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of an edifice for one reason and one reason only: because—”
    But then they'd just say, “Oh, a
Southern
writer. What
are
grits?”
    I don't live in the South anymore. I maintain you can't live in the South and be a deep-dyed Southern writer. If you live in the South you are just writing about folks, so far as as you can tell, and it comes out Southern. For all we know, if you moved West you'd be a Western writer. Whereas, if you live outside the South, you are being a Southern writer either (a) on purpose or (b) because you can't help it. Which comes to the same thing in the end: you are deep dyed.
    Whether or not anybody in the South thinks you are a Southern writer is not a problem. Englishmen thought of Alistair Cooke as an American. Americans thought of him as English. So he was in good shape, as I see it: nobody kept track of whether he went to church.
    One thing to be said for being in the Northeast and you Southern is that it provokes you to keep an edge on your Southernness. Sometimes I'll bring up obscure examples of anti-Southern prejudice—“You ever think about the fact that in the book, the good witch is the Witch of the South, but when they made the movie they changed her to the Witch of the North?”
    Also I make a point of taking no interest whatsoever in what passes inthe North for college sports. When I was a boy in Georgia, college sports was Bobby Dodd versus Bear Bryant immemorial. Compared to that, the Harvard-Yale game is a panel discussion. When all the college sports you can follow in the local media are Nehi or Lehigh or whatever against Hofstra or Colgate or somebody, why bother? You know what they call the teams at Williams College? The Ephs. Let me repeat that: the Ephs. Pronounced
eefs.
Do you think that anybody who is willing to be called an Eph is capable of playing any sport at a level anywhere near root-hog-or-die? Caring about college sports in the Northeast is like caring about French food in South Carolina.
    A good thing about being Southern is that it often involves getting to a point where you don't know what to think. People of the Northeast act like they have never been to that point before. Certainly they think they know what to think about Southern things. Whenever people try to prove they are down with Southern culture by professing love for, say, Garth Brooks, I look at them with a certain expression on my face and ask whether they haven't heard of the real cutting-edge genre, Faded Country—songs like “I Guess Fishin’ Is Sufficient, But I'd Like a Little Love” and “I'm So Lonesome I Could Go Out and Ride Around on I-285.” Or if somebody starts telling me how deeply he or she responds to B. B. King, I'll say, “You know they've isolated the blues gene.”
    I let that sink in and then I add, “Now.
What do we do with that knowledge?”
    I bring up awkward racial questions whenever possible. For some years now, drastically bad race relations have been cropping up mostly outside the South, and I want to see some Northern white people sweat. I don't accuse them of being racist, because they know they aren't
that kind of person.
What I will do is say that anybody who claims to be “colorblind” or not to have “a racist bone” in his or her body is at best
pre-
racist and has a longer way to go than the rest of us. Back when the O. J. Simpson verdict was a hot topic, I would bring that up. A lot of enlightened-feeling Northern white people, who have never even suspected themselves of what we might call ethnocentric assumptions, are completely unself-conscious about blaming the whole thing on the jury.
    The reason O. J. got off, people of the Northeast would feel fine about asserting, is that the jury was (a) too black to have any sympathy for the victims and (b) too dumb to get out of serving on the jury.
    My response to (a) was to wonder aloud whether, if we stay humble long enough,
Southern
white people will ever be qualified to get away with bald-faced