Old Customs Fading : Funerals in South: a New Way of Death

When Calton Primble visited a church recently for a friend’s funeral, he was completely taken aback by the brevity of the service. “The whole thing was over so quick, you didn’t have time to even miss the deceased,” said the 72-year-old Atlanta gardener.

Primble well remembers the days when no decent Southerner was sent to his final resting place without an extended farewell--the more extended, the better. Church ceremonies lasting three to four hours were not uncommon.

But, with many other Southerners, he is discovering that, like the traditional Southern way of life, the traditional Southern way of death is undergoing a dramatic transformation.

Cremations on the Rise

Shorter--and sweeter--church services are not the only signs of the changing times. Cremations, once anathema to Southerners, are gaining in popularity, while home funerals and all-night wakes--two mainstays of the old pattern--have fallen out of favor.

Moreover, while friends and neighbors still rush to the aid of grief-stricken families with typically Southern outpourings of food and sympathy, nowadays the food is often more likely to have been passed over a take-out counter than prepared at home, as was customary.

Even the old-fashioned, hand-held funeral fans, with their brightly colored reproductions of the Last Supper or Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane are becoming victims of the new order: Air conditioning is rendering them obsolete.

“What we are witnessing is the ultimate Americanization of Dixie,” said Charles Wilson, professor of history and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi. “It’s part of the general integration of the region into the nation.”

How far that will go is anybody’s guess.

“I think the basic pattern of Southern funerals will remain relatively stable, despite all the changes taking place,” said Grady McWhiney, a Texas Christian University historian.

Cling to the Old Ways

One bulwark against the complete encroachment of alien funeral fashions is the rural South. Nearly 40% of all Southerners still live in rural areas, and they are doggedly faithful to the old ways.

In the Mississippi hinterlands, for instance, blacks still observe the practice of placing personal possessions of deceased relatives on top of their graves. A Mr. Coffee coffee maker, complete with cord and a potful of fresh flowers, could be recently seen on a grave in a small black cemetery near Oxford.

But in the big cities and other urban centers, traditional funeral rites are under serious assault. Growing economic affluence, increasing urbanization and changing life styles are combining to alter many time-honored customs.

At the H.M. Patterson & Son funeral home in Atlanta, for example, the distinctive four-poster beds with billowy canopies that generations of wealthy Atlantans were once laid out in for viewing are no longer in service.

Instead, as in prestigious funeral parlors in any other part of the country, the reposing rooms are filled with period antiques--Louis XIV, Chippendale and Empire--and the bodies are viewed as they lie in coffins.

Oddly enough, Patterson’s originally installed the beds decades ago as a means of wooing Atlantans away from the traditional home funeral.

Changes in Black Funerals

Change has also come to Atlanta’s black community.

“Our funerals used to border on ‘Imitation of Life’ in terms of length and pageantry,” said Clara Ivey Wilson, director of Atlanta’s second oldest black funeral home. She was referring to the 1933 Fanny Hurst novel in which a black maid is given a regal funeral with plumed horses drawing an ornate hearse.

Nowadays, Wilson said, “The trend is toward much more scaled-down funerals. We’re talking 45 minutes to an hour at the most for the church services.”

For some Southerners, however, even that length of time--which appears to be the new standard throughout much of the South--is too much.

“The latest trend here is to skip having a church ceremony altogether and to combine everything into a short and simple service at the grave site,” said Mary Alice Bookhart, former women’s editor of the Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson, Miss.

Different Church Services

The trend toward shorter funerals has also been accompanied by a shift in the emphasis of the church services.

“Traditionally, you had a very emotional service with the minister preaching a sermon that didn’t try to comfort the bereaved so much as it attempted to win people to the faith by reminding them of their own mortality,” said the University of Mississippi’s Wilson.

In that respect, he added, “There was little difference between the funeral sermon and the typical Sunday service.”

Nowadays, that evangelical quality of Southern funerals is on the decline.

“What we attempt to do in our church is to celebrate the victory of Christian death and to bring peace and comfort to the family,” said the Rev. Douglas Watterson of the First Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tenn., echoing a widely held sentiment among the newer generation of Southern ministers.

Ministers Better Educated

Watterson attributes the shift in emphasis, in part, to a better-educated ministry. “Fifty years ago, say, 50% of the pastors in the Baptist church had never seen the inside of a theological seminary. Today, many are graduates of college and have graduate degrees from seminaries.”

Perhaps the most radical departure in Southern funeral customs--especially from the viewpoint below the Mason-Dixon line--is the growing vogue for cremation.

With their tendency toward a more literal belief in hell’s fire, Southerners have often viewed cremation as “placing a body in double jeopardy,” according to one observer of Southern folkways.

But in Richmond, Va., one-time capital of the Confederacy, the cremation rate has steadily inched up during the past decade and is now around 7%, said Joseph W. Bliley III, who heads a family-owned funeral firm that dates back to 1874. By comparison, the cremation rate in California is about 30%.

Not a Southern Tradition

“That may not sound high, but it’s actually quite a bit,” Bliley said. “Cremation just isn’t a Southern tradition.”

And in Atlanta, the Rev. Stephen Churchwell of the Roman Catholic archdiocese said: “More and more people are asking their parish priests about it.” Until the early 1960s, he said, the Catholic church prohibited cremations, but the restriction has since been lifted.

But in Natchez, Miss., funeral director Charles Laird said: “We do practically no cremations down here. We’re small town folks. In the big cities, it’s popular because people have very few close friends and neighbors, and it’s a convenient way to dispose of the body.”

One fashion that is catching on in Natchez, however, is white funeral coaches. Laird first introduced them several years ago and, he said, his competitors quickly followed suit.

“We have a heavy Catholic population, and when the priests quit wearing black robes at funerals for mourning and started wearing white, I came up with the idea that white funeral coaches would be in order and in good taste,” he said.

Besides, he added: “White’s my favorite color in automobiles.”

Drive-in Mortuary

Some innovations in funeral practices do not seem to fare well, however. Herschel Thornton Mortuary in Atlanta built a drive-in window 10 years ago to permit families and friends to view the bodies of loved ones without getting out of their cars. It was popular for awhile but is scarcely used now. Three funeral homes in Georgia have been offering burial in outer space through a contract with a Florida firm, but, so far, they have had no takers.

As in other regions of the nation, the funeral industry in the South has played a key role in altering traditional funeral customs. The move away from home funerals, for example, was encouraged by the funeral profession.

Once Was Easier

“Back in the old days, when people had homes with wide parlors and wide front doors, it was easy to get in and out,” said a Birmingham, Ala., funeral director. “But when people started moving into apartments and condos and multistory structures, it became a virtual impossibility.”

Walter Edgar, director of the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina, recalled the reaction of a funeral director when Edgar’s family told him they wanted a traditional home funeral for his grandmother.

“She died in the late ‘60s, and the funeral director couldn’t believe that somebody in that day and age still wanted a funeral out of the home,” he said.

All-Night Wakes

With the demise of home funerals, it was not long before the custom of the all-night wake--or the “sitting up” ceremony, as Southerners refer to it--began to wither.

“Young men between the ages of 17 and 25 used to sit up all night when the bodies were lying in state in the homes,” said William Wyche Fowler Sr., a native of Warrenton, Ga., and father of U.S. Rep. Wyche Fowler Jr. (D-Ga.). “I always volunteered because we were given Cokes, cookies and sandwiches, which we ate all night.”

Today, said Bob Cochran, a funeral director at Patterson’s in Atlanta, “We recommend a couple of hours or three hours for visitation preceding the funeral”--at the funeral home, of course.

Another custom undergoing permutation is that of lavishing homemade dishes upon a family in which death has struck. For example, one suburban Birmingham housewife fixes what her family refers to as the “death casserole”--a chicken-and-rice dish she prepares only on such occasions.

But because of the growing number of women now working outside the home, purchased foods are replacing the home-cooked specialties they used to carry to bereaving families.

“The last time I went to deliver some food, I opened up the refrigerator there and it was full of coconut cakes from Rich’s”--a department store long known as Atlanta’s Bloomingdale’s--”and store-bought Honey-Baked Hams,” said one Atlanta socialite.

New Ways Better?

Whether the old ways are better at comforting family members and friends of the deceased and assuaging their grief is a matter of contention among Southerners.

“I think the old-fashioned funeral was much better in working through the grief people feel upon the death of a family member or friend,” said Ralph Turner of the A.S. Turner & Sons funeral home in Decatur, Ga.

But the Rev. William Guy of Atlanta’s Friendship Baptist Church, the city’s oldest black church, said: “I think probably for many people there is a desire to escape from that deliberate pulling of the heartstrings and tugging of emotions that was so characteristic of the older funeral service.”

However, he added: “My father, who was also a minister and is now deceased, once commented that people probably felt they weren’t well served unless there was this strong emotional pull and a lot of demonstrative crying.”

With all the change in their funeral customs, Southerners still know how to put on the dog when the occasion demands.

Bryant’s Funeral

When University of Alabama football coach Paul (Bear) Bryant died in 1983, the funeral required three separate churches to handle the crush of mourners.

Bryant’s widow, his immediate family and top dignitaries, including Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, were seated in First United Methodist Church, Bryant’s church. The proceedings there were piped through an audio hookup to two nearby churches, First Baptist and First Presbyterian.

The floral arrangements banked around Bryant’s coffin--a plain Southern pine coffin covered with 2,400 crimson and white carnations--included one in the form of the late coach’s trademark hound’s-tooth checked hat and another with a four-foot-high crimson “A.”

After the funeral service, the coffin was carried to a waiting hearse by eight pallbearers, allmembers of the 1982 Crimson Tide football team. A cortege of about 300 automobiles then drove through the campus, past the football stadium and on to Birmingham, about 50 miles to the northeast, where Bryant was buried in a multigrave plot belonging to his widow’s family at Elmwood Cemetery.

When the funeral cortege streamed into the cemetery, 19 motorcycle police and seven police cars led the procession. The burial was attended by more than 10,000 persons.

“That was a funeral in the finest tradition of the South,” said Ole Miss’ Wilson.

Also contributing to this report were Times researchers Diana Rector in Atlanta and Aleta Embrey in Washington.