NY NEWSDAY: The South in red, gray and blue

[sled]

The South in red, gray and blue

http://tinyurl.com/6kv6f

December 7, 2004

The seductress' billboard-size pout bears down on drivers zipping
along the freeways of Durham, N.C., where she is paid to take her
clothes off in a nightclub and, perhaps as an extension of that,
perform other fleshly favors.

The giant photograph of her made-up face and exposed shoulders - the
rest is left to the imagination - represents a promise of sex,
fantasy. It is an invitation plastered on a roadside sign in a state
next to the one that produced awful old Strom Thurmond. When the
eventual U.S. senator was young and a fire-breathing segregationist,
he conceived a baby with a black woman he did not wed because
interracial marriage was outlawed and, even so, such a union would
have stopped Thurmond's march to Washington in its tracks.

The tale of his half-black daughter had long circulated. Trotted out a
last time in 2003, when the daddy was cold in his grave, it was
attached to an actual person, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the
daughter. What had transpired in the dark was shining in the naked
light of day. And that might have sent the senator's adoring public -
to say nothing of his pure white kin - reeling. On the other hand,
half-black babies have been pretty commonplace for a pretty long time.

(snip)

In these parts, my adopted home, the Bible Belt is reviled for its
Bible-thumping. It is stereotyped and wrongly generalized about. I
know that from having been reared there, and harboring still an
enormous love for it. And yet its contradictions, those concerns that
had me scratching my head, become instructive for the warring reds and
blues. There are absolute rights and absolute wrongs, and an expanse
of imperfections and ambiguities in between.

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