AN interesting look at the South in Virginia, and the lingering voluntary ignorance off some Southerners that not only explains why the South lost the war but why so much of it is still mired in poverty. From the Washington Post....
Gordonsville, Va. — There’s debate about where the South really
begins. The Mason-Dixon Line? The Potomac? The Rappahannock? The “sweet
tea line?” What’s certain is that, by the time you’ve reached David
Lamb’s horse farm in Orange County, you’re there.
Oakland Heights Farm offers riding lessons and holds rodeos in the
splendid heart of the Piedmont, on Route 15 a couple of hours southwest
of Washington. Lamb is a Civil War buff who says his side lost, and
grouses about prickly Yankees who swoop in and buy huge tracts of land
and put up fences. Ask him what being southern means, and he says, “You
can show up and sit on my front porch and have a glass of iced tea with
me.”
Unlike some folks, he’ll talk politics with you. One day
recently a fellow came down from Washington to ride, and mentioned that
he was an economist working for President Obama. That riled Lamb. He
would no sooner vote for Obama than wear a protective helmet instead of a
cowboy hat.
“We’re bankrupt,” he told the economist, and proceeded to debate politics for an hour as they rode together through the woods.
“He’ll never be back,” Lamb says, shrugging.
Southern
hospitality isn’t about to disappear, but the intensity of American
politics in this election season can make for awkward encounters and
tricky relationships, to judge by dozens of interviews in recent days
along Route 15 in Virginia. The north-south scenic byway offers a
transect of the cultural fault line between Northern Virginia and what
might be more traditionally defined as the South.
Virginia has a
long history as contested territory, and this year it’s a critical
battleground state in the presidential election, with 13 electoral votes
in the balance.
For a full generation, since the political
realignment during the civil rights era, Republican presidential
candidates had an apparent lock on the old Confederacy. But Obama,
boosted by support in the booming Northern Virginia suburbs — known
among some unreconstructed southerners as Occupied Virginia — won the
state four years ago and has enjoyed a small but steady lead in recent
Virginia polls.
As a general rule, the true South is more
conservative, and more friendly to Republican candidates. The only catch
is that the South is changing, modernizing, diversifying. Crude
electoral maps and broad-brush political analysis can miss the granular
complexity of America’s political geography, because so many people have
added to their list of inalienable rights the right to defy
stereotypes.
“The nature of the South is changing faster than the
stereotypes are. Much of the South now looks like San Jose. Is it still
southern?” asks John Shelton Reed, a retired professor of sociology at
the University of North Carolina who has studied the cultural borders of
the South.
So where is the border, professor?
“If I had to
say, and I guess I do, I’d say just about the Rappahannock [River] when
you’re going south,” he said. “When you get 50 miles from Washington,
you’re probably in the South.”
Along the Carolina Road
Route 15 is the asphalt version of what was known long ago as the
Carolina Road. The road crosses the Potomac at Point of Rocks, Md., and
is just a two-lane country road when it reaches Lucketts, Va., in
northern Loudoun County. Dominating the heart of Lucketts are a couple
of antique stores, including Really Great Finds, where Carrie Sisk, 36,
the retail manager, is a local and remembers when Loudoun County was
just cow farms. She’s a Fox News fan, and her politics are more
anti-Obama than pro-Mitt Romney.
“He’s so cocky. He thinks he’s Jesus. I don’t think he cares a whole lot about America,” she says of the president.
Keep
heading south, past Leesburg with its outlet stores, and you’ll see the
antebellum plantation Oatlands, where preservationists are fighting to
keep housing developments out of its viewshed. Oatlands says “South,”
but the eye is drawn beyond the old grain silo to the rack of new
housing on the distant hillside.
Eventually you’ll see signs for
the Winery at La Grange, which sits at the base of the Bull Run
Mountains. Katie Lee, 29, taps on a laptop at an outdoor table, sipping a
fine pinot gris. She’s an Obama voter. Co-worker Trish Davila, 45,
doesn’t say how she’ll vote, but offers an unhappy observation: “People
start to question other people’s patriotism if they don’t vote
Republican.”
Onward to Warrenton, which is now a suburb of Washington.
“When
I was a kid, Main Street was dirt,” says William Lawson, 75, a funeral
director standing in the shade on Main. He says he’ll vote for Obama,
and is unhappy with congressional inaction. “What they need to do is
clear the House. Both houses. They’ve been in there too long.”
Tom
Armstrong, 59, an arborist, pops out of the post office and says he
remembers when this part of Virginia was rural and didn’t have many
middle-class people, just the poor and the very rich. He likes the more
multicultural feel of the area. He’ll vote for Romney, saying he doesn’t
like the Democratic position on entitlements: “I really don’t think
being a citizen of the United States entitles you to anything.”
Laurie
Goddin, 62, of Alexandria, was meeting her friend Letitia Ord, 51, for
lunch in downtown Warrenton. They didn’t realize how much of a political
divide exists between them, because until this moment they hadn’t
discussed the election.
“You’re not going to go Republican?” Ord asked incredulously.
“I don’t like Romney at all,” Goddin said.
“You like Obama???”
“I think he needs more time.”
“Oh my God — I think he’s a disaster.”
“That’s why we don’t talk politics.”
‘This is kind of where it starts’
Below Warrenton on Route 15, the landscape starts to change.
There are fewer housing developments, and fewer just-built mansions that
look like they sprouted in a pasture after a recent rain. You’re
nearing the Rappahannock, an unofficial border, and now you see vintage
motels, what used to be called motor courts, and the occasional old
house being eaten by vines. A truck stop has a big sign out front: “BBQ
World.”
This is Quarles Truck Stop, where the manager is Donn
Sachs, 63, a Tidewater Virginian who doesn’t feel he’s in the South when
he’s this far north: “A lot of people don’t even know what grits are.”
He’ll vote for Romney, largely on foreign policy grounds: “Stop
apologizing for the U.S. and take a hard line on who’s our friends, and
who are not.”
Just a little ways ahead, in the hamlet of Opal, a sign on the right says, “Clark Bros — Guns.”
It’s a gun shop with an outdoor shooting range in back. There’s a fiberglass bear, ferociously kitschy, on the roof.
“This is kind of where it starts,” says owner Steve Clark, and he’s referring, of course, to the South.
He’ll vote Romney and thinks Obama has done everything wrong: “He won’t admit that he’s a socialist, and that’s what he is.”
Ken
Greene, a gunsmith, says of the president: “He’s trying to play Robin
Hood. Take from the rich and give to the poor. And I’m tired of
handouts. . . . Democracy’s supposed to be about survival of the
fittest. Bailing out GM, bailing out this and that, it’s not good. Sink
or swim.”
Now comes the Rappahannock River, which is shallow this
far upstream. Last weekend some local African Americans reenacted an
August 1862 flight to freedom, in which slaves crossed the river here to
escape bondage and join retreating Union soldiers.
Ed Dudley, a
Verizon employee, has parked a van on the northern side of the river so
he can work on a line that leads to a water gauge in the river. He says
he’ll probably vote for “the Constitutional guy” — former Virginia
congressman Virgil Goode, who’s the presidential nominee for the
Constitution Party. Romney’s really a liberal, he says. As for Obama,
“Nicest guy I ever seen in the White House, but too dadgum liberal for
me, too socialist. I want ’em out of my hair.”
In downtown
Culpeper, you’re probably in the South, though you’re really not that
far from Washington, which spews cultural seeds into distant pastures.
Along the fault line you might think yourself deep in Dixie, only to see
signs for yoga lessons and a wine bar.
Nora Lee, 47, a bail
bondswoman in Culpeper, says she prays for a Republican victory. But she
also finds it hard to talk to her more liberal friends about the
election. She knows a man who can barely speak to his son, so divided
are they by politics.
“This year’s really touchy,” she says. “It’s almost like a religious situation.”
Split politics, but clear identity
Halfway to Orange is a vintage roadside store, the Midway Country
Market. The proprietors are an African American couple who spent years
teaching school in the District before relocating. Bob and Mary Royster,
both 65, have packed their market with antiques, old tools, vintage
glass bottles, furniture. You can buy pigs’ feet marinating in a jar,
and pickled eggs. This is where you can buy souse — “head cheese.”
The
Roysters will vote for Obama, but they’ll be judicious in talking
politics with their customers. “It’s an ultraconservative area,” Bob
Royster says. He says he doesn’t detect the kind of racism that existed
in the past, though he says it’s not a good idea to “step on certain
toes in the good ’ol boy network.”
Route 15 comes to Orange, where
Jimmy Harris, 57, makes a purchase at a produce stand, and says he was a
contractor until “the illegal immigrants put me out of business.” He’ll
vote Romney, mostly because he considers Obama a catastrophe: “This
country was founded on God, and he has gone the route of Sharia law,
taking our rights away from us.”
Beyond Orange and past Dave
Lamb’s horse farm is the town of Gordonsville, where Ken Garr, 52, a
painter, will vote for Obama, because Romney “is for the wealthy people.
He’s not for the middle class.” He remembers when the economy bottomed
out four years ago and no one wanted to spend a nickel. Things really
are better now than then, he says.
Eventually Route 15 hits
Interstate 64. Just before the interstate there’s a new shopping plaza,
with a Wal-Mart and a Lowe’s. The place calls itself “The Shoppes at
Spring Creek” — the kind of spelling that makes a southerner suspect
that someone’s taking on airs.
Beyond that is the village of Zion
Crossroads. A man sells produce on the roadside. People trickle into the
laundromat and the convenience store.
William Sprouse, 55, a
logger and tree culler, says he’s undecided this fall. “I guess I’ll
have to go with Obama, because Romney, I’m not sure what he brings to
the table.”
He says of the locals, “Everyone’s conservative. They squeeze the dollar.”
Route
15 keeps going, of course, because remember, it was the Carolina Road.
The conversation about where the South begins can safely come to an end
at this point. People here know where they live.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/along-virginias-route-15-the-souths-cultural-border-displays-a-political-divide/2012/09/28/a37f4c3e-08de-11e2-a10c-fa5a255a9258_print.html
