The Southerner is often inspired to do his best when the odds are the heaviest against him, when he knows it, when he knows further that the world knows it and is looking on. The truth of this was demonstrated again and again in the Civil War, when some of the South’s most brilliant victories—it is possible also to say, when some of the South’s most brilliant defeats—were won under these circumstances. The Southerner, with all that is sensitive, tender, flashing, quick, volatile, and over-imaginative in his nature, is likely to know fear and to know it greatly. But also, precisely on account of his sensitivity, quickness, imagination, he knows fear of fear, and this second kind of fear is often likely to be so much stronger than the first that he will do and die before he shows it. He will fight like a madman rather than like a man, and he will often attain an almost unbelievable victory against overwhelming odds, even when few people in the world believe that victory is possible.
These facts are true, and they are likewise admirable. But in their very truth there is a kind of falseness. In their very strength there is a dangerous weakness. In the very brilliance of their victory there is a lamentable defeat. It is admirable to win against terrific odds, but it is not admirable, not well for the health and endurance of the spirit, to be able to win only against terrific odds. It is thrilling to see men roused to such a pitch of desperation that they fight like madmen, but it is also thrilling to see them resolved and strong in their ability to fight like men. It is good to be so proud and sensitive that one is more afraid of showing fear than of fear itself, but these intensities of passion, pride, and desperation also take their toll. The danger is that though they may spur men to the feverish consummation of great heights, they may also drop them, exhausted and impotent, to abysmal depth, and that one attains the shining moment of a brilliant effort at the expense of the consistent and steady achievement of a solid and protracted work.
The transplanted Southerner is likely to be a very lonely animal. For that reason his first instinctive movement in the city is likely to be in the direction of his own kind. The first thing he does when he gets to the city is to look up old college chums or boys from his home town. They form a community of mutual interests and mutual self-protection; they build a kind of wall around themselves to protect them from the howling maelstrom of the city’s life. They form a Community of the South which has no parallel in city life. Certainly one does not find a similar Community of the Middle West, or a Community of the Great Plains, or a Community of the Rocky Mountain States, or a Community of the Pacific Coast. There are, perhaps, the faint rudiments of a New England Community, the section which, after the South, is most definitely marked by a native identity of culture. But the New England Community, if it exists at all, exists so faintly and so sparely as to be almost negligible.
The most obvious reason for the existence of this Community of the South within the city’s life is to be found in the deep-rooted and provincial insularity of Southern life. The cleavage of ideas, the division of interests, of social customs and traditional beliefs, which were developing with a tremendous gathering velocity in American life during the first half of the nineteenth century, and which were more and more separating the life of an agrarian South from the life of the industrial North, were consummated by the bloody action of the Civil War, and were confirmed and sealed by the dark and tragic act of reconstruction. After the war and after reconstruction, the South retreated in behind its shattered walls and stayed there.
There was an image in George Webber’s mind that came to him in childhood and that resumed for him the whole dark picture of those decades of defeat and darkness. He saw an old house, set far back from the traveled highway, and many passed along that road, and the troops went by, the dust rose, and the war was over. And no one passed along that road again. He saw an old man go along the path, away from the road, into the house; and the path was overgrown with grass and weeds, with thorny tangle, and with underbrush until the path was lost. And no one ever used that path again. And the man who went into that house never came out of it again. And the house stayed on. It shone faintly through that tangled growth like its own ruined spectre, its door and windows black as eyeless sockets. That was the South. That was the South for thirty years or more.
That was the South, not of George Webber’s life, nor of the lives of his contemporaries—that was the South they did not know but that all of them somehow remembered. It came to them from God knows where, upon the rustling of a leaf at night, in quiet voices on a Southern porch, in a screen door slam and sudden silence, a whistle wailing down the midnight valleys to the East and the enchanted cities of the North, and Aunt Maw’s droning voice and the memory of unheard voices, in the memory of the dark, ruined Helen in their blood, in something stricken, lost, and far, and long ago. They did not see it, the people of George’s age and time, but they remembered it.