(This is the third in a series. The author spent the summer working for the Southern Courier, a civil-rights newspaper based in Montgomery, Alabama.)

For reasons that are sometimes hard to understand, every year some Northern tourists decide to come to the South. They don't come like the droves that swamp America's glamour spots, perhaps, but they do come. Every year, in its own modest way, the trickle of Northerners makes its way down. These Yankees are coming for a special purpose. Instead of looking for the simple amusement they could find in one of the North's Fun Cities, these pioneers are following a dream. They are following one of the two Great Southern Myths that the rest of the nation has concocted for its lower regions, and nearly all of their reaction to the South is determined before they leave, by their choice of which dream to follow.

America is a charitable nation, and in its search to find something nice to say about the South, the North has cooked up the first Southern Myth, the dream of Southern Hospitality. This is a pleasant vision, made of equal parts of mint julep, placid plantations, charming belles, and singing darkies. Revelled in long enough, it can impart a kind of Mark Twain air to any town south of Minneapolis.

The second Myth imparts a little less rosy glow to the South. This is the myth of the Redneck South, the South of Klan rallies, midnight lynchings, and torchlight processions. This dream has George Wallace as its star, not Thomas Jefferson. The supporting cast is made up of illiterate brutes and lumbering semi-humans who blindly destroy any thinking creature.

The groups that follow the two dreams are as different as the dreams themselves. Paunchy suburban couples from Hartford and Los Angeles come to see Southern Hospitality. They are displeased with the increasing velocity of their modern life; and the sight of calm acres make them smile. They gladly plunk down their admission fees to see the remnants of the old days in Natchez and Richmond. They stay at hotels with names like The Plantation House, and go home convinced that heaven must be a little like the South.

See the Dirt

Those who come to see Rednecks are a different breed. They are mainly kids, kids like the ones that protest and yell in the rest of the country. When they reach the South, they are in for a surprise. While their friends at home are protesting racism or complicity by one of the North's universities, the kids in the South are seeing racism stripped of its Northern subtleties. They have come to see the South's dirt, and the South rubs the dirt into their eyes. They ignore places like The Plantation House, concentrate on truck stops and corner gas stations. They leave the South convinced that it must be hell.

In between, there is a middle state. But it is not a comfortable pose of objectivity, or even a neutral state of apathy. Instead, it is the agonizing limbo of double consciousness, or realizing that both Southern Myths are real. In itself, the recognition of both sides is not surprising. What is shattering is finding that one Southern town, one store, or one drawling person can fit into both schemes, and that by artful manipulation, an observer can extract the puree of both dreams from any given situation.

The two dreams have always had a regional distribution in the South: Virginia and Tennessee seem to fit the Hospitality pattern well, while Alabama and Mississippi have to be the natural haunts of the lurking Klansmen. Southerners, of course, are aware of this. And those in the Deep South respond with an even more aggressive Southern Hospitality than the kind Virginia dispenses with quiet confidence. And so it is in Alabama and Mississippi that the Southern schizophrenia--the simultaneous existence of the two myths--is most apparent.

Signs at the borders hint at the difference. Coming down on US 427 from Nashville, the traveller passes a small sign saying "Leaving State of Tennessee." On the other side of the road is a mammoth white billboard. WELCOME TO HISTORIC ALABAMA, it says. ALABAMA, CRADLE OF THE CONFEDERACY AND HEART OF DIXIE WELCOMES YOU. At the bottom, in capital letters just as large as the rest, is LURLEEN WALLACE, GOVERNOR OF ALABAMA. It's hard to read LURLEEN, because right underneath it is GEORGE. The Alabama Highway Department has always been embarrassingly short of money, and it didn't want to bother painting out George's name. Albert Brewer, who has been Governor since Lurleen died last spring, hasn't made the welcome signs yet. To the right of Lurleen's name is a Confederate flag; to the left, an American one. Separate but equal.

Paranoid Hospitality

The same blaring tone pervades the rest of the state's hospitality. Guides at the state capitol in Montgomery pointedly ask visitors, 'How do y'll lahk our state?" Correct answers may win handshakes with Governer Brewer ("he ain't a Wallace, but he's a good man") or small "Wallace in 68" buttons. In gas stations and greasy cafes all over the state, the same ritual goes one. "You from out of state? What y'll doin' round here? How you lahk it here?" The ritual has an important purpose: about half the people who come to Alabama are Southern Hospitality-seekers; the other half are rotten no-good trouble-making kids. Each half will get what it's looking for; the Alabamian is ready to glad-hand the decent folks who like the South and to womp on the no-good kids. But first there has to be the interrogation.

I went through the interrogation a hundred times this summer. Sometimes I won, when I was a faceless white man, up to no ill. If I spiced my conversation with, "You sure know how to keep things in order down here" (translation: you ain't lettin' them niggers run around crazy like in the North), or if I chortled at the constant "nigger" jokes in the gas stations, I won. If I took pictures of "No Colored" signs, stirred up trouble in the wrong side of town, or stayed with black families, I lost.

* * * *

I came to the South naive and expecting the worst. Like many of the Northern students who trooped down to Dixie last summer, I knew little about the South and less about its black people. Nevertheless, I was sure of my mission and relieved to find an area where right and wrong were so easy to tell apart. Instead of bothering with the increasingly-complex questions of government morality, I could merely go somewhere else and oppose Evil.