Allen Tate, that famous ‘fugitive-agrarian’, wrote in 1948 that the task of the civilised intelligence is perpetual salvage. I have found that the culture of the American South, tattered though it may be by a war on its own soil that claimed more lives by percentage than the societies engaged in the world wars, still exhibits its vestiges most literally beneath my feet. I live and write in a two-centuries-old plantation house in the county of my birth in South Carolina. There, shards of the past rise to the top of the soil in broken pearl-ware pieces, feather-edged china, transfer-ware dishes, ...
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