It was a little after 9:30 in the morning, already hot, humid like a wet wool blanket, when we drove into Live Oak Cemetery in Selma, Alabama. We followed the logic of its layout, turning down a gravel lane flanked by two rows of massive magnolias, arriving at the cemetery’s center. A sign marked it as Confederate Circle, and its focal point was an imposing marble monument. At the Circle on that day in July 2018, in the persona of two women, one Black, one white, both natives of Selma, both in their sixties, we witnessed a confrontation that felt nothing less than tectonic.

Sixty years earlier, the prominent historian C. Vann Woodward wondered if the notion of a “South” was losing its meaning. Woodward had written excavations of the regional past that hold up even today—Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel (1938), Origins of the New South (1951), The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955)—but in his 1958 essay “The Search for Southern Identity” he surveyed the present and saw transformation everywhere, a contemporary South “in the midst of an economic and social revolution that has by no means run its course.” A distinct regional history had shaped an ethos at odds with the national sensibility of innocence, optimism, and triumph, Woodward argued, but that distinct ethos was fading in tandem as the South became “indistinguishable” from the rest of the nation. And—or perhaps especially—the revolution was manifest in the very land itself. In the “roar and groan and dust” of a “great machine” that “demolishes the old to make way for the new” Woodward saw the emblem of change: he imagined all of the sweeping transformations as a formidable “Bulldozer Revolution.”¹

Growing up in Atlanta in the 1970s and ’80s, I was no stranger to bulldozers—or to cranes, wrecking balls, or any of the other powerful machines that were so readily tearing down the old and building up the new. I had no consciousness of living in a “South,” and if I’d been aware of the regional ethos that Woodward described, I wouldn’t have related to it. The landscape I knew was one of air-conditioned fluorescent-lit malls, of shopping plazas with vast expanses of asphalt parking space, of imposing glassy skyscrapers that pierced the skyline, of chain stores and fast-food restaurants where I could get the things I saw on TV.

It was in a college class in 1992 that the idea of place first occurred to me. My friend Pete and I were in a small seminar, reading the work of Flannery O’Connor for the first time. I was fascinated by what I encountered there: a landscape brimming with weighty existential drama. Seemingly mundane settings—a barn loft, a small clearing in the woods, a sawmill camp, a pigsty—became sites of religious crisis, epiphany, and revelation. O’Connor died just eight years before I was born, and her family farm was less than a hundred miles from where I grew up, but the world she evoked felt so foreign and different. Her essays, with titles like “The Regional Writer” and “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” ruminated at length on a “South,” and she made claims about that South that fired my curiosity. She described it as a place haunted by a theological imagination, where life leaned “toward mystery and the unexpected,” where freaks could still be recognized, where “an inburnt knowledge of human limitations” stood as a counterpoint to nationalist mythology of power and prosperity.² This was the seed, for me, of thinking beyond mere locations, disparate sites of varying distance measured in mileage, and imagining instead a broad landscape shaped by a particular human drama. It was the difference between space, inert, this space, that space, with no intrinsic connection, and a coherent place with characteristic features. But it was in the imagination only. I could see the particularity of place in O’Connor’s stories, but I wasn’t experientially acquainted with it.

The impression stuck, and a few years later Pete and I hit on the idea of a peculiar kind of road trip. The premise was to go looking for a South. We were curious: Did it actually exist? Or was it just in the literary imagination? Or the distant past? I couldn’t have quite articulated it at the time, but the basic impulse was a longing for difference, born out of boredom with the familiar, boredom with the glitz and glow of the Atlanta I knew. From its beginnings the city was modernist, established not because of the landscape but simply as a junction point for two railroads, one snaking south from Chattanooga and the other west from Augusta. A “Zero Milepost” marker is the oldest non-Indigenous artifact in Atlanta, and in the late ’90s I found it, in a small backroom in a police precinct nestled in a parking garage basement.³ If you wanted a metaphor for utter disinterest in the past, in the particularity of place (even modernist place), that was a good one. So was the mascot that the city created when it brought the Summer Olympics to town in 1996. An animated figure, blue with big eyes, red sneakers, and lightning bolts above its head, it was unclear what, exactly, it even was. Intentionally so: the mascot’s name was “Whatizit,” or “Izzy” for short. Many citizens pilloried it, but perhaps that’s because it was a mirror they didn’t want to see. The dominant ethos was indeed generic, past-less, place-less, identity-less. Was there a something else?

We had the intuitive good sense to go seeking a South off the interstate highways. I’d later learn the full story: the interstate highway system was a midcentury political creation, linking one metropolis to another through the most efficient route possible, marking space by mileage numbers, altering the landscape itself through the churning, chewing, land-flattening bulldozer. It was one of the largest civil engineering projects in world history. In a radical departure from previous modes of transportation, the human presence was forbidden. No one lived, worked, shopped, legislated, or worshipped on the interstate. You had to exit for all of that. The federal law creating the system was passed in 1956, just two years before Woodward’s essay, but construction was an undertaking of the 1960s and ’70s. This network and its bulldozing geography were very recent developments, just being finished as I was coming of age.

So, we set out from Atlanta in August 1997 on the older US Highway 19, heading south. We were seeking a South and we didn’t have a consciousness of being southern, but in a very elemental way, our consciousness had been deeply shaped by forces we were unaware of. Of course we could embark on an ambling road trip without being worried about our safety. Of course we could seek things off the beaten path without feeling endangered. I was not self-aware at the time, but as a white person and a man, I simply assumed that I could readily go where I wanted, without concern. Such an outlook had been shaped by centuries of history. Ta-Nehisi Coates evocatively calls this “the Dream,” a disposition generated in a white “other world” where “children did not regularly fear for their bodies.”⁴ In my active consciousness, I saw myself as coming from a past-less Anyplace, longing for connection to place and history, but in fact I already had an inescapable connection to both, and it had formed my unconscious presumption of personal safety on the front end of a twelve-day, two-thousand-plus-mile off-the-grid trip in my questionably reliable twenty-year-old Ford truck.

The most striking thing, early on, was the discovery of an older geography. The pre-interstate routes took us into towns, villages, and cities, then fanned out from those to the outlying countryside. There was a logic to the built landscape. Distinct places existed in relation to other places, not through the abstract math of mileage but through connections both economic and social. Urban places were not just conceptually different from rural places; they felt different. But they existed in symbiotic relation, tangibly embodied in the routes that connected one to another. And the routes that led into urban places went to a center. There was an obvious core, a public square structurally arranged to be the focal point of the community.

Within the trip’s first few hours, US 19 took us into Zebulon, Georgia. A sturdy two-story brick courthouse was the centerpiece, set in a park-like square, and commercial buildings, many of old brick like the courthouse, formed a perimeter around the square’s four sides. The built landscape introduced me to something that’s so obvious but that I simply didn’t know: The most basic political unit is the county, and at the center of every county is a county seat. The courthouse was there because Zebulon is the seat of Pike County. Zebulon’s unusual in not having something we would soon notice as a regular feature in county seats: large, prominently placed monuments to the Confederacy. These stone tributes were an imposing, unmistakable presence at the geographical center. I didn’t then know about the phenomenon of the Lost Cause, but I didn’t need to to get the monuments’ most basic message—white folks were in charge here. This was their public square. The geography taught me that.

This geography was new to me, and the message—or, more accurately, the overt public assertion of it—was too. It took time to put this all together, but I slowly came to see that the unconscious presumption of personal safety with which I’d set out on the road and the longing for place that inspired the trip were intrinsically connected. To come of age in the 1970s and ’80s was to come of age in the wake of intersecting revolutions. There was the Bulldozer Revolution of the land itself: the sprawling proliferation of suburbs, shopping plazas, and interstate highways. But there was also the Civil Rights Revolution. This mass social movement challenged white dominance of the public square. It broke down formidable barriers in the labor market, in public accommodations, in electoral politics, and in public schools. But as Kevin Kruse shows in White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, whites responded to these civil rights gains first by abandoning public spaces, then by abandoning the city altogether.⁵ As Matthew Lassiter notes in a companion book about Charlotte, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South, the new “spatial landscape and futuristic ethos of the white suburbs” fostered an “ideology of racial innocence.”⁶ Just as the older, pre–civil rights geography was racialized, so was the new one that came after it—but in concealed and hidden ways, ways that found escape from the burden of race in the placelessness and pastlessness of suburbia, in a new geography of isolated whiteness.

Boredom with this isolation had sparked the road trip—not racial self-awareness or a moral commitment to confronting racism. But it didn’t take long, with the older geography as guide and teacher, to be pushed into both. In the smaller towns and villages, the means for white abandonment simply weren’t there, unless whites pulled up stakes and left the area altogether. These places weren’t axis points for interstate highways. They couldn’t finance suburbs or lure chain stores to a new commercial strip. In these places, history and race were palpable. And they beckoned us from the truck and out on foot. The automobile had brought us there, but the close concentration of buildings, the density of the built landscape, incentivized walking as the proper way to see the place. It quickly became a pattern: Pete and I would drive into the obvious center, then amble around with curiosity, wanderers with purpose but without a predetermined goal. The act of putting one foot ahead of the other, treading on the very land itself, had an immediacy, a materiality, that traveling in an automobile simply couldn’t. And out on foot, there was no escape from the elements. The heat, the humidity, the overpowering sun—these were palpable, sometimes oppressive presences. They initiated us into the landscape and into an expansive web of connection with life and logic beyond individual control.

Of course, in walking there was no shield, no locks, windows, or gates to control access. You couldn’t know who you might stumble upon. With the unconscious safety we assumed as white men, we quickly came to embrace this lack of control as a good thing. We became open to unexpected encounters, seekers of serendipitous meetings. Our assumption of safety was so deeply shaped by history that I don’t know how we could divest ourselves of it, but in openness to the uncontrolled and unexpected, we were departing, if not divesting, from the insulated, isolated whiteness that came in the wake of the Civil Rights Revolution. In doing so, we were finding a South, recovering lost connections, learning forgotten stories, regaining an elemental attachment to the land—and slowly coming to see ourselves as more than curious wanderers, as also, and more deeply, implicated citizens of a contentious home.

That’s how we got to be standing in Live Oak Cemetery in Selma on a steamy July day. It was the first road trip we’d done in a while. We followed the 1997 trip with four more, then fell into a fourteen-year hiatus as life happened and we became semi-responsible adults. But the possibility always stuck with us, and we finally made it happen. We left my house in Augusta on a Friday afternoon, and by Wednesday morning—after meanderings through places like Birdsville, Deepstep, Fargo, Mystic, and Wetumpka—we were in the center of Selma’s old cemetery. The Confederate monument in the circle bore a dark Victorian inscription: “There is grandeur in graves, there is glory in gloom.” But what drew our closer attention was a recently erected monument just a stone’s throw away. It was a bronze bust on a granite foundation, honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest—the “defender of Selma” in a major cavalry fight late in the Civil War (which, despite the monument’s claim, the Union forces won). More famously, Forrest was a prominent antebellum slave trader and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The monument was erected, a plaque told us, in the year 2000. We weren’t unaware of neo-Confederates and new memorials, but this one took us aback.

As I was processing this, and as Pete was meandering toward some shade, a car pulled into the circle. A white woman, in her sixties I’d guess, looked at me suspiciously, then got out of the car and asked what we were doing there. I said that we were on a road trip, and that my friend, gesturing toward Pete, was writing a book about the South. “Oh, everybody’s writing a book nowadays—especially about the South,” she replied hostilely. Then, turning toward the Forrest monument, she said, “We put this up in 2000, in front of the Smitherman Museum, and two NAACP lawsuits later, they made us move it here.” She introduced herself as Pat Godwin. It was clear that she was a steward of the Lost Cause, and it seemed pointless to challenge her racism. But I was curious what exactly had, or hadn’t, happened in Selma. I’d thought of it as a place of civil rights triumph, not neo-Confederate reassertion. I shifted into oral historian mode and asked her some questions. We ambled through the cemetery for about ten minutes, rejoined Pete near the circle, and chatted a little more. We were all about to depart when we heard a rumbling in the distance, looked toward the sound, and Pat said ominously, “Oh, here they come. They bring them over here from the Voting Rights Institute.”⁷ A large bus slowed to a stop at the head of the gravel lane. The door opened, and teenagers, Black and white, began to disembark. They stood waiting, with notebooks, and finally a Black woman, looking from a distance to be about Pat’s age, stepped off. She said a few things to the teenagers, but we were too far away to hear. Then she began to walk down the lane, toward the circle, with the teenagers hesitatingly following her. Pat advanced to the front of the circle, like a posted sentry. Pete and I simply stood there, too caught up in the scene to say anything or move. The sky was bright blue, but a bolt of lightning could have burst out of it and it wouldn’t have felt weird, but totally appropriate. It was a weighted, full moment—civil rights versus the Confederacy in the persona of two women on a seemingly ordinary Wednesday morning. It felt epochal, like the drama of history was unfolding before our eyes in real time.

The group’s walk down the lane took maybe thirty seconds, but it seemed like a slow, full thirty minutes, with building dread and, in the back of my mind, with worry about whether the group was in fact safe. Finally, they reached the circle, and Pat said in an oddly chipper tone, “Well hello, Joanne.” The Black woman sighed and said matter-of-factly, “Hello, Pat.” Pat addressed the teenagers: “I’m Pat Godwin, president of Chapter 53 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and we want to welcome you to our cemetery.”⁸

And then Pat walked to her car, got in, drove once around the circle, and left. We’d been standing in the shade the whole time, at a distance, so transfixed by the scene that we weren’t even self-conscious. But with her departure, both of us (though not a word was said) wanted to burst out to the group, “Hey! We’re with you!” But silently, both of us felt that the spectacle of two white men hopping in to have the first word was so inappropriate. They weren’t here for us, much less for our absolution, and they had good reason to assume we were neo-Confederates, given the circumstances in which they’d met us. As we fumbled, Joanne began her presentation: “In 2000 we elected the first Black mayor of Selma. And three weeks later the UDC put this up. Now, you can do the math.” The teenagers shook their heads and moaned. Public monuments had powerful political meaning, she insisted, and Black citizens had mobilized quickly to challenge the UDC. It led to a major triumph: when the new mayor and city council voted for prompt removal, Selma became the “first city in the nation to remove a Confederate monument from government-owned property.” ⁹

Joanne encouraged the group to linger, reflect, and write in their notebooks. It felt weird to continue to stand there, at a distance, so we got in Pete’s minivan and simply sat, speaking to each other for the first time since the encounter began. One Black teenager, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, was headed in our direction. My eye caught his, and I noticed his T-shirt, with Emmett, Trayvon, and other names of Black victims of white violence. “That’s a great shirt,” I instinctively blurted out, and he met my awkwardness with a smile. “Thanks,” he said, and walked over. I got out of the van and we started talking. His name was Elijah, and he told me that they were high school students from the DC area, traveling to see civil rights sites. “It’s great that you’re doing that,” I said. “I didn’t do anything like that when I was your age, but a month ago I took a group of college students on a trip like that, and it was amazing. Transformative.” He told of some of the places they’d been and began to show me photos. Other students, visibly skeptical, cautious, and worried, began to inch closer. As they caught the conversation, their looks changed to ones of curiosity. Before long, most of the group had joined us. Joanne came over, asked a student to let her lean against the van in the shade, sighed, and said, “Whew, it’s a steamy morning!” We nodded, moist with sweat and caught off guard by her nonchalance in light of, well, everything. Then she looked at us, introduced herself as Joanne Bland, and asked, with a twinkle in her eye and a slight smile, “Now what are y’all doing here?”¹⁰

It was so disarming, and it went to the heart of the self-awareness, the conscious positionality, that I’d gained in the course of these meanderings. In reflection, I can see that the initial impulse for our road trip was very much in what Soren Kierkegaard calls the “aesthetic” mode: It was born out of boredom with the familiar and out of curiosity about difference. The older geography I found pushed me into Kierkegaard’s “ethical” mode, with its persisting commitments and social concern. But the very presumption of safety I carried with me, the insulated whiteness from which I’d come, implicated me and dispelled any fantasies of occupying a space of innocence. This awareness propelled me into what Kierkegaard calls the “religious” mode, with its consciousness of guilt and attention to paradox. It was certainly a paradox that I’d experienced viscerally in Live Oak Cemetery: I would have expected suspicion and hostility from an older Black woman, openness and cordiality from an older white woman. But it was the exact reverse. It was mysterious, and mysteriously lifegiving. In serendipitous encounters like this, and to depths I never could have imagined at the outset, I had found a South—and my strange place within it.