Alabama Ghosts<\/em> is, at heart, a work of conservancy, preserving the tales passed down through families, footnotes to the official historical record. There\u2019s the story of the luxurious steamboat Eliza Battle<\/em>, Alabama\u2019s Titanic<\/em>, which caught fire in the icy waters of the Tombigbee River in 1854, killing half of its passengers. \u201cOn stormy nights,\u201d Windham wrote, \u201cthey saw the great steamer rise up out of the troubled water \u2026 and always there was music, dancing tunes, providing a background for the shrieks of terror and cries for help that came from the phantom vessel.\u201d The restless spirits of the Confederacy blow tobacco smoke at the current owners of their houses, and women who died childless tuck tots into bed with their ethereal hands.<\/p>\n

But neither is Windham blind to the casual violence and systematic oppression that the old South represented. Many of the ghosts did not die peacefully. She writes, for example, of Henry Wells, a freed slave who was blamed for the arson of the Pickens County Courthouse in Carrolltown, a structure that the impoverished population had struggled to rebuild after the Civil War:<\/p>\n

\n

In a group of men gathered about the square on a sultry afternoon of his arrest feeling against him ran high \u2026 In a black ragged cloud west of town the rumbling of thunder lent an additional menace to the already ominous situation. Soon someone produced a rope. His face grey with fear, Wells shouted at the top of his lungs, \u201cI am innocent. If you kill me, I am going to haunt you for the rest of my life!\u201d And as later events proved, he did.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

After the lynch mob had done their frenzied work and dispersed, an apparition in the image of Wells\u2019 face, tense with fright, appeared in the courthouse window. It\u2019s still there, streaky and pale, a Rorschach test for the Southern conscience.<\/p>\n

In Windham\u2019s tales, the romanticism of the South collides with the reality of its racial politics, myth and fact intertwine to present a picture of the South that is as true as any textbook. \u201cThe really good ghost stories tell us who we were, who our ancestors were,\u201d Windham remarked in a documentary following the Alabama ghost trail. \u201cWe are storytellers in the South, we always have been.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a novel sentiment. Flannery O\u2019Connor, the mistress of Southern ghouls, wrote in her essay \u201cThe Grotesque in Southern Fiction\u201d that the impulse to tell stories is an act of reparation \u201cthat demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.\u201d Windham\u2019s ghost tales offer a similar comfort, a hopefulness that the events of history are not as far gone as we might think, that they might still be corrected. What Windham recognized is that all history is made of ghost stories, whether we choose to believe them or not.<\/p>\n

Margaret Eby is an Alabama-raised freelance writer living in Brooklyn. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To grow up in the South is to be fed a steady diet of grits and ghost stories. Ask any household in Alabama, and they\u2019ll tell you about a friend or family member with a rogue phantom that blows out candles or stomps around in the attic. Being haunted is a permanent condition below the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":230,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[3593,3582,3551,3587,3588,3596,3589,3584,3594,1888,3586,3597,3585,3592,3583,3591,3590,3598,3595,3581],"class_list":["post-20144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-13-alabama-ghosts-and-jeffrey","tag-absalom","tag-alabama","tag-all-things-considered","tag-boll-weevil","tag-confederacy","tag-creek-indian-war","tag-deep-south","tag-eliza-battle","tag-flannery-oconnor","tag-folklor","tag-henry-wells","tag-kathryn-tucker-windham","tag-kkk","tag-mason-dixon-line","tag-selma-times-journal","tag-the-alabama-journal","tag-the-grotesque-in-southern-fiction","tag-wiggle-tails","tag-william-faulkner"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSouthern Gothic by Margaret Eby<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 31, 2011 \u2013 To grow up in the South is to be fed a steady diet of grits and ghost stories. 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