Coca-Cola heir travels through the region and reflects on history in ‘Deeper South’
“A Deeper South” is a combination of history, travelogue, memoir and social commentary, which, while deflecting from many, many discussions, keeps returning to Candler’s main theme of how the insidious myth of the “Lost Cause” has peppered our landscape with so many Confederate monuments.
The author is a Candler of O Sailboats; His family tree includes the men who founded the Coca-Cola Company and Emory University, as well as several Georgia senators, governors, judges and militia leaders – many of whom did not live their lives on what he considers the right side of the law. history.
After growing up as a “privileged white male” in Atlanta, Candler awakened in college to the complicated history of his ancestors and home. He became a professor of theology at Baylor University, but felt that as an academic he had become “a truncated version of myself” and resigned his tenured position, the better to create works like “A Deeper South.”
Back in college in the late ’90s, Candler and a friend drove the back roads of the South, absorbing the quirks and vagaries of the most remote locales. A few years ago, he retraced many of these earlier trips, passing through Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama and Mississippi, taking photos and notes as he went.
During his travels, Candler was struck by the gap between the South’s roughly 2,000 Confederate memorials and the absence of commemoration of the thousands of black people who were lynched between the late 1800s and the late 1960s.
Confederate monuments were few and far between after the war ended, Candler explains. Then, between 1900 and 1920, when white supremacy isolated the region again, they appeared everywhere, often near courthouses. His true purpose was not to honor the dead, he writes, but to claim that territory as “white space.”
There were no barriers too low for the zeal of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to rewrite history. Henry Wirz, commandant of the Andersonville prison camp in South Georgia, was one of the few men to be tried and executed for war crimes. But the organization erected a large obelisk in his honor in downtown Andersonville “to redeem his name from the stigma attached to him by bitter prejudice,” according to the plaque.
It’s not just Confederate statues that irritate Candler. The life-size statue honoring James Brown in his adopted hometown of Augusta shows “no trace of James’ fierce virility, no sign of the agony – sexual, racial, political – that Brown projected…” The statue “looks like a attempt to overthrow him.” to” size, erected reluctantly by “a city that has long cared about it”.
In a terse and brutal art review, he describes the Brown statue as “a black version of Josh Groban. With a cape.
Candler ventures across all six states, hitting the usual suspects — Tuskegee, Alabama, home of the HBCU founded by Booker T. Washington; the crossroads in Mississippi where blue legend Robert Johnson claimed to have sold his soul to the devil; Charleston, South Carolina; and Memphis — and something unusual like Marietta’s Big Chicken, built in 1963 not to advertise a KFC but for a fast-food restaurant called Johnny Reb’s Chick-Chuck-‘N’-Shake. All it is rooted in these four years.
He lingers in the impenetrable mysteries of the Okefenokee Swamp, where, ever the scholar, he names Homer, Virgil, Dante, and cartoonist Walt (“Pogo”) Kelly, and writes about an ill-conceived 19th-century plan to clean up and drain the swamp. to provide valuable land. The recovery project relied heavily on convict labor (also known as slavery by another name). Fortunately, the swamp won out and is now a US National Wildlife Refuge, although a titanium mining company is trying once again to monetize this unique natural phenomenon.
Candler’s powers of observation are astute. At Montgomery’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the names of 4,000 lynching victims are inscribed on hanging steel boxes that resemble coffins. “As steel wears, it oxidizes and becomes discolored like rust. … In many of them, the discoloration runs down the surface of the steel like a trail of blood.”
Candler can get a little confused by his own family history, which is understandable, but it just makes the book longer rather than better.
The appeal of “A Deeper South” lies more in how much even a student of history can learn about small, important details of our regional past. And as a student, perhaps you won’t fall victim to one of his best aphorisms: “The one thing that will certainly never go away, no matter how much you ignore it, is your own ignorance.”
“A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery and Sadness of the Southern Road”
By Pete Candler
University of South Carolina Press, 400 pages, $27.99
