Now that John Ashcroft has been confirmed as U.S. attorney general, the furor over his interview in The Southern Partisan may quickly fade from memory. For Ashcroft's foes, after all, there will be plenty of fresh material as soon as he starts taking action, making choices. What interests me here, in any case, is not what Ashcroft said or didn't say and how that might bear on his fitness to serve, important as those questions doubtless are, but rather the outrage and incomprehension that greeted his remarks in a magazine most Americans have never seen and never will.

I don't read The Southern Partisan myself, but sometimes I pick it up at my local library to see whether a good friend of mine is still on the masthead. He does book reviews and once talked about reviewing my first novel, until he read it and decided that it was neither very Southern nor very partisan. After reading strong criticism of SP in the press, I called my friend to see whether his magazine had really printed t–shirts celebrating Lincoln's assassination. He'd already gone into the Witness Protection Program, but his wife told me that National Public Radio had asked him about the t–shirt just a few nights before.

"Well," he told them in his Carolina drawl, "I didn't buy that one."

Nothing about this situation surprises me. In the mid–eighties I went to Mississippi with a group of Christian college students from the Midwest. We painted houses, laid bricks, taught Bible school to poor kids, and sang with a local choir. At night we slept on the floor of a rickety trailer behind a black church, two to a mattress. I'd grown up in the South, but for most of the group, this was a shocking first encounter with Very Deep Dixie (Orlando at spring break doesn't count). Memory tells me that most of them came from Minnesota and Wisconsin, that they were all blond, and that they had names like Ingrid and Heinrich. But memory usually lies.

In any case, one highlight of the trip was a quasi–civil rights tour, in which a van took us around town showing us how people lived in a city which had only been officially integrated for 20 years. First we looked at a white neighborhood: a dull cluster of 20– or 30– year–old ranch houses on wide streets without sidewalks. Then we drove a mile or so across the tracks to an older part of town, abandoned by the original inhabitants and now occupied by low–income black families. Cameras clicked around me; cries of horror and pity drifted through our cracked windows to the cracked sidewalks below.

I'd seen Southern poverty before. What surprised me was Midwestern self–righteousness. It seemed that for Ingrid and Heinrich, the injustice of small–town Mississippi was a wholly separate, wholly Southern kind of injustice, shocking to the sensibilities of real Americans.

It's funny to me now to think of white 20–year–olds from Minnesota passing judgment on The Southern Way. Had anyone thought of taking them on a tour of a poor black neighborhood in the Midwest? How far from home would they have had to drive to find one? And would they have cried out in shock like Victorian missionaries? Would they have pressed their cameras to their windows and their hands to their hearts?

I live in a small–town in Alabama. Here, whether you're black or white, you have no leisure to consider racial questions from the other side of a moving window. In the newer, more cosmopolitan South (Atlanta, Charlotte, Birmingham), people of various colors and persuasions segregate themselves by geography. Urban sprawl enables whole communities of like individuals to hedge themselves into separate squares on the map. They're divided by highways, rivers, and mountains: physical boundaries that affirm psychological ones. Hail to sprawl, the New South's new answer to racial, economic, and perhaps even philosophical tensions. But in the old rural South, things are different. We still live together, black and white, in contiguous neighborhoods. We shop together. We share libraries and restaurants. We share public schools and Christmas parades. We may not share a lot of conversation, but we share a lot of space.

The Confederacy still lives here, too, holed up with all of her mixed baggage in ancient neighborhoods and trailer parks, wealthy new developments and government–subsidized housing. Just before I began this paragraph, for example, I drove a few blocks to the drugstore to pick up some film. An 18–wheeler roared past me on its way to the local cement plant, its grill glistening with a well–polished Rebel Flag. A car parked in front of the pharmacy had a bumper sticker showing the same flag next to the motto, "Pride, Not Prejudice."