The New South Holds the Old South in Her Arms: Cathy Smith Bowers’s Traveling in Time of Danger (Iris Press 1999)

(This essay was first published in the Fall/Winter 2000 issue of the Asheville Poetry Review.)

When I was a freshman at Duke University in 1969, I used to ride up and down Interstate 85 between Salisbury and Durham on weekend visits home. Each Sunday evening, as I drove back toward Duke I’d start practicing my new dialect, trying to get rid of all traces of my working-class Southern speech. Behind me, in Rowan County, was the Old South. My people were Scots-Irish, who had barely survived the Depression as farmers. After World War II, the men had signed on to work for the railroad at Spencer Shops. They were angry about integration, resentful of change. Except for the War, almost none of them had been farther from home than Kure Beach. No one on either side of the family had gone to college, not my grandparents, not my sixteen aunts and uncles, not my forty first-cousins.

Any college would have been a culture shock, but Duke in 1969 was like a foreign country. Terry Sanford, one of the architects of the New South, had just become President. Duke that year was everything the New South was supposed to be—liberal, cosmopolitan, secular. Eighty percent of the student body was from outside the South. The campus was a hotbed of anti-war, civil rights, and pro-labor activism. 

Classmates from far-away places like DC and New York treated us home-grown Southerners as if we had just landed from another planet. When things got dull, my best-friend (whose father was a foreign diplomat) would entertain the other freshmen by dragging me out for display like a side-show freak at the county fair. “Look,” she’d say. “She’s got on a ‘gator belt and matching ‘gator shoes.” “Say gree-uhts for us.” 

We blue-collar Southerners worked hard to disguise our backgrounds. We never let on our families didn’t go to the opera. When our friends leafed through their issues of The New Yorker, we never let them know the only magazines around our houses were Readers’ Digest and Guidepost. 

I tell this story not because it is unique. What many newly-educated, working-class Southerners have learned from experiences like mine is shame and disdain for their past. In order to survive, we have lived divided lives, developed distinct alter-egos, resorted to what T.S. Eliot calls a dissociation of sensibility. In “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot bemoans the fragmentation of the modern world, the division of thought and sensibility. The ordinary human falls in love or reads philosophy “and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other.” For many New Southerners, this fragmentation is exaggerated. In cultivating a cerebral, urbane self, we shut away the deep, instinctive self, only letting it slip out when we hear an old hymn or see a photograph of the home place. 

Like many upwardly-mobile Southerners, I have spent much of my adult life struggling to acknowledge my past without sacrificing my “progressive” values. Imagine then my pleasure at discovering Cathy Smith Bowers’s Traveling in Time of Danger filled with poems that teach us how to make peace between our working-class roots and our cultured personae. 

Born into a family of South Carolina mill workers, Bowers is Poet-in-Residence at Queen’s College, where she teaches in the International Study Program, traveling with students to such exotic places as Italy, the Czech Republic, Korea, Indonesia. Both worlds are evident in her poems. In Traveling in Time of Danger, she writes about Heraclitus, Descartes, Vishnu, and Monet. But she also includes green bean casseroles, stock boys at the Piggly Wiggly, an ex-husband who liked to work on trucks, and relatives named Loma, Dub, and Willie Mae. In these poems, the cosmopolitan and the down-home comfortably co-exist. She moves easily between the two, often using one to make sense of the other. 

In “Southern Rhetoric,” the speaker teases her mother for her long-winded, circuitous way of speaking. (In these poems, poet and speaker seem almost too close to need distinguishing.) The poem begins with a stunning illustration: The mother announces, ”It’s a sight in this world / the things in this world / there are to see.” Bowers responds at first with scholarly detachment, with the freshman composition teacher’s concern for redundancy. She is able to achieve enough analytical distance from her blue-collar upbringing to apply the term rhetoric to it and to see her mother’s language and her own as uniquely Southern. Yet her bemused attitude is anything but condescending. For one thing, she includes her own speech in the critique—ribbing herself for her own “syllables piling up like railroad salvage.” Most interesting, perhaps, is the way Bowers’s own language in the poem is an easy blend of dictions. She uses words like “promontory,” “atolls,” “warranting,” but, in the same breath, resorts to blue-collar constructions like “Talking mountains. Talking rivers” and “scolds me good.” Rather than style shifting from one distinct dialect to another, she seems at ease integrating elements of both into a single, seamless speech. It’s clear by the end of the poem that Bowers does not want to renounce her background or its rhetoric. Even though she’s astonished her mother would want to “lay claim” to their language, she provides a rationale for it. Because language often fails, she explains, now and then it’s necessary to use “those few extra syllables, / some things spoken twice.” The poem closes not with scorn but with a tender memory of her mother teaching her to speak: “From the little house, the crib / where she bent each day, / naming for me the world where words always fail.”

The poem “Weather” begins by tackling the alien cultures of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and introducing geographical determinism, the notion that a civilization’s world view is determined by its geography and weather: Because the Nile flooded regularly and provided predictable crops, the Egyptian were optimistic, even about death. The Mesopotamians with their irregular flooding and famines were pessimists who expected the worst in death and life. In the second and third stanzas Bowers shifts to two fast-vanishing staples of the Old South: the local barber shop where everyone chats about the weather and the small-town world of front porches lined with people in rocking chairs who shout weather reports to passing friends. (In the New South, men are groomed in uni-sex hair salons, and architects design porchless ranch-style houses.) The last two stanzas also treat another part of the Old South—the rural, farming South’s obsession with the weather, an agrarian habit that dies hard with some of today’s elderly. My friend’s grandmother watches the Weather Channel for hours—MTV for old people, one comedian calls it. 

In the poem, Bowers attempts to bridge the two arenas of her life by using intellectual concepts to help her understand the Old South milltown where she grew up and working-class language to make sense of the alien cultures of Egypt and Sumeria. In “Weather,” she explore the concept that the one way the divine reveals itself to humans is through weather: “Even the ancient Egyptians / knew God was nothing / more than weather.” She applies this theological notion, heretical as it would be to her fundamentalist relatives, to the local barbershop and her grandmother, explaining their obsessions with weather as attempts to connect with the divine. Conversely, she resorts to blue-collar diction, instead of “fifty-cent” words, when she interprets the ancient civilizations, using language like “lugging,” “the pharaoh’s finest stuff” and “the bug-eyed Sumerians” and calling the Egyptian’s culinary artifacts “pots and pans.” 

In “Kwanza,” the speaker sends her favorite uncle a Kwanza Christmas card decorated with a “black cubist Christ, / each angle of his visage full and visible / like the fractured-back-together-again / women of Picasso.” The poem relies on the tension between the milltown family and a speaker who is racially progressive, ecologically enlightened (She uses recycled paper), and culturally sophisticated (She recognizes the cubism of Picasso when she sees it). Bowers gently mocks the relatives who are so shocked by the card that they hold a family conference to ponder what they “might have done to prevent what I had come to.” And she satirizes their racial attitudes: “some of the finest people they’d ever / known—don’t get them wrong—were colored.” At the end of the poem, she returns to her uncle, whose world has been subtly altered forever:

Told me she was told
how my uncle’s weathered tires

rode him safely home, my card
tucked deep inside the pocket of his coat.
How the night frogs keened

a song he’d not remembered hearing.
And something something
not quite right

about the moon

As his world starts to unravel, the poem falls out of its own order, its tercets dissolving. 

But Bowers does not indulge in any self-congratulation that this transformation has occurred. In fact, the ending employs the most lyrical, tender language in the poem. Further proof of Bowers’s affection for her family in the poem is the way she deliberately draws on the syntax and formulae of the oral, story-telling South she grew up in. The poem’s first sentence stretches itself across five tercets, winding digressively, almost interminably onward, the way those rocking-chair-sitting, I’m-gonna-keep-talking-till-I-run-out-of-breath-and-keel-over kind of story tellers do. Most cleverly, she captures the Old South’s tradition of stories being passed on and then passed on again by including at least four or five times the formula “she told me, she was told.” Even as she critiques the long-entrenched ways of her relatives, she owns her connection with them and acknowledges that their speech patterns are deeply-engrained in her.

In “From Rome,” the well-traveled poet again tries to reconnect with her milltown family, this time through the postcard she sends to the same beloved uncle, a postcard of Michaelangelo’s “Creation of Adam.” Bowers ends the poem with a deconstructionist reading of Michaelangelo’s painting, zeroing in on Eve and her prescience of a future that she reads in the painting’s gaps. Sophisticated though she is, Bowers cannot help remembering her relatives moving through their daily routines. She can’t help wondering what they would make of this strange world, a gesture reminiscent of Vallejo’s poem “El bueno sentido” that begins “—There is, mother, a place in the world called Paris. A very / big place and far off and once again big.” Bowers seems to find some irony in the fact that the postcard’s “Dionysian Adam” will be viewed in her uncle’s window by fundamentalist mill workers who will not recognize the painting’s incongruous mixture of pagan and Christian. Yet the poem is dominated, not by irony or smugness, but by immense affection for an uncle who offers his daily “gift of love—two wild cherry cough drops glistening like jewels in the extended craziness of his hand” and by a heartfelt desire to somehow brighten his life with her postcard.

In these poems, Bowers hopes to reintegrate herself, free from any dissociation of sensibility, to reacquaint the self that remembers in its ”deep heart’s core” the warmth of a mother leaning over her crib with the one that engages in high intellectual pursuits. She wants those parts of her, the emotional and the intellectual, the downhome and the highbrow, to know each other and help each other interpret the world.

My sophomore year at Duke, I took an interdisciplinary course called “The Changing South.” Each class a distinguished scholar from a different field lectured on the way the South was moving from the old ways to the new. It was a huge class, at least 200 students. When we moved into class discussion, each person used measured, academic language, careful to speak about the Old South in non-judgmental terms. One day, halfway through the term, a girl who hadn’t spoken raised her hand. When her voice came forth with its down-home, blue-collar twang, all heads turned, the students’ and professors’ faces as shocked as if a banjo player had tried to take a solo in the middle of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. The message was clear: “ We can dissect the Old South as a phenomenon, but flesh-and-blood representatives are not welcome.” I never spoke in that class, afraid that after all the months of practice something in my voice would give me away. 

In her story “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker introduces us to Mrs. Johnson, “a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands” who can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man and whose proud, educated daughter Dee returns home to treat her mother and sister as backward and contemptable. In the story, Mrs. Johnson describes a dream she sometimes has in which she and Dee are suddenly brought together on the kind of TV show where “a child who has ‘made it’ is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage.” In Mrs. Johnson’s dream, a man like Johnny Carson shakes her hand and tells her what a fine girl she has. Mrs. Johnson ends the dream this way: “then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tears in her eyes. She pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she has told me once that she thinks orchids are tacky flowers.”

In Cathy Smith Bowers’s Traveling in Time of Danger, the educated poet takes her unschooled family in her arms and, with tears in her eyes, pins an orchid on its dress.