The Southerner is a local person - to a degree unknown in other sections of the United States. The Southerner always thinks of himself as being from somewhere, as belonging to some spot of earth.

Everyone in the South knows who Jefferson Davis was and this if one thing that distinguishes the South from other parts of the country.

On a summer evening some years ago, two of the South's most celebrated writers, William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter, were dining together at a plush restaurant in Paris. Everything had been laid out to perfection; a splendid meal had been consumed, a bottle of fine Burgundy emptied, and thimble-size glasses of an expensive liqueur drained. "Back home butter beans are in," said Faulkner, peering into the distance, "the speckled ones." Miss Porter fiddled with her glass and stared into space. "Blackberries," she said wistfully.

Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the United States to Europe's wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes. Anyone with a lick of sense knows you can't make good barbecue and comply with the health code.

Somehow in rural Southern culture, food is always the first thought of neighbors when there is trouble. "Here, I brought you some fresh eggs for breakfast. And here's a cake and some potato salad." It means, "I love you. And I am sorry for what you are going through, and I will share as much of your burden as I can." And maybe potato salad is a better way of saying it. From now on I will not tell you - I love you - I will just UPS some potato salad. Will that be better?

Next to fried food, the South has suffered most from oratory.

I am alarmed over the grits situation. You have to ask the waitress to bring you grits. Previously you only had to ask the waitress not to bring you grits. And more recently, at some restaurants you not only have e to ask for grits but have e to pay for them. I consider this a sacrilege, as I am quite sure that the Lord never intended for grits to be sold.

There ought to be a different category for Southern girls. They've been doing this since they were born. "They're professionals," a Northern contestant in a beauty pageant was heard to say.

The friend asked why the rebel army had continued to fight when they knew defeat was certain. Senator John Sharp Williams said the Confederate soldiers were simply afraid to quit and go home because of the women.

I grew up in a part of the South generally referred to as "deep," an adjective that has metaphysical as well as geographical connotations.

The South has had its full share of illusions But the illusion that "history is something unpleasant that happens to other people" is certainly not one of tem For the South has undergone an experience that it can share with no other part of America, though it is shared by nearly all the peoples of Europe and Asia; the experience of military defeat, occupation and reconstruction. Southerners can never resist a losing cause.

The past is never dead. It's not even past. Northerners, provincials that they are, regard the South as one large Mississippi. Southerners, with their eye for distinction, place Mississippi in a class by itself. No lie, the average Yankee knows about as much about the South as a hog knows about he Lord's plan for salvation.

New Orleans can wreck your liver and poison your blood. It can destroy you financially. It can shun you or embrace you, teach you tricks of the heart you thought Tennessee Williams was just kidding about. And in August it will break your spirit.

You think I don't have culture just because I'm from Louisiana Believe me, we got culture. We've always had sushi. We just used to call it bait. Southerners make good novelists; they have so many stories because they have so much family and live in torrid heat.

Can you imagine Faulkner writing Absalom, Absalom! under the spell of central air conditioning? One might, indeed, discover a direct relationship between the rise of air conditioning and the decline of the creative fury of the Southern writer.

How may of us, the South's writers-to-be of my generation, were blessed in not having gone deprived of the King James Version of the Bible? Its cadence entered into our ears and our memories for good. The ghost of it lingers in all our books. This is part of why the Southerner talks music and is polite.

As our fellow citizens once observed, Southerners will be polite until they are angry enough to kill you.

The South still has a better chance of working out its problems than the more urbanized rest of the country, simple because more of us still know one another's names.

To me the South is unexplainable. All I can say is that there's a sweetness here, a Southern sweetness - that makes sweet music. If I had to tell somebody who had never been to the South what it was, I'd just have to tell him that it's music from the heart, from the pulse - from the innermost feeling. That's my soul, that's how I sing. And that's the South.