Southern Traditions: Gone with the wind

By DAWN HINSHAW - dhinshaw@thestate.com

Columbia businessman David Hodges was surprised when church groups didn’t kick up a fuss about grocery stores selling beer and wine on Sundays.

“Maybe it’s just fallen farther down the list of issues of importance,” he mused.

City voters went on to approve the ballot measure by a landslide last month, reversing a tradition in place for as long as anyone can remember.

Just as attitudes about alcohol laws are changing, many conventions that distinguish Columbia and the rest of the South from other parts of the country have begun to fade.

The notion of a “day of rest” devoted to church and family, for example, is being replaced by chores, sports and shopping.

Civility is giving way to quick conversations by cell phone. Hesitate at a stoplight that’s changed from red to green, and someone is liable to blare their horn — not a courteous beep, mind you, but an impatient honk.

And while distinctly Southern food is as popular as ever, some cooks are doctoring up traditional dishes with heart-healthy substitutes. Chicken isn’t automatically fried. And customers may have to ask for sweet tea, only to find that some restaurants have stopped serving it altogether.

“There’s a certain gnashing of teeth by the old-timers around town about the changes, and they’re usually blamed on people coming in from somewhere else,” said Hodges, 55, who owns a Columbia life-insurance firm. “I’m not certain that’s true.”

People who ruminate on such things say the changes have to do with size, not just an influx of Yankees. Columbia is getting big, after all.

But many suburban Southerners maintain ties to a childhood home in a rural community, said Ted Ownby, interim director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in Oxford, Miss.

They return from time to time to visit parents, grandparents or in-laws in a land where strangers driving down the road still lift their fingers from the wheel in a leisurely wave.

Southerners who live in growing cities might be distinguished more by their sense of nostalgia than by the traditions they maintain.

“But not just empty nostalgia,” Ownby said. “A respect for something that’s not part of them very often anymore.

“It’s their best self that they’re nostalgic for.”

OBSERVING A DAY OF REST

While Sunday is the traditional “day of rest,” some South Carolina towns still shut down on Wednesday afternoons, a reflection of the era when farming was the state’s bread and butter.

Batesburg-Leesville, in Lexington County peach country, is one of those towns where some store owners still close at 1 o’clock.

The custom began as a trade-off for maintaining long Saturday hours or to assure attendance at Wednesday evening church services.

“I kind of like the tradition,” said Tommy Shealy, whose barbecue restaurant has been closed on Sundays and Wednesdays since his folks opened it in 1969.

“But as other chain restaurants come in, and they’re open seven days a week, it may force you into competing with them.”

Late in 2005, the folks at Economy Furniture in Batesburg-Leesville decided to give up their Wednesday afternoons off and keep the doors open.

Third-generation owner Brent Shealy, 52, said people from outside the community, unfamiliar with the tradition of Wednesday shop closings, would drive to Batesburg-Leesville to shop and end up being inconvenienced.

“It’s just a little different day and age,” he said, “and people really expect you to be open. We’ve always been closed on Sunday, and that will not change because of our belief in church and family.”

Tom Sponseller, head of the Hospitality Association of South Carolina, said the presence of national chains puts pressure on locally owned restaurants and stores to adopt a policy of being open on Sundays to compete for customers — even if they don’t do a lot of business.

Hodges, a Columbia native, said requiring people to work on Sundays “undercuts the fabric of the community.”

He subscribes to the belief that people shouldn’t do anything unpleasant, disruptive or noisy on Sundays. He won’t crank up the lawn mower to cut his grass, for example.

His “day of rest” revolves around church in the mornings and an afternoon of reading or napping. It’s all about trying to “recharge the battery.”

Hodges said he finds it distressing that some sports leagues have started calling kids in to practice on Sundays. “How do you distinguish Sundays from Tuesdays when you do that?”

Oran Smith, a native of Greer who runs the Palmetto Family Council, said parents no longer make time to share “the pleasures of life and the skills of leisure and what makes us who we are” in the South.

“It’s kind of a pace issue,” said Smith, 45.

“Sunday is a day where everything else is supposed to stop.”

CHANGING STANDARDS OF CIVILITY

Drivers in the rural communities that ring Columbia maintain the tradition of pulling over to the side of the road to make way for a funeral procession, said Chris Leevy Johnson, with Leevy’s Funeral Home.

“You’ll see men take off their hats. You’ll see somebody put their hand over their heart,” said the 33-year-old Johnson.

But downtown, the response to what he described as “somebody’s soul traveling through” is uneven. “Maybe half of Columbia will pull to the side out of respect.”

Anymore, just driving can cause culture shock.

On two recent occasions, Jan Cohn has been caught up in situations when she felt threatened by fellow drivers along Columbia streets.

She got honked at, sped past, flipped off.

“There are so many more drivers today, and people are so impatient. They’re in a hurry,” said Cohn, 55, who teaches etiquette to middle-school students through the Junior Cotillion program.

Some Columbians have forgotten what it means to show others dignity and respect, she said — what is “acceptable” behavior and what is not.

“Southerners were always known for that — the expression, ‘Southern hospitality’ — because Southerners were always warm. They made you feel comfortable in their presence,” said Cohn, a native of Montgomery, Ala., who’s lived in Columbia most of her life.

Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said Cohn isn’t the only one who’s noticed more impatience on the part of drivers — more honking of horns and even some violent incidents of “road rage.”

“It’s not the slow, laid-back South it used to be,” said Lott, 54 and a native of Aiken. “Columbia’s becoming a large city.”

Cohn worries civility is being lost in a hectic world where people communicate by cell phone, e-mail and text-messaging. “People don’t know how to communicate verbally as well anymore,” she said.

Ownby, a “forty-ish” professor of history and southern studies at Ole Miss, agrees that technology might have confused the “clear, mannerly rules of how people relate to one another.”

He continued: “Maybe that’s what Bill Cosby is talking about these days: ‘We’ve got to have some manners; we’ve got to have some sign of respect.’”

DINNER AND DEBUTANTES

Local landmark Lizard’s Thicket advertises itself as a place that serves Southern cooking.

“It’s like my Daddy used to say: ‘You want healthy food, go to the hospital — there’s never a line,’” owner Bobby Williams said.

But he has made some concessions to address health concerns about traditional Southern food. The restaurant seasons with ham hocks more often than fatback. It offers decaffeinated tea without sugar.

And at some point, the 55-year-old Williams said, he’s going to have to cut back on salt.

Still, there’s only so much he can do.

“This is South Carolina, you know what I mean? That’s what people want. They want starches, and they want sweet tea.”

In fact, when it comes to food — whether it’s chicken bog or barbecue — many local traditions are not only maintained but celebrated, said University of South Carolina history professor David Shields, 56, who studies Southern food.

“You can tell whether someone’s a local or not by whether they eat boiled peanuts.”

Shields said, too, that every sorority, fraternity and debutante organization once had its own signature punch, often a rum drink. But that’s a tradition that only a few maintain today.

Still, drinking has a distinctly social aspect to it, and Columbians’ decision to welcome Sunday sales of beer and wine is more in keeping with the region’s historical attitudes about alcohol, Shields said.

Laws to regulate drinking in the South have always been set locally and vary from county to county, added Ownby, at the University of Mississippi. “It’s pretty clear that urban areas allow alcohol more than rural areas, and high-tourist areas, above all, allow the sale of alcohol more.”

But Sponseller, 58, the hospitality lobbyist, doesn’t expect anybody to start hollering about changing the law that forbids the sale of liquor on Sundays.

Most liquor stores around here are “mom and pop” operations whose owners appreciate having Sunday off. But Sponseller noted a move afoot to change another old Southern tradition: closing liquor stores on Election Day.

OLD WAYS A GENERATION AWAY

Kevin Lewis, whose students read both William Faulkner and Martin Luther King Jr. as part of his “Religion in the South” class at USC, said the old ways will die with our grandparents’ generation.

“There are many Souths, and many more all the time,” Lewis said. “Even before World War II, when things were more narrow, there were different gender and racial and class distinctions of what it means to be Southern.”

He continued: “You just can’t keep the world out of the South, and the world is not quite like the traditional South.”

Ownby, born and raised in the South, made a similar observation — perhaps a little more graciously.

“A lot of what we think of as the South comes from past definitions,” he said. “For our kids, it’s very different than it was for our grandparents.”

Reach Hinshaw at (803) 771-8641.

What Southern traditions do you think are worth saving? Use the comment box below to leave your thoughts.