'A certain amount of unhinged reality'

 A bit more on Lorraine Hansberry’s point about the values that come through the culture.

Guy Davenport put it this way: “Southerners take a certain amount of unhinged reality for granted.”

Consider just a few of the things that came through the culture when I was a boy:

I’m old enough to remember legal segregation, the separate drinking fountains at the courthouse. You were required to believe what obviously was false: that this country treated people of African descent with justice.

I’m old enough to remember half-literate but fully-frenzied preachers giving detailed accounts of the Judgment Day, with emphasis on the Lake of Fire. You had to believe all that was literally true. But you had to believe, at the same time, that the snake-handling preachers in the river bottoms were religious fanatics.

There were impossibly difficult rules you just had to absorb. A Davenport example: You could talk about movies, but had remember which people you were talking to. Some people thought you were going to hell if you went to the picture show, and that the hellfire might be catching.

I’m talking as if this unhinged reality were in the past. I still witness the most casual acts of racism. And millions of Southerners believe Trump won the election.

Lorraine Hansberry’s point was that when you are thinking about a fictional or dramatic character, you have to keep thinking until you get to values that did not come from the culture.

The stuff that comes through the culture is the stuff you have to endure. It doesn’t get interesting until you get beyond it.