Flagrantly Southern
Humor collection from Roy Blount Jr. needles know-it-all Northerners
by Michael Ray Taylor
There is a memorable scene in Charles Frazier’s Civil War novel, Cold Mountain, where the city-educated preacher, Monroe, gets his leg pulled by a North Carolina farmer named Esco. Monroe has been led to believe that the locals are wholly ignorant of, among many other things, the rudiments of Christianity, so he slowly and carefully spells out the Passion story for Esco—who happens to be a lifetime member of a local Baptist congregation. “And what this fellow come down for was to save us?” Esco asks. “And they still done kilt him like they did?” When the preacher answers both questions in the affirmative, Esco ponders a moment, then grins, slaps him on the back and says, “Well, about all we can do is hope it ain’t so.”
This anecdote strikes a chord with Southern readers because there is no native sport as enjoyable as letting a Yankee make a fool of himself with his own anti-Southern prejudices. Roy Blount Jr., an Atlanta native and Vanderbilt graduate, has spent the past four decades living among those of the Northern persuasion in New York and Massachusetts. He has made the sport an art form, as demonstrated by the 80-odd essays that make up Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South. “You aren’t so dumb,” a shocked New York financial writer tells him at a dinner party.
As with his previous collections, nearly all of these comic gems were published in so many magazines one wonders how Blount keeps his assignments straight, among them Sports Illustrated, Men’s Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, Life and too many more to list. Some of the best pieces first appeared in The Oxford American, a magazine uniquely suited to Blount’s blend of intellectual erudition and down-home leg pulling. Of course, as art forms go, the magazine essay is a dying one, with maybe 43 people out there still reading them. Luckily for Blount, he has found new fans through public radio. Frequently a guest on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, he is known for championing the rights of the singing impaired and for bits of doggerel concerning the current president. Blount also appears often as a panelist (and usually the top scorer) on the public radio news quiz, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. From his radio persona, it is easy to understand how a Northerner could confuse his accent and aphorisms with ignorance, and it is also easy to understand how gleefully he would pounce on them for it.
In one Prairie Home Companion appearance, as Blount relates in an essay called “Total Immersion, Up to a Point,” he told the following joke:
“Do you believe in infant baptism,” one old boy asks another, who replies, “Believe in it—hell, I’ve seen it done.”
An online argument ensues among fans who get the joke and fans who can’t understand why their wives are still laughing. In a discussion of these arguments, and in his own religious determination to identify himself as a “contemplative Anabaptist,” Blount pokes at the religious assumptions blue-staters make about red-staters, and vice versa, in a manner that calls to mind Frazier’s Esco and the preacher.
While some of Blount’s more interesting pieces focus on politics and religion, some of the funniest are on less philosophical concerns, such as food (see “Meat, Three, Wallace Stevens and Me” on Nashville’s Elliston Place Soda Shop); travel (“Snakes Alive,” on the rattlesnake roundup of Whigham, Ga.); and the proper usage of a native Southern term misused by slumming Yankees (“The Plurality of Y’all”).
As a longtime magazine essayist, Blount understands that the ending of a piece is as important as its lead, and he does a masterful job of tying loose ends into a memorable last line, even when the essay in question is shorter than this review. So the occasional flat essay nevertheless exhibits a classic storytelling structure and surprising lines that cause a reader to laugh in a way that makes the other passengers on a flight eye him warily. Consider, for example, Blount’s proposed answer to the question, familiar to any author who ever attended a cocktail party, “What kind of writer are you?” Blount’s response: “Self taught annunciatory. I received a vision out of this corner, of this eye, at about 7:45 p.m. on January 11, 1949, and since that moment in earthly time I have been an inspired revelational writer from the crown of my hat to the soles of my shoes.” Blount then reveals the source of his revelation: “The nature of the vision was a footprint in the side of an edifice, and the heel of it was cloven, and the toes of it was twelve. And how could a footprint be in the side of an edifice, you wonder? Especially since I stood alone at the time, stark naked and daubed with orange clay, in a stand of tulip poplar trees some 11 miles outside of Half Dog, Alabama.”
As Blount asks in another essay, “What’s not to be Gothic about?”
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