Portis on the New South

Main Street in a purportedly Southern city

Since rereading Gringos back at the beginning of this month I’ve been revisiting more of the late lamented Charles Portis’s work, particularly the short stories and travel essays collected in Escape Velocity. This comes from his magnificent memoir “Combinations of Jacksons,” published in the Atlantic in 1999. Throughout, Portis uses the phrase “combinations of Jacksons” to denote a certain kind of rural, unsophisticated, rambunctious, indeed ungovernable but good Southerner. Salt of the earth, good folks—an instantly recognizable type.

Here, Portis moves from describing how the support of a great uncle who rode with Quantrill and Jesse James for Theodore Roosevelt, a New York Republican, infuriated other Confederate veterans in 1904 (“Unseemly spectacle, coots flailing away”) to make an aside about the gradual, creeping fulfilment of the hopes of the Henry Gradys of the South:

For more than a century now, at intervals of about five years, southern editorial writers have been seeing portents in the night skies and proclaiming The End of the War, at Long Last, and the blessed if somewhat tardy arrival of The New South. By that they seem to mean something the same as, culturally identical with, at one with, the rest of the country, and this time they may be on to something, what with our declining numbers of Gaylons, Coys, and Virgils, and the disappearance of Clabber Girl Baking Powder signs from our highways, and of mules, standing alone in pastures. Then there is the new and alien splendor to be seen all about us, in cities with tall, dark, and featureless glass towers, though I’m told that deep currents are flowing here, far beyond the ken of editorial wretches in their cluttered cubicles. A little underground newsletter informs me that these peculiar glass structures are designed with care, by sociologists and architects working hand in glove with the CIA, as dark and forbidding boxes, in which combinations of Jacksons are thought least likely to gather, combine further, smoke cigarettes, brood, conspire, and break loose out of a long lull.

The essay is tinged throughout with a ubi sunt melancholy, perhaps nowhere more pointedly than here.

I live just outside a city of exactly the New South described here—glossy, polished, deracinated, full of outsiders. Not so much out-Yankeeing the Yankee as letting him take over. (Here’s a spoof I recently discovered. You laugh so you don’t cry.) I think Portis was onto something. I also hope he turns out to be wrong, that the pendulum will swing back, that his Jacksons will “break loose” and combine again.