New Releases by Malcolm Jones

Who exactly — them or me — first came up with the idea, I''m not certain. No matter. The Institute for Southern Studies staff asked if I would take out six months to travel the South as a reporter for the Institute''s then-new syndicated weekly column, Facing South. Captive to Southern fondness for poking about the region and to that larger American myth about freedom deriving from travel, I claimed the job before any list of applicants could be gotten up. A new van was purchased and fitted out with a bed, typing stand, CB and regular AM-FM radio, specially cut mosquito netting, and a fan. The Institute''s charge dictated that I''d see the rural South, not too much of the Interstate/urbanized South. Places like Ville Platte, Louisiana; Ink, Arkansas; Ripley, Mississippi; Pickens, South Carolina; and Fincastle, Virginia. The blessings of this constraint came vividly to mind when my path intersected an Interstate cloverleaf in Georgia — typically crammed with service stations, motels and fast food franchises. Over the door of one eatery hung a banner proclaiming "Join the Fun — Eat and Run." All told, I logged nearly 28,000 miles between May and October, 7977. I kept an eye out for the little things. Graffiti, for example. In the rest room of a Charlottesville, Virginia, vegetarian restaurant I found: "Mother made me a homosexual." Below, in another''s writing, "Fantastic! If I bought her the yarn, would she make me one?" Or signs, like one on a New Orleans building: Straight Business College. And listened for larger themes, not at all certain I could hear them — but knowing that these, too, were a Southern tradition going back at least to the days of Fannie Kemble''s Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838-1839, the powerful attack on slavery, and William Byrd ''s History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, the travel log some assert first described "the good ol'' boy."

This issue, which marks the beginning of our fifth year, combines a number of articles about the good times and growing pains of a South reaching national maturity. It seems appropriate for us to answer, at this time, some of our readers'' questions about who we re and what Southern Exposure represents. Early observers thought we''d never make it this far with a regional journal so critical of the powers that be and so preoccupied with the lesser known people, with the struggles and heritage of a culture considered bankrupt by sophisticated America. But, like the South, we have attained a new stability, partly from the spin-off of the media search for Jimmy Carter''s South (they have yet to find it) and partly from our appeal to the same hunger for connections to a past, a place, a people, that made Roots a meaningful event for so many.