Telling Tales South of the ‘Mason-Diction’ Line : Books: Southerners seem to have a deep-seated need to express themselves.

Three qualities unite Southerners: a passion for the land, an almost Calvinist assumption of a preordained universe, and an absolute reverence for the word.

In the beginning, of course, was the word, which explains why, on a weekend that blazed up like the summers of childhood, 35,000 Southerners spent three days indoors, intent on and finally intoxicated by the rhythmic words of more than 120 authors at the inaugural Southern Festival of Books.

“This has been a book town since the late 1700s, when the first publishers set up shop,” organizer and author John Egerton told the crowd. “The first bookstore opened in 1911. This was the Athens of the West before there was a South.

“And it was because of talk--porch talk, pillar talk, hearth talk, table talk. It was the singing in church; the shouting in the fields; the talking in the pulpit, in the classroom, in the courtroom. As a friend of mine used to say, ‘It’s all just talk, darlin’, just good ol’ Southern talk.’ We may have the highest illiteracy rate in the nation, but we sure know how to talk.”

And talk they did. Novelists, short-story writers, songwriters, historians, critics, chefs, academicians, illustrators, children’s authors, a former president and a former governor, blacks, whites, “new” writers and old, talked about what makes writing Southern, what drives so many Southerners to write, and even about how to publish, market and promote them.

In between, they engaged in that other quintessentially Southern passion: the social hour.

“What characterizes Southern writers?” repeated humorist Roy Blount Jr. “You mean besides incipient alcoholism?” A pause. “I’ll have to think on it.”

Why do so many Southerners write? Elizabeth Spencer (“Light in the Piazza”) says it goes back to a culture of storytelling. Northerners “don’t have time for telling stories. And you know, we were so poor for so long, we had to have something to amuse ourselves.”

Charleston, S.C., novelist Josephine Humphreys (“Rich in Love”) believes storytelling “is a natural urge in humans, if not a need and hunger. I find I really need to (write) to find significance in the events of my life. Even when I was little, I used to wake up in the night afraid of dying because it was the end of the possibility of seeing the meaning in things.”

Similarly, Lee Smith said of the character in her epistolary novel, “Fair and Tender Ladies,” that “for Ivy, it’s the writing of the letters that signifies--it’s what they mean to her, not to whoever gets them, that helps her make sense of her life.”

Oral Tradition

Children’s author Patricia McKissack told a packed meeting room of children, their parents and their grandparents that the Southern oral tradition was unique; that she was telling stories her mother had been told by her mother, and that McKissack hoped would be told by her own children to theirs--stories not just of family traditions, but even ghost stories and inspirational fables.

They are indeed family stories, agreed Mark Childress (“A World Made of Fire”), “but you can’t reveal your sources. I have a great-aunt who just won’t be able to read my next book. We’ll have to keep it out of her hands. She’ll have a stroke.”

Robert Massie, author of “Nicholas and Alexandra” and “Peter the Great,” says it is true that Southerners are obsessed with the past. “Southern writing, both fiction and nonfiction, struggles to take us back to our roots. It’s in our history: We lost, and we still wonder why.”

Among the more famous participants were Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, who packed the auditorium during their joint reading. Musical storytellers included Tom T. Hall, who headed a panel titled “Song of the South: Poetry, Fiction, Storytelling, Truth and Lies in Country Songwriting,” and Margaritaville’s No. 1 resident, Jimmy Buffett. Buffett’s appearance at the Nashville Tennessean’s Book and Author Dinner attracted a group of teen-age fans clutching copies of the children’s book Buffet wrote with his daughter Samantha (Buffett also has a new collection of short stories out).

There were five Pulitzer Prize winners there, including Taylor Branch (“Parting the Waters”), along with winners of scores of other literary awards.

More than 60 Southern publishers and bookstore operators set up booths and signing areas in the broad plaza at the foot of the classical State Capitol.

Illustrator Michael Hague, whose haunting and romantic paintings of “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty” are framed on many industry executives’ walls, signed autographs for more than four hours as fans--primarily adults--stood patiently in the near-90-degree heat.

There were religious publishers handing out “biblical literacy IQ tests” of the Old and New Testaments; dozens of university handouts pushing biographies of regional sports heroes, Confederate generals and even other authors; books of Southern recipes, and a cooking corner where such celebrities as Chef Tell showed off their skills.

“Now, there’s a trick to cooking sweet potatoes,” warned a matronly Southern woman. Then, stepping effortlessly from the Old South into the New, she popped the dish into the microwave.

Accent on the Vowels

One of the first things you notice in Southern writing are the vowels. Not as accents, exactly, although the festival brought together an almost encyclopedic range of twangs and drawls, but as rhythm instruments.

Flat-voiced Oxford, Miss., fire captain Larry Brown, whose first novel, “Dirty Work,” about two Vietnam veterans, one black and one white, has received a thunderous critical welcome, gave a reading from his book. His short, blunt sentences fell on the ear like hammers.

“ ‘World don’t change for no one. World gone keep going on. Don’t make no difference what you do, what I do. World keep turning. God got a plan for everything.’ ”

In the audience, a woman whispered, “Can you imagine how that sounds in English?”

“You have to write in the language of the people,” said North Carolinian Tim McLaurin. “I couldn’t have written (‘Woodrow’s Trumpet’) in the King’s English. It would have been ridiculous.”

In Jill McCorkle’s case, the language of the people is dialogue, stream-of-consciousness talk from the T.R. Pearson school of skinflint punctuation, delivered in a twang that would do Dolly Parton proud. McCorkle giggled, “I lived in Boston for two years, and I do have relatives who’ve accused me of getting uppity and losin’ my accent.”

Over a period of three days, all the flat, fallow and rich syllables of writers, would-be writers and faithful readers began to twist around each other like a mountain road. Mark Childress said, “There are so many Southern writers because we’re all language freaks.”

Historian and novelist Wilma Dykeman phrased it best when she spoke of life below “The Mason Diction Line.”

The South and its harsh, even ruthless social history sparked several discussions on the special problems of Southern black writers and on the way blacks have been portrayed as characters in Southern literature.

Former Fisk University professor Blyden Jackson, now professor emeritus at North Carolina-Chapel Hill, is at work on a four-volume history of Afro-American literature.

He said Southern black writers were fortunate insofar as the South offers a rich supply of both subjects and subject matter. But on the negative side, he said virtually all creative writing by Southern blacks was an expression of a single irony--”the position of the American Negro in a nation that professes democracy.” Having defined irony as the incongruous, simultaneous blow of both laughter and pain, he warned that too many black writers felt only the pain and lost control of the humor.

C. Eric Lincoln (“The Avenue, Clayton City”) said a black writer is “plagued” by the necessity of confronting the identity of his audience. “Is he writing for black people? Is he writing for white people? Indiscriminately . . . or only for himself?”

But first-time novelist Tina Ansa (“Baby of the Family”) argued the universality of the black experience: “Whether readers are black or white, or if it’s translated into Chinese, if they can’t feel what my characters feel, I haven’t done my job.”

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the filming of “Gone With the Wind.” One panel wondered, “What Hath Margaret Mitchell Wrought?”

Anne Goodwin Jones, author of “Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936,” suggested that “GWTW,” as it is commonly known, was an early, albeit inadvertent, feminist tract.

Reminding listeners that the Victorians believed women shouldn’t think (much less write) because using the brain would drain energy from the uterus, thus endangering the species, Jones pointed out that as “GWTW” progresses, the traditional gender roles begin to fall apart. Scarlett is a better business manager than her husband Frank Kennedy, Ashley the cavalier is a terrible businessman, gentle Melanie shoots the Yankee renegade, Rhett is by far the better parent and so on.

“If gender were not biological fact but cultural stereotype,” Jones argued, Mitchell must have begun to see race in similar terms. “If women aren’t naturally weak, then maybe men aren’t naturally strong. If whites aren’t naturally good, then maybe blacks are not naturally evil. And if women aren’t naturally submissive to men, then maybe blacks only seem to be happy slaves.”

One of the other things that strikes you in Southern writing is the friendliness of the people--and that, Tina Ansa said, is also quintessentially Southern.

“I grew up in Macon, which I am told is the exact center of Georgia, but I moved North. I moved to Maryland, which I consider the North, and it was in Maryland that I realized just how Southern I am. I missed the flavor of Georgia tomatoes; the red clay; the way rain smells on a warm street; the way you see a farmer off in a field on a tractor, and you don’t know him and he don’t know you, but you beep and he waves and it’s just people. I had this craving for the longest time before I realized it was (for) grits.”

McLaurin also referred to this craving for roots. “I’m from Fayetteville (N.C.). I’m the first in my family to go away, to go to college. I’ve lived in Africa, I’ve lived around . . . but those 70 acres are home eternal.”

And he pulled a small pouch out of his pocket, and drew out a plastic bag. “My brother sent me this,” McLaurin said. “It’s home dirt. And I’ve carried it with me for eight years.”

Special Moments

There were moments of awe-inspiring solemnity, such as during one seminar on the revolution in Southern historical writing. Stooped Thomas D. Clark, nearing 90, spoke with passion of seeing small black children lynched, and of the breathtaking illumination of the South by rural electric power.

But for the most part, the Southern Festival of Books ended as it began, with talk. Talk about books, talk about great themes and techniques, talk about talk, and just plain old talk.

And some of the funniest stories had to do with how everyone in the South, even those who don’t write yet, think they can. Josephine Humphreys, who says she has to force herself to write 300 pages, told of being greeted by the owner of a gas station who said he had just written a 900-page novel--on “the daily life of a gas station operator.”

Even more popular was the one about the retired admiral who phoned her urgently saying he needed help reorganizing a vital book he’d written about the welfare system in America.

“We have to get it out before the elections,” he said. “I’ve got all the work done. The only problem is the form it’s in--I need someone to help me edit it.”

“What form is it in?” Humphreys asked.

“Limericks,” he answered. “Eighty-two limericks.”