After driving up I-95 from South Florida toward Washington, D.C., somewhere between the boiled-peanut signs, the billboards promising salvation, and the exits containing more Waffle Houses than seems mathematically possible, I began wondering:
Is Southern hospitality actually real?
I think it might be.
This conclusion wasn’t reached at a Charleston garden party or over mint juleps on the veranda of an antebellum mansion. It came from the more reliable laboratory of American culture: restaurants, candy stores, hotel elevators and random encounters with people who had absolutely no reason to talk to us.
Brunswick, Georgia
Our first evidence came in Brunswick, Georgia, where we stopped for lunch at Indigo Shanty.
The food itself was worth getting off I-95 for—creative Southern cooking with enough personality to remind you that the interstate exit signs do not constitute a representative sample of American cuisine.
And then there was dessert.
Georgia Peach Pound Cake.
Who knew?
I’ve spent decades eating desserts and had somehow missed the possibility that peaches and pound cake might constitute one of civilization’s great achievements. It was one of those desserts where the first bite makes everyone at the table stop talking briefly—a considerable accomplishment in our family.
But what I remember almost as much as the food was our waitress.
She didn’t merely take our order and disappear. We started talking. She told us that her family had lived in the area for generations—going all the way back to colonial times.
Colonial times!
In South Florida, someone who arrived in 1987 is considered a pioneer.
A patron joined the conversation. Later, we wandered into a candy store and started talking with the owner. Again, there was no apparent objective to any of this. Nobody was networking. Nobody was collecting followers. Nobody glanced at a phone after 23 seconds to indicate that our allotted social-interaction period had expired.
They just talked to us.
Warmly. Curiously. Naturally.
It felt different.
Then came Florence
We stopped overnight in Florence, South Carolina, at a Hampton Inn.
There, Kathy and I got into an elevator with an older gentleman.
Now, in New York, the universally understood rules of elevator behavior are fairly straightforward:
Enter.
Face forward.
Study the floor numbers with extraordinary concentration.
Do not acknowledge that you and three other mammals are temporarily confined inside a steel box.
This gentleman apparently had not received the memo.
We started talking.
It turned out he served on the local school board and had just come from a meeting organizing a program at the local schools designed to help students develop specialized skills and give opportunities to students who might otherwise be disadvantaged.
By the time the elevator doors opened, we weren’t discussing the weather. We were talking about education, opportunity and how schools can identify abilities in children whose circumstances might otherwise prevent those abilities from being recognized.
Think about that.
We got onto an elevator expecting transportation between floors.
We got off having had a conversation about American education policy.
At a Hampton Inn.
That’s when I began to suspect that Southern hospitality might be more than an advertising campaign.
Maybe Southern hospitality really does exist
There is certainly mythology involved.
The South has spent generations cultivating an image of porches, sweet tea, “yes ma’am,” neighbors bringing casseroles and strangers asking where you’re from.
But stereotypes sometimes originate from observable cultural differences.
In much of the South, particularly in smaller cities and towns, conversation with strangers still seems to be considered normal social behavior.
Eye contact isn’t necessarily an invasion of privacy.
A question isn’t necessarily an interrogation.
And telling someone you’ve never met something about yourself doesn’t require first accepting their LinkedIn invitation.
Compare that with a large Northeastern city.
Try standing on a Manhattan sidewalk and asking a passing stranger:
“So, where are y’all from?”
You may learn several colorful new expressions, none traditionally associated with hospitality.
This doesn’t mean New Yorkers are unfriendly. Quite the contrary. If you collapse on Lexington Avenue, six people will probably help you before the ambulance arrives.
But if you’re standing perfectly upright and appear healthy, they expect you to keep moving.
The New York social contract is:
I’ll help you if you need me. Otherwise, don’t block the sidewalk.
The Southern version seems closer to:
We’ve got two minutes. Why shouldn’t we talk?
Why?
Climate probably contributes.
For generations, warm weather encouraged more social life to occur outside—on porches, sidewalks, church steps, front yards and town squares. People saw one another.
But climate can’t explain everything.
Miami is warm.
Nobody has ever merged onto I-95 in Miami and thought, What a delightful expression of communal warmth.
Population density matters. Pace matters. Smaller communities create repeated interactions. You encounter acquaintances, neighbors and people who know people you know. Reputation becomes a form of social currency.
Religion probably matters too.
Drive long enough through Georgia and South Carolina and you discover that Christianity is not exactly keeping a low profile.
Jesus competes vigorously with personal-injury lawyers for billboard space.
Churches historically served not only as places of worship but as centers of community life. Greeting strangers, asking about families, feeding visitors, helping neighbors and making newcomers feel welcome became behaviors reinforced generation after generation.
And then there’s the complicated part
Southern hospitality also exists alongside a much darker Southern history.
The mythology of the gracious South—good manners, gallantry, hospitality, the gracious host on the veranda—became entangled after the Civil War with romanticized memories of the Old South and the Confederacy.
That mythology could describe a society as genteel and courteous while ignoring the rather enormous question:
Hospitable to whom?
Slavery, Jim Crow and racial violence coexist uneasily with the romantic image of Southern graciousness.
But that doesn’t make the friendliness of a waitress in Brunswick today artificial.
Cultures inherit traditions from complicated histories and transform them. A social custom doesn’t have to endorse everything about the society in which it originated.
And the Florence encounter struck me as particularly interesting in that context.
Here was an older Southern man, serving on a school board, enthusiastically talking to two complete strangers about helping disadvantaged students acquire specialized skills and opportunities.
Whatever the origins of Southern social customs, cultures don’t remain frozen in 1861.
Dolly understood this
Then there’s Dolly Parton.
Dolly possesses perhaps the purest modern version of Southern charm.
She somehow gives millions of people the impression that if they happened to sit beside her at a diner, she’d actually want to hear about their grandchildren.
Her warmth isn’t naïveté. She’s funny, perceptive and perfectly capable of delivering a sharp line. But she wraps intelligence in friendliness rather than using intelligence to establish distance.
That feels distinctly Southern.
And think about several modern presidents raised in the South.
Jimmy Carter had the Georgia smile and Sunday-school manner. Bill Clinton became famous for his appetite for personal interaction—the political equivalent of the man at the barbecue who somehow remembers the names of your children three years later. George W. Bush practiced the Texas variation: nicknames, informality, jokes and the impression that he’d rather be talking over barbecue than standing behind a lectern.
Three very different presidents with very different politics.
Yet each understood an important Southern social instinct:
Make the other person comfortable before expecting him to listen to you.
It’s an effective human skill.
Not surprisingly, it’s also an effective political one.
But is it sincere?
Probably about as sincere as any deeply learned cultural behavior.
A New Yorker isn’t necessarily angry when he says, “C’mon, buddy, move.”
And a Southerner isn’t necessarily offering lifelong friendship when she calls you “honey.”
Culture gives us scripts.
The interesting part is what happens after the script.
In Brunswick and Florence, people kept talking.
The waitress told us about generations of her family.
The candy-store owner lingered in conversation.
The man in the Hampton Inn elevator told us about his schools and the children he hoped they could help.
Nobody was trying to sell us anything. Nobody knew us. We were simply two travelers who would probably be back on I-95 the next morning.
Yet they invested a few minutes in us anyway.
That felt real.
The I-95 experiment
Maybe one of the best ways to understand America is not to fly over it.
Drive through it.
Get off I-95.
Ignore the interstate landscape of identical gas stations and fast-food restaurants. Stop in Brunswick. Spend the night in Florence. Walk into a locally owned store. Ask somebody a question that can’t be answered with yes or no.
You’ll pass signs advertising pecans, boiled peanuts, fireworks and eternal salvation.
Eventually somebody will start talking to you.
Not networking.
Not posting.
Not texting.
Talking.
And if you’re lucky, you’ll learn something about a family that’s been in Georgia since colonial times.
Or about a South Carolina school trying to give disadvantaged kids opportunities they might otherwise never have.
Or about the person standing next to you in an elevator.
And occasionally you’ll learn something truly important:
Georgia Peach Pound Cake is magnificent.
For a country increasingly populated by people staring silently into six-inch screens, perhaps the most appealing thing about Southern hospitality isn’t that it’s Southern.
It’s that it’s hospitality.
Somewhere between Brunswick and Florence, I realized how much I had missed it.
