Yes, it's true that the South hypocritically cries reverse discrimination and Yankee tyranny all the time, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the Progressive South, soon to be a majority, which gets no recognition from the rest of the country or the world. The irrepressible fantasist Neil Gaiman has just blogged about this, as it impacted him, under the title "Of course, in Alabama the Tuscaloosa, but that is entirely irrelephant...".
Gaiman's publisher thinks that there is no market for his books in the South, and wouldn't let him go on tour there until just recently. They sold more than a thousand tickets to his reading on the University of Alabama campus in two minutes.
Funny, publishers had almost exactly the same problem with L. Frank Baum, the Royal Historian of Oz, over the Wizard of Oz. Follow me on the Magical Mystery Tour below the jump.
Gaiman first.
The strange thing is that, as an author, there are places publishers never send you, and the American South (if you don't count Atlanta) is one of those places. When I'd ask, I'd be told it was because people didn't really buy books there, or there wasn't a demand, or something.
When the event sold out in two minutes, they thought the server was broken. The response was phenomenal.
Dear Mr. Gaiman,
I was at your reading last evening (in Alabama).
It was my first author reading... And it was also the first for my dad, my friend and her godmother (Yikes! We Alabamians really ARE deprived!).
So you were right: None of us have ever had a story read to us in twenty years (How about our whole LIVES?)
But your reading blew us away. I don't think we have NEVER laughed so much. And we teared up in all those sad, wistful places (or maybe that was just me). You were amazing. And keeping a theater of 1,000 Alabamians attentive for two hours with just a podium and words... That was another mind blowing thing. Oh, and should I mention that I'll never be able to read a novel and be satisfied now?!
Here is the problem.
I'm going on about this at greater length than I normally would because I don't get it. On the one hand you have a terrific university and a population that really seems to read and is hungry to interact with authors and to come to events like this. On the other hand, you have authors, who really like to go places where people like us. So why has it taken me 22 years of signing my way across America to get to Alabama? And why don't publishers send authors there?
It makes me suspect some kind of self-fulfilling deeply wrong idea here.
Now Baum.
Although Baum was a successful children's author when he wrote The Wizard of Oz, every publisher who looked at the manuscript turned it down on the grounds that there was no market for American fantasy. When Baum asked how they knew, they said that if there were, somebody would have published some, and they hadn't. Perhaps you can spot the fallacy here.
Baum, of course, knew that children loved the story when he told it. So he undertook to pay for the first printing himself. His first royalty check was for more than $5,000, a fortune at the time. Well, enough to buy a house in Hollywood, anyway, which Baum named Ozcot. He wrote fourteen more Oz books, and the series went on to 42 volumes, officially, and dozens more unofficially. The movie was a huge successes, as was The Wiz later on. Librarians were always talking about how many copies of his books they had to replace because children wore them out reading.
And me.
So, yes, I believe that Gaiman is right to suspect a self-fulfilling prejudice among publishers. We have seen it before. It isn't a prejudice that holds that the South is evil, but that it is not really literate.
The fact is that there have been several Souths from the beginning. The slave South and the free South, for starters. During the Civil War, Unionists in both Alabama and Mississippi opposed secession, even suggesting seceding from the Secesh, with decidedly mixed results. The self-proclaimed Southern Aristocracy, and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and other great writers from the South, and the oral traditions. The Blues and other Black music, against the minstrel shows. Coming down to the Universities and the countryside today.
The most important fact to know about the racist, intolerant Old South and Bible/Book of Mormon belt is that it has been shrinking at a gradually accelerating pace for as long as we have polling data. In 1948 the rate of shrinkage on mixed marriages came to about 1% of the US population annually, increasing to at least 2.4% in recent years. Opposition to gay marriage is also declining at just under 2% annually. A Klan rally at Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi, recently drew many times more anti-racist students than Klan supporters. The lily-white Churches are definitely shrinking, though they have a long way to go yet.
It is quite clear that these changes are not coming through conversions of racists. They happen because some fraction of the young grow up different from their parents. Plots of opinion vs. age are almost linear in almost all regions on almost all issues. Not just race or gay marriage, but the Cuban embargo, for example. Abortion may have a different dynamic. I don't have clear data about it. Certainly greed is not going out of style in the oil patch.
Now, what can we do about these facts? Well, for a start, you can go and support Kossack kissthespy in Alabama, as the state prepares to elect a rather conservative Black governor, and the crazies crawl back out from under the rocks. Our best projection is that Alabama and Mississippi will be the last states in the US to tip on social issues, some time around 2024, but the Senate will tip by 2016, or earlier if the Democrats do something about the filibuster in order to pass Health Care, rather than go with reconciliation. Possibly this year.
So don't assume that any given White Alabamian is a redneck racist and bigot, just because the majority are. Sure, their Senators are, and a lot of old people, but not the young people. Take any chance you can to make contact with those, like Neil Gaiman's fans, who need your support. And keep Austin TX weird.