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The Front Porch: A Legacy of American Cultural Plurality
| Article
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19968 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
2,598 Words |
| Author
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Sue Bridwell Beckham
Sue Bridwell Beckham is professor of American studies at the
University of Wisconsin-Stout. She writes extensively on
southern culture in the United States. This essay was
researched on assignment for THE WORLD & I. |
Long after she had permitted her husband to air-condition their rambling Mississippi house, my mother-in-law insisted that everyone repair to the front porch to "cool off," once the evening dishes were done. In April, when the outdoors was seventyish and fresh, her command was welcome; in August, when both the temperature and the humidity hovered around ninety, it seemed to defy logic. Still, she knew the porch had powers beyond the physical, and when any family members begged to stay in the cooler indoors for some solitary activity such as reading or watching television, she was convinced that only a rift with another family member could be behind the desire. And she was equally convinced that an hour or two on the porch would heal the rift--the parties would cool off, too.
An African American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston was a transplanted southerner and an anthropologist. In the early thirties, when Hurston finished her degree, the academic world still believed the only appropriate subjects for anthropological study were Stone Age peoples as yet unexposed to the wonders of modern technology. Anticipating trends of the late twentieth century, however, Hurston braved professional censure and announced that she would use her credentials to record the folklore of her people in the American South. Hurston knew just where to gather material on the folkways and mores of southern African Americans--she would do it on their porches. There, she reasoned, where storytelling was a way of life, where people were most comfortable, where community was the rule, she would learn the folklore that had been passed down for generations. The result was a seminal work, Mules and Men, published in 1934.
These women of the American South--my mother-in-law, a white high school graduate, member of the working class, mother of seven, and grandmother to many, and Hurston, a young and ambitious black woman, educated at Columbia--sensed the same truth: that for traditional southerners the front porch is more than an architectural appendage, more than a place for dealing with a hot climate and a social soul. For them, it was a ritual space of tradition and communion. Most southerners would agree with this observation from Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God: "When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to."
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