Looking Into The South

March 8, 2011: Local publisher and past club president Andy Brack filled in as the meeting’s speaker to describe a book on which he is working.

The project started two years ago when an Australian student visited the Brack family. After meeting with Alex Sanders, Fritz Hollings and Jack Bass and attending a Rotary meeting, Brack took the student on a tour of the South. Over the next few days, they visited people and places in Columbia, Greenville, Atlanta, Nashville, Memphis, Little Rock, the Mississippi Delta, Jackson and Montgomery.

After the trip, Brack said he wrote a chronicle of their experiences to highlight how someone who knew little about the South learned about it. A year later, the book was done.

“But something wasn’t right. So I left it alone for about four months. Then I figured out what was wrong – – basing a whole book on a thin chronology just didn’t work. So I decided to recast the whole thing.”

Now, he is reformulating the more than 200 pages of text into a work that attempts to explain the South to outsiders.

“People from the South are exceptional in many ways, but outsiders often don’t understand what they see because they are blinded by preconceived notions based on Dukes of Hazzard and Burt Reynolds movie caricatures.”

Past president Earl Walker asked whether the 1940s work “The Mind of the South” by W.J. Cash played any part in the current work – and noted that Cash eventually went crazy. Brack said Cash’s book was one attempt to define the many-times-defined “New South,” and that while the new work was following in a tradition of essays explaining the South, the term “New South” should be dead.

Member Vito Scarafile said the South had dramatically changed since he moved to the area in the 1960s. “I feel more like a Southerner than anything else,” he said. “I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”

Past president Dyson Scott noted how Census figures showed more African Americans were returning to the South – in part because the sense of community that exists in the region.

Member Colleen Moring suggested the book should include a section on the language of the South because she didn’t understand that “supper” was “dinner” and that “balled peanuts” were “boiled peanuts” when she moved to the region when a teen.

Brack said he hoped the book would deal frankly with issues like race, education, economics, history and more. He said he expected to complete it this year.