Different Down There

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VERY 20 years or so, America reintroduces itself to the Deep South. The details of the en- counter shift with each era—in the Twenties, it was the great Mississippi flood; in the Fifties and Sixties, lynch- ings and murders and civil-rights sit- ins—but the effect is always the same: Pictures and news accounts of a strange, backward place come flashing over the wires, and America is once again united with its colorful, impoverished, and pos- sibly crazy old aunt.