Years ago, when my children were small, I took a part time job at The News & Observer in Obituaries. Most obituaries came by way of funeral homes who got the information from the families of the deceased and then called or faxed us in our little cubbies downtown in the Classifieds. Sometimes a family member would call and dictate an obit that included not only when the person was born and had died, but also the year they accepted Christ as their personal saviour, their hobbies, pets, causes, educational degrees, and make, model, and year of their car or motorcycle. Blurry photographs of the dearly departed would be faxed or couriered from the funeral home. These tributes cost money. A simple death notice was free, but anything more than public record accrued a fee. Some survivors complained that the Daniels family, publishers of the paper, were making a profit off of death. They considered it in poor taste. But it is the mission of newspapers to peddle misery for profit and the manager of Obits felt that if the survivors weren’t too proud to make money off the demise of a loved one, we shouldn’t be either.
Working in Obits tends to make you see everyone in terms of their pathology. A long period of children dying or breast cancer victims makes it so you take on an actuarial outlook on life. I developed a horror of kicking the bucket and being listed in the paper under “Other Deaths”. If there is anything more diminishing than being listed as an addendum in the Obits, I can’t think what it is.
The strangest thing about the Obituary page as I typed it then and as I read it now was the placement of greetings of the living to the dead. These sentiments are often wishes for a happy birthday or a remembrance of the death date. They frequently feature Christ-awful poems. I recently emailed my friend Mickey who is wise and inclined to be more generous toward people than I am.
“Do the dead read the N&O?” I asked him, trying to get a handle on the psychology of people who pay the paper to print such stuff.
“It’s possible,” he emailed back, “That in ten years the dead will be the only people reading newspapers.” Neatly side-stepping any useful answer.
I suppose it is just as likely that dead folk read the paper as it is that Saint Jude does. Letters to Saint Jude appear now and then in the Classifieds. Kind of a pulp paper novena, I suppose. Truthfully, although I am baffled by the logic of journalistic communications with the communion of saints, I am equally charmed by the sweet faith it implies. Do people in New Jersey wish the dead a happy birthday in the North Jersey Herald Press? Do residents of Idaho pray to St. Jude in the Idaho Statesman? Maybe. But I’d be willing to bet it happens more often in the papers of the South. If there is a part of the country where those on the Other Side are likely to skim the Classifieds and death notices the way the living scan the wedding announcements and drunk driving arrests it is the portion of the country below the Mason-Dixon line. The Veil is thinner. And God is a direct participant in every aspect of life. “Bidden or unbidden,” as the sign over Carl Jung’s office translates, “God is present.” I discovered that even people who adamantly disavow a belief in God, can be equally insistent on an afterlife and a continuing conciousness after death.
A true Southerner to my way of thinking, Christian or otherwise, has an innate respect for Mystery. In a primarily agrarian society, seasons are tracked, weather studied, the character and habits of insects a matter of intense scrutiny. Even with the demise of the small farm, the advances in harvesting and sorting technologies, genetic modifications and chemical enhancements, a culture based on living things instead of manufacturing and machines cannot escape the ultimate knowledge that life is a mystery. That powerful secret is at the core of every seed, is in the egg of every turkey, and the maturing zygote of the hog is as much a source of wonder as is man himself. A man or woman can make a machine. They cannot make a sweet potato, chick, or pig.
People whose lives and economy depend on the natural world realize, not always happily, that they are only stewards. This is humbling. Humility before the works of creation and death is a necessary component of a character open to the other ways in which Mystery manifests itself. This humility is not restricted to Southerners, but it is abundant here, as common as the pigeons on the statues of Confederate soldiers. Additionally, as a conquered, invaded people Southerners sit uncomfortably astride the fence of pride and shame. As a region whose present and future have been troubled for over a hundred years, an emphasis on the past, particularly a better, imagined past combines with a tribal mindset, and pervasive religious sensibility to foster a belief in ghosts, poltergeists, psychic phenomena, and spiritual imprinting. I came to believe as I talked to people about communication with spirits, the experience of the supernatural, and the impact of the dead on the phenomenal world that Southerners need the dead. Theirs or someone elses’. Most of the battles of the Civil War took place in the South and the dead of both sides are as much a part of the land as the cicadas that burrow in the red clay.
I also realized that few of my friends could be considered true Southerners by my lights. Even my husband who has lived here over thirty years is a Hoosier from Northern Indiana and occasionally pronounces words in a way that makes me wince. Southerners by my reckoning have to have been born or at least reared in the South and ideally their parents and grandparents were also. True Southerners spent childhood summers outdoors mostly barefoot, attended schools without air conditioning, and spent countless hot nights flipping their pillows over to get some relief from the cool side. They are the recipients and practicioners of oral local history, eaters of barbeque and banana pudding. You know who their people are because you are probably related to them yourself. I am a true Southerner, but the only other genuine Southerner who went ghost hunting with me was Jill McCorkle, a native of Lumberton, North Carolina and a writer. My son, Duncan, might be considered Southern at least on my side. Being naturally gullible, superstitious and courteous, he came with me on two cemetery visits. Everyone else who helped me in my research was a transplant except for a friend’s aunt in Southport, North Carolina who would not be interviewed. Andy is from Indiana, Mickey is from New York, Beth is from Manhattan, Elaine is from Nigeria, and Tom is from Connecticut. I’m not sure where Dr. Balaban is from, but not hereabouts. Elaine’s family is from South Carolina and she says she can “pass” for Southern, but it is her childhood in Nigeria that prompted her to tell me one August afternoon that the dead were all about us in her yard. My friends do tend to be English major types. My husband teaches theatre. I can’t prove it, but I’m inclined to believe that a segment of the population who believes poetry is important and literature essential have a head start on the willing suspension of disbelief and an intrinsic affinity for all evidence of the spiritual in the realm of the concrete. These are the people who helped me in my search for Southern ghosts and the Southern attitude toward them.
