By Elizabeth Broadbent

I.

When the Dalai Lama flew over the state of South Carolina, he looked out the window as the land unfurled below him. For a long time, he said nothing. Finally, he shook his head and remarked only, So much blood in this earth. 

I’ve been told that story several times by several people. The Dalai Lama never did visit South Carolina, as best as I can figure, though he did fly into Atlanta to see Jimmy Carter in 1979. It doesn’t much matter. The story’s true in the way the best stories are—it’s plausible, and it smacks you hard in the face with some essential truth about being in the world. Southern history is a blood-soaked horror of war and enslavement, death and despair. 

That horror leaked into our land. It remains, sure as soil and still inscribed upon it: in Richmond’s picturesque cobblestones, laid by the enslaved; and in Mississippi’s unfurling cotton fields, watered by sweat and grief. It lingers in postcard-pretty vistas of battlefield parks, their staid graves lined up like small, white teeth; in arrowheads plowed from fields or grubbed from muddy riverbanks. It glares from bronze monuments of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and rises defiant in Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War. Amid our moss-draped trees and white-columned houses, horror accuses us from bombed churches, from rope-scarred oaks, from sacred rivers dammed to build world-swallowing bombs. We Southerners can no more deny history than we can defy gravity. 

At its raw, red heart, history is a collection of stories; privilege sifts those stories and transforms some into fact. Narratives that endanger privilege—that empower the repressed, voice the unspeakable, or accuse the powerful—are subsumed, buried, and hidden. But those unvictorious stories refuse to disappear, and every writer knows that stories have a gravity of their own. Narrative’s pull warps and reshapes everything snagged in its orbit. It anchors us; it bends time. 

Violence, repression, and bloodshed lurk beneath every Southern story. Of course that horror leached into our literature. 

“Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people,” Harry Crews says in A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. “It is all—good and bad—carted up and brought along from one generation to the next.” If history is an accretion of blood of repression, that trauma flows from the collective to the particular, then downstream in what William Faulkner calls “a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son” (Absalom, Absalom!). Violation doesn’t end. Psychologists note that in addition to losing time and language, generational trauma also destroys the narratives that form identity. In a very real way, Southern Gothic stories embody attempts to recreate those narratives and hence remake identity. We regain control of our lives by reframing our narratives, both personal and historical. 

Tell about the South, and you talk about generational trauma, blood, oppression, and cyclical harm. Southern Gothic exists because the South remains a land defined by equal measures of love and violence. Writing about it means writing through that love and pain to freedom. It’s a stark act of survival. Dragging the buried truth to daylight, we find ourselves. 

II.

In many ways, current Southern Gothic finds itself by acknowledging this legacy of bloodshed. Richmonder Ellen Glasgow coined the genre’s name in 1935 with her essay “Heroes and Monsters,” decrying those authors she calls “professional rebels against gentility” with their “aimless violence” and “fantastic nightmares.” Eudora Welty found the term so derogatory that she rejected it, saying, “They better not call me that!” But the “fabulous Southern monster” that Glasgow describes still stalks the present day. Men team up across racial lines to avenge the murder of their gay sons (S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears). Grotesque police chiefs batter suspects and refuse to do their job (in my own novel, Blood Cypress). And Lady Chablis, most fabulous figured monster of them all, takes to the stage and roars, “Hey, bitches!” (John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil). Sorry, Ellen. Ninety years later, we’re gothicing harder than we’ve ever gothiced. 

Welty’s pearl-clutching is laughable now, but it’s no coincidence that modern readers have forgotten her and Glasgow in favor of their contemporary, the shrewish, devoutly Catholic Flannery O’Connor. Those women would say we’re simply meaner and baser, more prone to laugh at the theft of wooden legs, more gleeful over men with no pleasure but meanness. We’re bloody-minded, they’d say. 

Exactly. 

What do you write?, people ask at parties. 

Southern Gothic, I reply, smiling like the debutante I never was. 

White Richmond ladies conjure graceful plantations with kudzu climbing white columns. They smile back, and they don’t think about enslavement or repression. Maybe they ignore it. Social inheritors of Ellen Glasgow, these white-haired, blue-eyed women maintain an unshakable belief in the bulwark of artifice. Their pearls hold back the darkness. I’m sure they suffer for it, but they don’t talk about that, at least to me. Patriarchy and white supremacy mistake civility for morality. Intergenerational violence, writ large, scrawls itself on the personal and specific. Violence does not happen in a vacuum. Trauma resurfaces. 

Like abuse, our stories are unspeakable. 

III.

These unspeakable Southern stories twin pain with love. Abused children often can’t help but love their parents, and we Southern Gothic authors can’t help but love the South—perhaps not Southern society, but the land, or at least language about it. We wallow in its soupy swamp mud, its slick red clay, firm not in a belief of any nameable god, but sure of our genesis in that primordial Southern earth and our eventual return to it. Flip open any Southern Gothic novel, and you’ll find a paean to land or sky or sea. You’ll also find that land ruined by suffering, and the people who loved it broken or ruined or collapsed and laid waste. We love what hurts us, and we shape that pain into a narrative.

Until he died in 2016, South Carolinians knew Pat Conroy as the state’s favorite literary son. Conroy used his hellishly abusive childhood as fodder for a lifetime of fiction, which ranged from autobiography (The Water is Wide, The Boo), to thinly-disguised, semi-autobiography (The Great Santini), to “I stole this from real life and wrapped it in fiction” (The Prince of Tides, Beach Music), to novels and memoirs. He wrote obsessively not only about Southern subjects, but about the particularities of his own Southern disasters wrapped up in lyrical prose. With all his enormous, encompassing heart, Conroy loved his family, and he loved the South. He also loathed them both with the bone-deep hate of a beaten child. 

Conroy’s family frequently objected to the thinly disguised, unflattering characters who peopled his books. In My Writing Life, he notes that his sister-in-laws were particularly sweet to him, not out of kindness, but for fear he’d turn his pen on them. Conroy’s portrait of his narcissistic mother so enraged one sister that the author never reconciled with her. However, the story of his father’s abuse in The Great Santini led to Don Conroy’s public reformation. Conroy loved his father in the end, but Don had grown beyond the man who beat him. 

Conroy often marries the story of his brutal childhood with Southern archetypes: the alcoholic father incapable of articulating any feeling but rage, and that with his fists, insistent that his sons maintain impossible standards of masculinity. The remotely beautiful mother, obsessed with appearances, desperate for a position that a lack of both social class and money makes impossible. These parents become avatars of the Southern society whose particular historical atrocities formed them, Conroy suggests. You could go so far as to imagine that they become the South itself: that in The Prince of Tides, Henry and Lila Wingo are both the main characters’ abusive parents and the destructive incarnations of the South at large. 

Faulkner called it “that old, fierce pull of blood.” Our parents hurt us. We love them anyway, because identity demands it. We hate them because identity demands that, too. 

IV. 

Southern Gothic stories not only let us reshape identity. They also give us the chance to examine our new stories against other narratives. John Vercher’s Devil is Fine (2024) involves bodies unearthed on a forgotten plantation. At the same time, Devil is Fine was nominated a finalist for the Virginia Literary Award in fiction, and Louisiana’s Nottoway Plantation caught fire. A Virginian, John Randolph, forced enslaved laborers to build it, and until that burning, it had been used as a tourist attraction and resort destination. Plantation: three blood-soaked, pain-tongued syllables. White couples held weddings at Nottoway. Now it’s nothing more than a blackened concrete foundation. 

Vercher’s book examines the painful legacy of colonization, of being forced into narratives not your own. We have to reclaim our stories, he suggests, reframe them, and rewrite them. When she coined the term “Southern Gothic,” Ellen Glasgow resented “new” writers for creating stories that challenged stories of Southern gentility and romantic, upper-class chivalry. Extrapolate, and her sentiment aligns with those postmodern Confederati lamenting Nottoway’s burning. While Glasgow’s criticism lacks overt racism, she clings to the Southern romanticism that conceals it. Metaphorically, Glasgow becomes the narcissistic parent, one mortified by the abused child who dares disrupt a carefully constructed artifice (and Southerners do love artifice). Her words square off with the Dalai Lama’s—not with the truth itself, but in his audacity to speak it. And in turn, with my own audacity to retell it. 

But that’s what Southern Gothic writers do. We retell the South: reframing the pain, recreating our history, both personal and societal, attempting to make sense of the forces that set us in this particular fallen garden of Eden. Abused children recover, in part, by retaking power from those who hurt them. We reclaim their stories. Southern Gothic provides a voice for those submerged histories, for violence hidden and repressed.  

We cannot help but love what makes us. When those same forces wound us, we cannot help but hate them, too. Our parents or the South—they twin, blend, blur. They become one, like they were for Conroy. 

In the last lines of Absalom, Absalom!, after Quentin has reconstructed and retold the story of Thomas Sutpen’s self-damnation, his roommate Shreve says, “Now I want you to tell me just one thing more: Why do you hate the South?”

Quentin’s caught off-guard. “‘I don’t hate it,’ Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately. ‘I don’t hate it,’ he said. I don’t hate it, he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”

We love it, and we hate it. It made us, and it broke us. There is still blood on this earth. For those of us who haven’t left, especially those of us who are marginalized—by race, by gender, by sexuality or neurodivergence or disability—the South continues to break us every day. It hurts us, but we remain in this fallen garden sown with blood. Every Southern Gothic author sits in the cold and the dark with Shreve’s question. 

We see the blood in the earth—the blood of history, the blood from our own red veins. 

We love it in spite of ourselves.