South Toward Home

...I'm trying to find something bad to say about this book, but I can't...

...Now both of us are old...

...Buzz-saw haircuts on the little boys, neat little outfits with matching purses for the teenage girls, and a whole world is conjured up...

...Each writer was asked by Alex Harris, the director of the Center for Documentary Photography at Duke University, to use family photographs to inspire a piece of writing...

...By way of sharp contrast comes McPherson's recollections of moving from place to place and visiting his father with "a wire screen between him and us" in prison...

...The complexities of race and class, the awesome powers of memory, the right writers and a wonderful idea—it's all here...

...Powell's rich meanderings to Ms...

...Someone has pointed out to me that he is wearing a down jacket...

...Yes, not arrogant...

...And in their recollections we see the region not as the monolithic land of slowtalking and easy-living as northerners sometimes envision but in the fullness of its awesome class stratifications, social customs, and, above all, racial complexity...

...To begin with, it is a collection of pieces from some of the best southern contemporary writers, including Bobbie Anna Quindlen writes the "Life in the 30s" column for The New York Times...

...Padgett Powell composes a wry essay on the aspects of character found in early snapshots...

...He is holding a comic book and wearing a down jacket...

...University of North Carolina Press, $1695...

...James Alan McPherson's memoir about rootlessness, childhood insecurity, disappointment, and forgiveness centers on a picture of a young black man standing in front of a shanty...

...There are other points worth noting: The writing, ranging from Mr...

...In her painful recollection of her girlhood, "The Power and the Glory," Robb Forman Dew begins with the unforgettable sentence, "I had a wonderful personality until I was about fourteen when I was simply too tired to have it anymore'' The opening is accompanied by a photograph of the Westdale Junior High Homecoming Court—the author is second from the right, 14, and wearing a corsage and a hat—and it is all there: the personality and the strain...

...My father's roots were in this region...

...I have learned that he suffered from narcolepsy...

...McPherson's, too, is a child's consciousness, of reading all day at the colored branch of the library and going to the best colored school in Savannah His father, a talented electrician, has his license revoked and his dreams of opening his own business blighted...

...Those of us born and bred north of the MasonDixon line who have gone on to write for a living have a fantasy, based on an amalgam of Walker Percy, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams, that southern writers have an edge...

...But most likely his arms are crossed and his eyes are closed and his head is tilted because he is asleep...

...Of course, that is not all it does...

...You...

...I cannot remember him this way, although some arrogance, for him, was possible...

...With this book, we move away from a traditional format of documentary publication in which a photographer looks at the world and a writer explains what the photographer sees:' Harris writes in his introduction, a lovely bit of writing itself about the mesmerizing effect family albums had on him as a boy...

...The wearing of down jackets did not become fashionable until many years after this picture was taken...

...A World Unsuspected: Portraits of Southern Childhood...

...Still there is a complicity between the writer and the reader that is exhilarating and unexpected...

...But his family is never sure whether his problem is his color or his drinking...

...There is a photo of Dew's parents on their wedding day, two unusually handsome people smiling into one another's eyes...

...In the same piece, the pictures also work against the recollections...

...Instead, the writers have looked at the pictures and explained what they see in their mind's eye, with the pictures included...

...As you look from the prose to the photograph you agree: Yes, arrogant...

...Surely the running-board leg is my own touch," he notes of himself at age five, surrounded by little girls with bare legs, his own hoisted like a matinee idol onto the side of the car...

...As soon as you open the book you know the results must be inspired, for aren't those crowded black and white snapshots from a Brownie camera the most potent childhood referents...

...This is the only picture I have of my father," McPherson begins...

...The pieces also illustrate strongly—the pictures too, for that matter—what northern writers sometimes forget: that the southern experience is wildly diverse...

...But a down jacket would be most comfortable during the cool, rainy winters that settle into the coastal areas of Georgia and South Carolina...

...Ann Mason, Barry Hannah, Padgett Powell, and Robb Forman Dew...

...Josephine Humphreys offers a vivid rendering of her grandmother occasioned by a series of stiff Christmas portraits the old woman arranged each year...

...It is as though you are hand in hand with the author, not only in the place where he has taken you but on the journey he has made to get there...

...It is instructive to see the differences among approaches...

...know, this is ridiculous," she tells her girlfriends, in the sort of naive, knocked-over-the-head-by-truth tone that so often characterizes white discovery of racism...

...Dew's southern belle behavior is shaken one day on a routine ferry ride across the Mississippi river when, as she puts it, "I awakened to the whole...

...It was taken sometime in the 1930s, at his mother's family home in Hardeeville, South Carolina, when he was a young man...

...It looks tiring...

...Others use the photographs only as a starting point and do not refer to them directly...

...Some confront the pictures directly...

...We're all on the same boat...

...There is always the suspicion they have had childhoods so rich in atmosphere, eccentricity, and the wryest sort of pain that from the beginning they have an advantage in the creation of fiction that those of us who grew up surrounded by heavy industry and Wonder Bread can only envy...

...Can I come around sometime and sit with you?' " There's also a heartbreakingly funny account by Al Young about trying to tote a too-large watermelon home from his grandfather's fields when he was four and an account by T.R...

...One day a retired county official comes to call: "My mother said he asked, 'Is this Mac's son?' Then he said, `Mac was a brilliant man...

...That liquor just got to him' Then he said, `Mable, I never had anything against the colored...

...Asleep...

...We get Dew's account of relentlessly nurturing her charm—"the lovely solipsism of southern girlhood," she calls it...

...Moreover, recollections are inspired by a device so stunning in its simplicity and absolute rightness that it is a wonder it hasn't been tried a dozen times before...

...world" and realized that the side of the boat marked "White" had only a handful of passengers and the side marked "Colored" was terribly crowded...

...Alex Harris, ed...

...Both McPherson and Dew say a good deal about race...

...Pearson of going to the beach with his family that will be instantly familiar to anyone who's ever done it...

...Knowing its climate, he must have dressed with an eye toward comfort...

...Add to this the great skill of the contributors, and the results are wonderful...

...Mason's almost journalistic rendering of her time as a fan club aficionado, is uniformly first-rate...

...While her account of her father's descent into alcoholism is affecting enough, the newly minted optimism of the photograph gives it a special edge...

...I have known all along that he liked comic books...

...Someone else has noted that he seems arrogant...

...This book* only cements this fantasy...