Tom Mathews’s Reviews > South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature > Status Update

IF YOU WERE blindfolded and dropped into the French Quarter, it’s possible that you could find your way onto Bourbon Street just by your nose. Despite the vigilance of the brave men and women of the New Orleans Sanitation Department, the most populated blocks of the street always smell like sugar and stomach acid.

Faulkner’s New Orleans is a messy watercolor of a place, overrunning with pigment. Tennessee Williams’s New Orleans is steamy, haunted, and claustrophobic, full of nervous creatures and dilapidated boardinghouses; it always seems to be dusk there. The New Orleans that Toole paints in Confederacy is a different city altogether, the only place out of the three that I recognize.

Critics of Mockingbird often sneer at Lee’s approach to these issues as lacking in nuance, absent of any moral ambivalence. “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they are buying a children’s book,” Flannery O’Connor sniped. But Mockingbird faithfully follows O’Connor’s own guidelines for how best to shake an audience out of complacency: For the hard of hearing, you shout.

It was an annual tradition for our principal, once an acquaintance of Capote’s, to read aloud “A Christmas Memory.” It’s easy to see why...: It’s a story that shows the best of Southerners, a kindhearted elderly woman and her six-year-old ward saving their pennies to bake fruitcakes for near-strangers, a ritual of quirky generosity that jibes with a certain fondness for weirdos that the South nurtures.

While researching Childhood, Crews relied on scraps of lore about his father, stories he was too young to witness firsthand. “I have lived with the stories of him so long that they are as true as anything that ever happened to me,” Crews wrote. “Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people.”

In Geltner’s telling, a fan had come up to Crews and asked who he was. Once confirming the writer’s identity, he produced a knife and cut Crews, as a kind of souvenir interaction. The wound wasn’t that serious, Geltner assured me. Some fans ask for autographs, but Crews’s fans demanded blood—perhaps because blood is the currency Crews most valued.

In his dazzling memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Crews introduces himself as “a boy who was raised in the rickets-and-hookworm belt of South Georgia.” He begins his life’s story with an account of how his father contracted gonorrhea from a Seminole prostitute.

It was at Iowa that O’Connor asked her mother’s permission to go by “Flannery” instead of “Mary Flannery,” in anticipation of having her work published because, she joked to an interviewer, “Who was likely to buy the stories of an Irish washerwoman?”

“The deep South,” Faulkner wrote in Absalom, Absalom!, “dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts.” To be Southern is to grow up among the ruins. Southernness suggests a deep, inescapable past, an inability to move forward without the weight of your ancestors. Faulkner’s modernist prose and tangled chronological structures seemed to encompass it aptly.