A Deeper South

A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road  

By Pete Candler  

University of South Carolina Press, 2024  

Paperback: $27.99  

Genre: Memoir, Southern History, Travelogue  

Reviewed by Edward Journey  

In her foreword to Pete Candler’s A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road, Rosanne Cash writes that she has “learned that to come into the fullness of our own potential, we must know our own history.” Candler begins the book with an epigraph from St. Augustine: “You cannot love what you do not know.” A Deeper South becomes an entertaining and probing tour of Southern places; it also explores Candler’s discoveries of the darker sides of his own family history.  

Pete Candler, an Atlanta native, is a photographer and religion scholar who had a brief career in academia – a forbidding arena that made him feel “dismembered” and “disintegrated.” Ubiquitous in Georgia, the Candler family name encompasses achievements in politics, philanthropy, and business (Asa Griggs Candler founded the Coca-Cola Company). Pete Candler was familiar with his family’s legend and lore, but his book chronicles his growing awareness, as an adult, of his family’s connection to the sorry legacy of white supremacy politics, even lynching. As he learns more about his family’s past, he finds himself wondering, “Why am I just learning about this now?”  

A Deeper South contains ample autobiographical information. Candler examines how, in his “white boy” private school youth, he might have dismissed Confederate monuments and flags as “part of the landscape” without fully comprehending the purpose of their installation. He recounts idyllic evenings at the foot of Stone Mountain, home of the resurrection of the Klan, with its gigantic carving of Confederate icons, enhanced in his youth by a nightly laser show. He doesn’t really think about its implications (nor did I when I first saw Stone Mountain – pre-lasers – in the ‘60s). Although racial issues always lurk beneath the surface, the stimulus for A Deeper South is a twelve-day 1997 road trip Candler and his traveling companion, John Hayes, take on Southern backroads. Candler and Hayes retrace the road trip in 2018 with a fresh perspective, some lyrical moments (one should linger over the mystical and haunting paragraphs about the Okefenokee Swamp), some harrowing discoveries, and a refreshing dose of sly humor.  

Coming from Atlanta and its “culture of forgetfulness,” Candler calls his hometown “a city pathologically unfascinated with its own origins.” He posits that amnesia is “the most threatening disease that bedevils American culture at this hour.” The trip touches five states – Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi – with a side trip into Memphis, the proverbial starting point of the Mississippi Delta. Candler’s photographs are interspersed throughout the book. His tendency as a photographer to capture Southern sites in decay, like that of William Christenberry, yields images that are not pretty, “not debutante ball pretty, anyway – but they are beautiful in a way that only time and weather can produce.”  

Throughout the trip, Candler culls information from old WPA guidebooks and contrasts it with its contemporary setting; sometimes, things have not changed much. He meditates on roadside attractions and people encountered along the way. He ponders Reconstruction and its aftermath, which resulted in a “region-wide covenant” of white supremacy. A man named “States Rights Gist” is buried in a Columbia, South Carolina cemetery. In Plains, Georgia, Candler provides a verbal image of Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter walking “soberly, determinedly” to dinner at the retirement facility next door to their home. Statues of James Brown and Georgia colony founder James Oglethorpe face off across Augusta Square; in this case, James Brown appears to be the “tame” one. Candler perfectly captures that breathtaking moment at Yazoo City when hill country dives into the “uninterrupted flatness” of the Mississippi Delta. He finds out why yodeling country musician Jimmie Rodgers has an improbable influence in Kenya and the meaning of “Chemirocha,” a tribal tune of the Kipsigi tribe.  

Unintended kitsch appears and, just down the road, moments of inspiration occur. Candler explores the myriad contradictions of Alabama and its “seemingly endless lineage of not-ready-for-primetime politicians.” He and John walk through Butch Anthony’s “Worlds First Drive Thru Art and Antique Gallery and Museum” in Seale and explore the many facets of Tuskegee – the university and the town’s Confederate statue. A sojourn in Selma’s Live Oak Cemetery enables Candler to write the immortal line, “We meet midway between Nathan Forrest and Edmund Pettus.” At Live Oak’s Confederate Memorial Circle, they encounter Pat Godwin, president of Chapter Fifty-Three of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who requires a “two-factor authentication” of Candler’s Southern bona fides. At Gee’s Bend, home of the quilters creating “jazz in cotton,” they encounter the first electric passenger ferry in the nation – a vast improvement from the time when ferry service to Camden was stopped to discourage Gee’s Bend residents from voting. In Montgomery, the city’s focus on its history and monuments leads Candler to declare it to be “in many ways the anti-Atlanta” as he explores the legacy of Hank Williams, the City of St. Jude’s hospitality to Selma-to-Montgomery marchers, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. At Mobile’s Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Candler ponders the city’s history of Catholicism in an overwhelmingly Protestant state. He also considers the legacy of the slave ship Clotilda, which is still at rest in the Mobile River. 

As much as there is to savor in A Deeper South, discussing the book without mentioning the many editing errors throughout would be negligent. There are missing, misplaced, or multiplied verbs and prepositions that occasionally stop a train of thought in its tracks. “Two” and “too” get mixed up, phrases are repeated, and I returned to this sentence more than once to make sense of it: “Meanwhile, the home of Isaiah T. Montgomery is surrounded on Main Avenue is less decrepit than it once was.” Surrounded by what? I wonder. Mistakes happen, but the frequency of errors in this text is an unfortunate distraction. It feels, at times, like the book was edited by a spell-check app.  

Setting that unavoidable criticism aside, A Deeper South is a fascinating, informative, and personal look at the enigmas and intricacies of the region. The Japanese art of kintsugi provides Candler’s memorable metaphor for his work. Kintsugi is an ancient method for repairing broken objects with precious metals that accentuate rather than hide the repair. In that way, the object both acknowledges its history and gains value in the mending. As Candler gains and shares a better understanding of the history of his family and his place, he facilitates healing and progress moving forward.  

Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com).