Long Time Leaving by Roy Blount Jr.

say not. The truth was, I
didn't
wish that presentation luck. But maybe I came too close to giving myself away. Maybe I should have showed up in jodhpurs and a beret, sworn that this attire was authentic, and offered to clear up or improve upon some other misconceptions.
    “The good ol’ boy,” I might have informed the class, “properly pro-nounced
guddleby
—and deriving from the old English expression ‘God'll be with ye [in a moment]’—is a study in contradictions. He will daub himself with an aromatic blend of possum lard and peach juice
après bain
and yet has been known to gnaw off his own hand to avoid telling a lady that she is sitting on it. He relishes a Maypole dance as much as any frolicsome Vermonter, but in his version dogs are involved, and things don't start getting merry until someone is bitten. He does indeed talk and sing—and also prays, gargles, and woos—through his nose, but what is not generally acknowledged is that he reads through it, too. Don't address a good ol’ boy as ‘y'all,’ because he will get it into his head that there is more than one of him and will (1) drink accordingly and (2) demand to know what you have done with the rest of his hats. The first thing he is liable to tell you when you have gained his confidence is that he loves
your
mama, sight unseen, more than you do. Don't contradict him. But don't change the subject, either, for this will lead him to conclude that you lack (1) grit and (2) a kind of human sympathy. Above all, the good ol’ boy—far from being provincial—welcomes new acquaintances of all kinds because he is forever open to learning fresh wrestling holds. What say we go over to one of y'all's house now—I've brought a batch of chickadee gumbo—and take off our shoes?”
    But I don't always feel hearty enough, in an academic setting, to pull off such a performance. More and more I am inclined to stay home and read up on things that challenge my own stereotypical notions. For instance, I found it remarkable that Dr. Holmes's father had lasted for seven years as a preacher in southeast Georgia. It had always been my impression that the Holmeses were a long line of Boston Brahmins, and I couldn't imagine such a type laying down the gospel, successfully, for folks way down there below Savannah. I turned to Edmund Wilson's
Patriotic Gore
and Louis Menand's recent book about the development of philosophical pragmatism in America,
The Metaphysical Club,
both of which are highly informative about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and hisbackground. Midway, Georgia, was established as a Congregationalist religious center in the midst of plantation country. Abiel Holmes—Dr. Holmes's father, Holmes Jr.'s grandfather—went down there as a Yankee missionary.
    And got influenced. According to Menand, old Abiel acquired from slaveowners in his congregation a prejudice against black people, which he passed on to his son. In a lecture in New York in 1855, Dr. Holmes attacked abolitionists as “ultra melanophiles,” by which he meant extremist lovers of dark pigment. Dr. Holmes held certain truths to be self-evident, and one of these—before the Civil “War, at least—was the natural superiority of white people.
    Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., for his part, was an ardent abolitionist when war broke out during his senior year at Harvard. He joined the Union army right away and served with distinction throughout most of the war, the wound at Antietam being one of three he received. The war turned him into a pragmatist. When he thought he was dying (“a gone coon,” as he put it) from his first wound, he wondered whether he should start believing in God but decided he didn't need to. As the bloody conflict went on, he lost his fervor for abolitionism or any other cause, as such. After Antietam, he wrote home that “the South have achieved their independence …believe me, we shall never lick 'em,” and that war was “the brother of slavery …slavery's parent,