In trying to figure out where exactly "the South" starts in this constantly changing country of ours, I came upon this map on one of my favorite map grabs, Strange Maps. You can find the whole story here. But that is someone else's Oprah. What I am looking for goes much deeper. However, one can't help but notice that there is a category of religion actually called "Southern Baptist", which seems to be a fairly well defined border on the map above. As Wilbur Zelinsky explains in his piece, Where the South Begins: The Northern Limit of the Cis-Appalachian South in Terms of Settlement Landscape, "The abnormal relegation of ordinary urban functions to the country: the high incidence of the rural school, church, and cemetery, and the cross-roads store and postoffice" (173).Religion can certainly help define an area, but as Peirce Lewis notes speaking about Zalinsky, "Here was a man who was willing to go outdoors, use his eyes, and then return to the library and sort through a mass of data to find a match between statistics and landscape" (Wilbur as Icon*). I think this is a good point to think about. In these days of the www, it is imperative to test and "match between statistics and landscape". The illustration at the top is a great visual aid to help map statistics, but in order to really find where this region begins, you have to go there and document everything you see.
Grady Clay's term, "turf" comes to mind when I think of the fieldwork that I have done in Tennessee and West Virginia. Driving through the mountains trying to find a dirt road rumored to be there, in a Land Rover Discovery with New York plates, I discovered what being a stranger in a strange land can feel like. Most of the locals would greet us with a shotgun. On the other hand, it is always a good thing to witness firsthand southern hospitality, which features cuisines that are some of the best I have ever had. And of course a friendly, genuine, courtesy that I have come to define as southern hospitality, which is where I consider the south to begin.
