The characters of the title are evidently fictitious and serve as types for Davidson to continue making his point about "Rebels and Yankees." More precisely, to continue the Southern white-people's whining about how put upon they are by the blacks they must tolerate and the Yankees who misunderstand them. Cousin Roderick feels the burden in his life as what appears to be the landlord to sharecroppers:
On his several tracts of land, the gatherings of inheritance and purchase, are some one hundred and fifty Negroes whom he furnishes housing, food, and a little money; they do his labour - men, women, children together - the are his "hand". He is expected to call them by name, to get them out of jail, to doctor them, even sometimes to bury them when "lodge dues" may have lapsed. They are no longer his laves; but though they do not now utter the word, they do not allow him to forget that he has the obligations of a master.All the duties of mastership without the advantages of owning his "hands" outright! How can we fail to pity the generous white landlord?
Davidson pleads for a national attitude of "diversity" in which Cousin Roderick can go about his benevolent life tasks, burdensome though they may be at times, without interference from outsiders who might want to disturb the harmony of his life:
By some it may be said that dark clouds hang over Yankeetown and Rebelville - clouds of menace, maybe of destruction. I do not deny their presence, but my story is not of such clouds. In this strange modern world it may be observed that men talk continually of the good life without producing a specimen of it, to convince an inquirer. Brother Jonathan and Cousin Roderick do not talk about the good life. They lead it. If government is intended to serve human interests, what does it propose to do about them? If science is really intelligent, what does it mean by conniving to put a stigma upon them or to destroy them? I cannot believe that a government or a science which ignores or depreciates them is very trustworthy. I believe that government and science will fail unless they are taken into account. They, and others, are the incarnations of the principle of diversity through which the United States have become something better than Balkan, and without which the phrase "my country" is but a sorry and almost meaningless abstraction.Yes, what's important is for fictional white guys like Brother Jonathan and Cousin Roderick be able to keep living the "good life." If that means that African-Americans in Cousin Roderick's Georgia have to settle for whatever piece of the "good life" that Cousin Roderick is generous enough to toss their way, then, well, as Davidson said in the first installment in the previous issue, they are after all only "amiable children of cannibals" who should be glad of the "continual forbearance and solicitude that the Georgian" like Cousin Roderick felt toward them.
Such was Davidson's Southern Agrarian vision.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, donald davidson, slavery, southern agrarians, us south, white racism
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