The All-Too-Human Flesh of It

A look at the South’s racial bias is not completely free of bias itself, says Bill Thompson, reviewing Pete Candler’s “A Deeper South.”

By Bill ThompsonJuly 26, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• History

• Nonfiction

A DEEPER SOUTH: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road (2024) is a travelogue with a purpose, both a road trip and a sprawling history lesson that journeys far and deep into the often unacknowledged past of the American South.

Despite growing up in Atlanta, Pete Candler admits that, until recently, he never truly knew the wider South. A self-described “white son of privilege,” Candler is descended from a prominent 19th- and 20th-century Georgia power structure. His family name adorns multiple buildings in the capital city. With A Deeper South, he has produced a spiritual cousin to Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family, a quasi-patrician mea culpa published in 1998 that spreads the blame to the wider society, with justifiable dismay.

“For over a century, the narrative of the South (at least as told by white people) was of a region nobly devoted to a politico-religious Lost Cause whose lostness was, the story went, no fault of its own,” Candler writes. “To tell the story of the South truthfully requires a multiplicity of voices, perspectives, tones, accents, styles, vocabularies and dispositions.”

Candler recognized that memory itself can be a kind of belief system, that “the desire to remember the past in a certain way can often overwhelm the truths of history.” So he turned investigator, using knowledge as an “exercise in historical archaeology” to unearth the realities behind comforting myths, obscurantism, and willful ignorance. In 2018, accompanied by his friend John Hayes, he hit the road to make sense of the South, revisiting places he’d scarcely grasped on earlier travels and finding new arteries into this “foreign” land. (A Deeper South, in fact, had some of its roots in a series of essays for this publication.)

It was to be a tour “unguided by travel brochures or tour directors who offer a curated view” of the South, abetted instead by Depression-era WPA Guides, eyewitness accounts, and direct experience. But Candler chose to look at the region primarily through the lens of race, and what he discovered appalled him.

Moving from state to state, town to town, Candler recounts stories of the most grievous atrocities committed by white people against Black people, crimes sufficient to make the blood boil and the heart sink. These facts are inarguable, the product of extensive research and verification. Candler is a sharp observer and meticulous reporter, albeit with the unavoidable slant of deciding what you are looking for and finding it.

Of Charleston, South Carolina, for example, he writes that there is little in its human-scaled skyline to reflect the city back to itself. As he describes it, “In this beautifully insular place the sun-glistened air is humid with a creeping paranoia. One senses it crossing the Ashley River: a feeling that you are entering not just a place but an agreement, to not say too much, not ask too many questions, not to scuff the polished veneer.”

But alongside this rather lurid description, Candler might have also recognized that the city has become an international arts and culinary capital suffused with citizens and organizations who can hardly be characterized as insular, or that a steady influx of new citizens “from off” has forever modified the city’s character. He might also have noted that Charleston’s large historic district, on which he dwells, is rather like a well-preserved theme park, an antebellum and more animated version of Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg. It is only one part of the city, albeit the gaudiest.

A Deeper South embodies the paradox of being both a necessary and misleading book. A reader need not be an apologist for Southern history to grow skeptical of the constant drumbeat of Candler’s outrage. His diligence and determination in laying bare the real past is but one of the book’s strengths. Yet Candler weakens its power by succumbing to the deadening rhetoric of scholarly orthodoxy, depicting everything in black-and-white with almost no shadings, whether deserving or not.

Where, for example, are the voices of progress that the South has made against considerable headwinds? Candler might have acknowledged those Southern whites who swam against the tide, who fought for civil rights and were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, both literally and figuratively. Apart from a nod to the late Lillian Smith, author of Killers of the Dream (1949), we hear nothing.

Before his death in 2020, Barry Lopez, not only one of the greatest American writers but also, like Edward Abbey, an engram of the American conscience, believed the United States had yet to come to terms with the legacy of slavery. He argued that we as a people would never reach moral maturity until we do. Candler agrees wholeheartedly.

But while the subject of race is now daily discourse for most Americans, Candler seems to believe that the poisoned tide of white supremacy is worse than ever. When considered against a backdrop of slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights era violence, that claim is questionable. As he journeys, Candler chronicles unconscionable inflicted human suffering and exposes enduring white supremacist sentiments, both subterranean and vividly resurgent. But he misses other signposts that might moderate his disgust. Candler is not the first to yearn for voices long silenced to be heard or for unspeakable sins to be confronted. With few exceptions, the only beauty Candler finds is in the landscape and in the writing of such exemplars of “Southern” literature as Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner—those who refused to obscure their own Southern realities.

Candler confesses his own pretrip ignorance early on, largely blaming the educational system that told him little of what he relates today. Oddly, Candler (who should know better) errs in much the same way Paul Theroux did on a Smithsonian magazine assignment in 2014. Having never had an interest in traveling through the American South, dismissing it as a backwater, the redoubtable travel writer went reluctantly.

Stopping in Oxford, Mississippi, Theroux spoke of Faulkner as a Southerner “obstinate in his refusal to simplify or romanticize its history.” Yet oversimplify is precisely what Theroux did in his vignettes. His ignorance of the South was revealed on every page, including his sweeping bromide that “the vitality of the South lies in the self-awareness of its deeply rooted people,” which, in Theroux’s view, was limited to predominantly Black citizens of dying small towns, and the rural poor more generally. Their stories should be told, absolutely, but in something more than a snapshot and without suggesting that the urban South is an empty, homogenized betrayal of the culture, whatever that culture may be—to Candler, it’s mostly a sham.

To his credit, Candler, a former academic, takes no snapshots. Nor does he ignore the larger cities, like his hometown of Atlanta. There are incisive, if rather harsh, explorations of Memphis, Charleston, and Oxford, among others, but each visit finds the same moral and intellectual lassitude. Candler’s mistake lies in scorning as reactionary any narratives that diverge from the one of endless sorrow and ashes. His is not a sin of ignorance but of ideology, of too much single-minded generalization to truly represent a region as diverse as the South.

These criticisms aside, there are many things to admire in Candler’s book. He has a fluid and propulsive writing style. He is dedicated to his task. He uses literary references judiciously and with effect. Above all, his purpose is worthy: Candler seeks to dispel Southern amnesia and to “offer a view of the region that allows readers to divest themselves of a defensive sense of ownership, and instead envelops them in the rich, difficult, and all-too-human flesh” of it. This is an honorable and generous wish in a book that needed more such generosity to tell the full story.

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Featured image: Marion Post Wolcott. [Haircutting in Front of General Store and Post Office on Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Mississippi], 1939. Ford Motor Company Collection. Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1987.1100.260). CC0, metmuseum.org. Accessed July 26, 2024.