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Nothing anywhere is like what the South has to offer
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Published: November 16, 2008
DIXIE EMPORIUM: Tourism, Foodways, and Consumer Culture in The American South. Edited by Anthony J. Stanonis. The University of Georgia Press. $24.95.
Dear Old Dixie has been thoroughly marketed, starting well before the Civil War. Northerners and foreigners came down for "the Southern experience" -- a combination of soft accents, slow pace and scented blossoms -- and found that locals had a special zeal for selling "relics." As early as the 1830s, gardeners at Mount Vernon were offering cuttings from George Washington's shrubs for sale to visitors. In New Orleans, children assailed gawkers with offers to sell "grapeshot, bullets and lead" from the War of 1812. Such songs as the Carter Family favorite "Are You From Dixie?" and the sentimental ballads of Stephen Foster also perpetuated the Southern mystique, offering outsiders a brush of Dixie dew.
"Mechanized Southern Comfort," one of the 13 thought-provoking articles in Dixie Emporium, suggests that Krispy Kreme doughnuts "radiated a particular set of cultural complexities about the place of machines in the South," because "Krispy Kreme's visible assembly line offered patrons an opportunity to partake in a practice that both signified progress and connected them intimately with the rhythms of machines."
But let us not forget that along with the cultural complexities and marriage to the machines of industry, Krispy Kreme served up an outstanding product, given away free in the early days to work-weary laborers in Winston-Salem's tobacco factories. Those melt-in-your-mouth doughnuts expanded the "Dixie Emporium" to Europe, Japan, Hong Kong and the Arab Emirates.
Hillbilly culture, largely an invention of outsiders in the early days of auto travel, provided a stereotype of the Southern mountain dweller as rough-cut but canny. Jokes about rural Southerners often stressed both their gullibility and their superior native wit. Prized souvenirs from travels below the Mason-Dixon line included obscene statues called "The Horny Hillbilly," commonly sold in the Ozarks, or, in the Blue Ridge, pottery jugs for storing moonshine. And what better souvenir has ever hit the Dixie market than the ubiquitous Confederate flag in its many forms?
In "Just Like Mammy Used to Make," editor Anthony J. Stanonis provides his view of racial politics in the traditional Southern kitchen, where white women were supposed to supervise, not sweat. Florence Roberts' Dixie Meals, published in 1934, begins with a poem dedicated to her granddaughters: "Your place in life I do not know, but you must learn yourself, your maid to show." Cookbooks became another Southern keepsake, with mouth-watering recipes from such places as Antoine's in New Orleans putting Dixie cuisine on the culinary map. Some of the cookbooks employed an ersatz patois of "dis" and "dat" to give rural flavor.
Montgomery, Ala., has made a good business out of "Selling the Civil-Rights Movement," offering visitors a "time travel ride" on the Rosa Parks bus and a tour through the newly renovated Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church parsonage, decorated in the style of the years when Martin Luther King Jr. lived there with his family, complete to the finest detail -- "the small crater made when a dynamite bomb exploded" on the front porch. There's a chapter devoted to the development of South of the Border in Dillon, S.C., a gaudy commercial complex familiar to anyone who's ever traveled on Interstate 95. Religion in Delta Mississippi took a unique economic slant when black parishioners in the Jim Crow era were enjoined to purchase "good pictures" for their homes, pictures "that we will not tire of looking at." These sales items were an attempt by the church to counter the white perception that black Americans were uncivilized and unsophisticated.
Since at its heart consumerism is about perception, what Dixie sells reveals who we Southerners are as well as who outsiders think we are. Few areas of America have such a distinctive cultural brand as dear old Dixie. Let's cherish it as heritage, Dixie Emporium seems to say, but be careful how we use it.
■ Barbara Scott is a writer and reviewer who lives in Mount Airy.
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