Southern Manhood

Your willingness to be a jackass will never make you a man. Writers like South Carolina's Ray McManus are shredding the futile and stupid myths about what exactly makes a Southern man.

By Chuck Reece

Aug 3, 2024

What does it mean to be a man in the South?

The very idea conjures dozens of pictures. Maybe Southern masculinity boils down to the old joke about the guy whose last words are “Hey, y’all, watch this!” It’s the idea that in any situation where fearless, jackass confidence is called for, the Southern man is just the guy to do it.

For David Joy, the North Carolina novelist whose writing I hopelessly fanboy, the picture of Southern manhood is his grandfather, with “dozens of baby copperheads writhing in his fists.” Joy tells this true story in his introduction to The Last Saturday in America, the book of poems whose author, South Carolina’s Ray McManus, is the focus of Salvation South’s attention this weekend.

In that book’s thirty-nine poems, Ray McManus shreds the myths of Southern masculinity.

“These are poems about boys listening to men who were once boys who listened to men, the blind reading the blind through the dark,” Joy writes. “Some boys grow up. Some men never do. Ray McManus has chipped away at the pageantry and performance, the stupidity of the lie, the outright futility of it all.”

Four of the poems in The Last Saturday in America, including its title poem, first appeared here in Salvation South. In fact, they were the first poems we ever published. When we began, we had no intention to publish poetry. But six months after we ran our first story, a submission from McManus appeared in our inbox: seven poems topped by a cover note that said, “I absolutely love the work you do and the work you cultivate…that has helped (tremendously) to reclaim the Southern narrative.”

— “Where We Went Wrong”: an interview with Ray McManus by Chris Nesmith
—“It’s All Forward”: three new poems by Ray McManus
—“To Hear What We've Come for This Long Time”: three new poems by Linda Parsons
—“The Twangy and Telling Tale of the Banjo”: Salvation South Deluxe podcast episode

After we ran Ray’s poems, other Southern poets sent us their work. Now, we typically publish a poem or three every week, because we’ve reached a conclusion: poets are ripping up the useless, foolish, lying narratives of the Old South with ferocity and frequency. It is impossible to the read the work of warriors like Jacqueline Allen Trimble or Ashley M. Jones or Ray McManus and conclude otherwise.

The precise, masterfully chosen words of a great poet can slice the worst remnants of Southern heritage to shreds in a few seconds.

“There is no blood in the gavel which strikes to signal another bill—also bloodless—passed against all the blood just trying to stay within our bodies, trying to do its job. This place is brutal by tradition,” Jones wrote for us this year.

“Race: An economic system on which a whole country was built by the free or super cheap physical and intellectual labor of people of color, black people who shored up mediocrity and moral bankruptcy with their inventiveness and resilience, and poor white people, particularly immigrants from Eastern Europe and Ireland, who were sold a dream of dominion and wealth from sea to shining sea although most of them could not get enough sustenance to make piss let alone acquire a window or a pot,” Trimble wrote for us this year.

“And how easy it can be to forget, even in our finest moments, how much the kids will miss in this life when we’re all covering our mouths,” writes McManus for us this week, in one of three brand new poems.

It’s like Appalachian poet Annie Woodford wrote for us last year: “In the South, poetry is a matter of survival.”

These days, if the pen truly is mightier than the sword, the poets of the South wield the deadliest weapons in our region’s fight against injustice and ignorance and inhibition.

Chris Nesmith’s brilliant interview with Ray McManus this week digs deep enough to get at how the poetic sausage is really made. We’re equally grateful to Ray himself for the three new poems we bring you this week. And to ensure our pages are not overly fraught with masculinity this week, we offer three new poems from the brilliant Knoxville poet and playwright Linda Parsons that instruct us to lean in close to enough to hear and to feel.

Our Writing Your South online lecture/conversation series is coming back later this month with an appearance by the good Dr. Jackie Trimble herself, who will talk about how she creates work that so fearlessly confronts the ghosts and myths of the South. Click below to learn more and get your ticket. (If you're a member of our Family Circle or Writers' Circle, your standard discount code will work for a reduced-price ticket). We hope you can join us on August 21 at 6 p.m. Eastern.

Chuck Reece

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Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.