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Indeed, in the South, funerals are an integral part of the family experience. By the time a child has reached majority, he probably has been to a dozen funerals of older aunts, uncles and cousins. Obsequies provide a chance for catching up on the latest gossip or to do a little business. Southerners still pay condolence calls in the parlor, where they sit for hours with the bereaved, rarely mentioning the dead. At times, church services can be as flowery as a dime-store sympathy card—or as colorful as an Erskine Caldwell novel. Recently one backwoods Alabama dirt farmer was laid out in a dark suit, white shirt and tie. The old man had never before been so well dressed. His impressed relatives removed him from the casket, propped him against a wall and had him photographed for posterity. While elsewhere in the nation people are writing books and teaching university courses about how to face death with dignity, the South has long known about this instinctively. It knows that death is part of life.
But of the mixture of simple blood ties and rooted soil, of patriotic and military zeal, has risen a quality that many Northerners cannot find credible: a respect for law. It is this more than Christian principle or force of arms that has brought the South into contemporary life.
Long considered the most racially reactionary state, Mississippi briefly flared in violence, then integrated with a speed that astonished even its neighbors. Governor Mills Godwin of Virginia spoke for more than his home state when he said, "The racial issue is largely behind us because Virginians have a strong sense of law-and-order." Federal Judge James McMillan of Charlotte, N.C., echoed that North Carolinians would "litigate until hell freezes over, but when it freezes over, they'll go on about their business. The law is the law, and they respect it."
Yet it is one of the South's many paradoxes that violence is not far from the surface. Montgomery, Ala., Lubbock, Texas, and Savannah, Ga., have the three highest murder rates in the nation, in part because of the gun-toting tradition and a sense that honor dictates that real or imagined wrongs must be redressed. But up North, the combined rate of violent crimes (murder, rape, aggravated assault and robbery) is still greater than that of the South. Almost everywhere, people can walk the Dixie streets without having to fear muggings or purse snatchings.