cure and familiar. At least this was the case for men, who ruled; women
were often less eager migrants. But altogether, migration, discontinuity
of people-in-place, and a fragility and tentativeness of community charac-
terized antebellum America. This would be hardly less so after the Civil
War and through the twentieth century. Consider a recent sociohistorical
profile of William Faulkner’s home county of Lafayette, in northern Missis-
sippi—that which Faulkner called Yoknapatawpha in four decades of fic-
tion. The historian Don Doyle has revisited Lafayette with grand imagina-
tion and scrupulous, microscopic research. Among the most important of
Doyle’s findings is the persistence of flux in Lafayette’s human history. ‘‘The
mobility of the population suggests a people who rarely put down roots or
congregated often enough to form what we think of as genuine communi-
ties,’’ he writes. ‘‘The peripatetic people of Lafayette County sometimes ap-
pear as little more than an assembly of migrant strangers scattered across
a remote land covered with woods and cotton fields.’’ ‘‘Migrant strangers’’
might well suggest something more sinister than wanderlust, too, recalling
Faulkner’s Rosa Coldfield railing about pretentious newcomers inAbsalom,
Absalom!‘‘And the very fact that [Sutpen] had had to choose respectability
to hide behind was proof enough...that what he fled from must have been
some opposite of respectability too dark to talk about.’’^13 But generally, and
magnified to virtually everywhere, Lafayette County, Mississippi, may also
explain sentimental myths of home-sweet-home, stability, continuity, ‘‘old
families,’’ and obsessive land-loving in the South and perhaps over the con-
tinent. Sentiment, in other words, has compensated for homes and com-
munities dreamed of but hardly realized. InGone with the Wind, Scarlett’s
daddy, Gerald O’Hara, the Irish immigrant, counsels holding onto the land;
much later, after poor Gerald is gone, a momentarily despairing Scarlett de-
terminedly declares, ‘‘I’ll always have Tara!’’ But had she herself not already
commandeered an Atlanta lumber business, ordered the clear-cutting of
Georgia hills to rebuild the city, and become a permanent migrant? Per-
haps it is time we stopped confusing Stephen Foster songs with historical
reality—except ‘‘Oh, Susannah!’’ which is of course about migration.
tHumans have always moved, voluntarily and involuntarily. We describe
migration within parameters called pushes and pulls that have been ca-
nonical in demography for more than a century. The Fujianese, for in-
stance, were pushed from Fujian by population in excess of the carrying
capacity of the landscape and pulled to southeast Asia, California, the Ca-
ribbean, and elsewhere by business and especially laboring opportunities.