Southern Discomfort

The July re-enactment, sponsored by the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials, was part carnival, part church service, part rally. Politicians invoked Obama's name again and again, always to applause. But he is a background to their cause, incidental to their narrative of pain, and they sometimes describe him in terms almost as condescending as affectionate. One called him "the little black boy who is going to be president of the United States [because] God has fixed it that way."

This narrative, too, resists change. Richard Rusk, son of former secretary of State Dean Rusk, is part of a committee that had a plaque erected at the corner of the road where the Moore's Ford murders occurred. He did not go to the re-enactment and was not happy with what he heard about it. The baby ripped from the womb is not a known fact, just a widespread, highly potent political rumor. "We want to stay with truth we can prove," he said. But Moore's Ford has created its own storyline now, its own truth.

Of course, it's easy to forget how much of what makes up the Southern mind, especially now, has nothing to do with race. At a Starbucks on Providence Road, in one of the richest neighborhoods in Charlotte, N.C., financial consultant James Ruane, 58, talked about the gleaming city he moved to from Pennsylvania 30 years ago. Charlotte is built on banking and financial service industries that started and grew as something self-consciously regional, he said. "After the Civil War, during the Reconstruction," said Ruane, "the North neutered this place." All the money was in New York. That's where Southern businesses had to go to get it, and often they weren't welcome, even a hundred years later. So the bankers of Charlotte—the founders of Wachovia and what's now called the Bank of America—set out to change that. And as they built their businesses they built their city, almost from the ground up.

Most Southern cities are, to all intents and purposes, new metropolises created by and helped to create the new white middle class in the region after World War II. For the first time, college educations started to be commonplace in the states of the old Confederacy. As incomes grew, suburbs sprawled. At the beginning of this trip, in fact, I almost got lost several times looking for the Dickey family homestead in north Georgia. Driving on roads that might once have led to the dangerous backwoods my father, James Dickey, wrote about in his 1970 novel "Deliverance," I came across vacation cabins and swimming pools instead; no outhouses, certainly, only a growing number of hot tubs and Jacuzzis. The river my father used to canoe in search of the wild in the early 1960s, the Coosawattee, is now mostly submerged beneath a lake, while its upper reaches and its main tributary, the Cartecay, are lined with housing developments. PADDLE FASTER, I HEAR BANJO MUSIC, say the T shirts that ominously reference the movie version of "Deliverance." Now, every summer weekend, kayakers and rafters clot around the rapids like rush-hour traffic on the once wild streams in these mountains.

Merle Black at Emory and his twin brother, Earl Black, at Rice University in Houston have argued in the several books they've published together that a rising business class was key to the South's transformation into a Republican bastion in the last half of the 20th century. The split-levels and ranch houses were filled with people who shared the attitudes and values of small towns and family farms. They mistrusted government, especially the federal government, and they resented any politician who might tax away their newfound prosperity. What the Black brothers call "the most spectacular example of partisan realignment in modern American history" came about because of the GOP's "Southern strategy," which dates back to Dwight D. Eisenhower and culminated in the re-election of Ronald Reagan in 1984. The idea was to appeal to the South's newly prosperous suburb-dwellers while using unsubtle talk about "states' rights" and "quotas" to touch nerves earlier galvanized by unreconstructed racists like Alabama Gov. George Wallace.

These white, Christian, middle-class Southerners, the core of Republican strength in the region, are as disconcerted as anyone by the country's current economic turmoil. But that doesn't make them any more amenable to change. While they may be unenthusiastic about McCain (in 10 days' traveling I did not see a single bumper sticker with his name on it), they are leery of Obama's liberalism if not his skin color. "They just don't believe him when he says he'll only tax the richest 1 percent," said Merle Black. Perhaps even more important, they belong to an aspiring class whose members imagine, or dream, they might yet make it into that stratospheric bracket. "Southerners," said Black, "don't identify with where they are but where they want to end up."

Too often for these voters' conservative tastes, the Democratic Party comes across as "preachy," according to Black. He cited a recent appearance by Obama in Powder Springs, Ga. A woman in the audience complained about having to deal with immigrants who spoke Spanish but no English. Obama said they'd learn eventually, but she ought to want an educational system that would teach her kids Spanish. Southerners, said Black, really do not like being told what they ought to want.