The photographs that appear in the pages ahead, in their substantial sum, once again make us wonder why a particular region of the United States has been so blessed with talented writers. Two major explanations are by now familiar, so often have they been offered: a rural storytelling tradition, and the experience of military defeat, a subsequent marginality, vulnerability, all of which prompted moral reflection, explanatory narration. No question, Southern communities, even today in a culture at the mercy of universally present television sets, manage to persist as scenes of social awareness and exchange, places where people pay one another regard, give shared expression to what has been seen and heard. When I first came to the South, in 1958, as an Air Force physician stationed in Biloxi, Mississippi, I remember being struck by the constant conversation taking place in the supermarket I frequented. People were often stopping to chat, not all of them being friends or acquaintances; and yes, despite the mighty and forbidding presence of segregation, black and white folks there (or at the post office, the gas station, the hardware store, the druggist's) found time, and had the inclination to speak to one another, say something about the weather, but not rarely go beyond that subject to matters of local interest—an accident that occurred, a road detour that had been established, with all its consequences, the sudden death of a preacher, a political figure, or yes, a known nearby no-count who, all boozed up, had lost control of his speeding car and run smack-dab into a tree while attempting to make that curve on the country road. For me, used to the silent efficiency of New England shoppers, this was an entirely new world. I'd drive home with remembered stories in my mind rather than thoughts about what I would be doing next.
Not that the racial divide that I came to know back then wasn't a huge presence, no matter the conversational ease that seemed to prevail under certain circumstances, and therein an American story, full of social, cultural, political, moral implications—and over generations, a story that became grist for the newspapers and magazines, for Sunday sermons and court house speeches, and these days, for radio reports, television coverage, the movies. For a long time the South was a nation within a nation, its people Americans, yet apart and distinct in a vivid, daily way that centered on appearance: race as a focus for the eyes, and for the mind's response to what those eyes absorb. Put differently, race provided a constant drama in a regional life, evidence aplenty for the arbitrariness, the fatefulness of things. The grandmother of one of the black children I came to know when I observed and studied the course of school desegregation in New Orleans during the early 1960s (speaking of the way racial issues can envelop the life of a people, even the life of a temporary visitor) said to me once: "All day you have to watch your step if you're a negro, and if you're white too. There's this you should do, and there's that you shouldn't, mustn't do. You can't help but wondering about how it all came to be like it is, and why, and you think, God had something in mind, or if He didn't, then it's all crazy, and how will we ever be free of it."
The more I heard her speak, the more I'd think of passages in Faulkner—but, of course, he had heard people speak as she did, and himself had been given a moral pause similar to hers. That is what tragedy, injustice, bad luck, can do—prompt a good deal of introspection, and with it, the effort to make whatever possible sense out of what seems to be the senselessness of chance and circumstance. When Walker Percy was asked his explanation for the South's abundance of writers, he replied with characteristically pointed terseness: "Because we lost the war"—his way of stressing the connection between suffering, pain, ignominy and the reparative efforts of the human mind, through words and more words, through storytelling which (from the Bible through Homer and Vergil to the poets and novelists of the twentieth century) has been our demonstrated human responsive inclination. "I get to thinking about what she's going through," that grandmother once said to me, referring to the child's struggle, against fierce mob opposition, to enter a boycotted elementary school—and then what she did with those thoughts: "I'll talk with my minister, and III talk with my daughter (the child's mother) and well remember what Moses went through, and Jesus, all His troubles, and we figure if it could happen to them, bad things, it can happen to us, and there's a reason, and like our minister says, we have to show the world the truth, through what we do and say, that's our job in this long story."
She had a little schooling, but that last word showed a perspective not always available to the best-educated minds—a realization that in life, as in art, individuals engage with one another, shape one another's lives, are protagonists or antagonists, are caught up in one or another unfolding set of circumstances, even dramatic actions of various kinds. She and her family, especially her granddaughter, were contributors and recipients of a kind of moral energy that has been the South's legacy—the redemptive side to a long chronicle of racially connected fear and hate. So many of the region's writers, Faulkner foremost, of course, but dozens of others who appear here on these pages, or who died before these pictures were taken are men and women who have wrested "art" from the "life" that they share with others who call Dixie home.
To look at these pictures is to struggle with the inevitable mystery of talent, if not genius—appearances will tell us only so much, and certainly not give us the clues we yearn to possess as to what makes for, accounts for, in Henry James's phrase, "the madness of art." Yet, we want ever so much to connect to a person's presence, his or her self-presentation, with the stories or poems or essays or plays we have read, and here, for those of us interested in a region's imposing collective cultural legacy, are those particular portraits. Here are individuals standing strong and self-assured, or in seeming frailty, vulnerability. Here are individuals in wheel chairs, down but far from out. Here are eyes—some of them looking up, some down, some aimed at a scene the nature of which the viewers can only guess. Here are hands folded, or arms hanging loose. Here are, on occasion, a spouse, a child—and yes, in one instance, a snake; in another, some eggs. Here are heads bare, or covered, heads tilted or held ever so erect, so as to oblige the camera's lens. Here is informality and gentility and propriety—a mix of the casual and the ever so correct. Here are young and old—we know some of these writers have a long and promising time ahead, and we know some are close to death as they faced a patient, determined, tactful, and respectful photographer who sought them out, it can be said, in the nick of time. Here are writers become icons of our era, so that no picture, however thoughtfully composed, taken, can rescue them from familiarity to us (a mixed blessing, of course, because lost in such a certainty of knowledge—oh yes, I recognize him, her!—are dozens of important private, personal truths that never see the light of day).
So it goes. So they all sit and stand for us, a camera's attention become our many human sights to consider: a broad range of late twentieth-century writing folk of Southern background—in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, "all sorts and conditions." Surely, in some instances, we are right to note the neckties or the lack of them, the buttoned-down elegance or the bold, even defiant irreverence, or the proclamation of irregularity that has been conveyed. How all those postures and poses, those efforts to insist or reveal or hide, connect with the work that has prompted inclusion in this book—that is for each of us to consider as we turn these pages. Inevitably, we will try to link in some way a caught second of a lived life, as it is presented here, with the published consequences of days, years, given to the pen, the typewriter, the computer. "I go about my plodding life as best I can," the New Jersey poet and physician William Carlos Williams once remarked, and then he added this exception of sorts to that daily experience: "But when I'm in that study with the typewriter, I shed my skin—it's a leap into another life, and I can stay there only so long." I remembered those words, of course, when I saw the snake in one of the pictures; but I also kept thinking of those words as I went, so to speak, from writer to writer in the pages ahead—a visit to their ordinary lives, and a reminder ironically, that it is in the other life, to which they occasionally or persistently or eagerly or reluctantly "leap," that they achieve the statements that make us want to visit with them here visually, even as we remember with gratitude and respect our visits with them as their readers.


Robert Coles
Cambridge, Massachusetts
October 1996



Robert Coles © 2000