Back in the halcyon days of comparative history centered on the Ameri-
can South, C. Vann Woodward brilliantly addressed opportunities (and
deep problems) presented by the works of the Brazilian scholar Gilberto
Freyre, who had been educated at Baylor and Columbia and who cherished
the plantation patriarchies of his own Old North and of our Old South.
Woodward generously supported analytical studies of plantation societies
around the globe but rightly suggested cautionary perspective. ‘‘The culture
contrast,’’ he wrote, ‘‘suggests setting a flock of gray and white mocking-
birds down in a tropical jungle filled with gaudy parakeets.’’ New England-
ers, he averred, may have found ‘‘life along the James, the S[u]wannee, or
the Lower Mississippi...lushly exotic and outlandishly bizarre. But set
side-by-side with life along the Amazon, the colors of antebellum society
in the Old South fade to temperate-zone grays and russets and muted saf-
frons that went well enough with magnolias or Spanish moss, but were not
quite the thing for promenades under palm and breadfruit.’’^1
Conceded. Yet confined to our own continent, we may still legitimately
think about, say, New Orleans (pre-Katrina) versus, say, Bath, Maine. Both
are lovely riverside cities, Bath much the cleaner but with few promenades
(of which the French Quarter and Garden District have many) and scarce
mockingbird sighting. Woodward’s juxtaposition of tropical ‘‘gaudy para-
keets’’ with mockingbirds as avian symbol of the South was simultaneously
appropriate and wrong. Appropriate because of traditional, popular-
cultural allusions that include the nineteenth-century song ‘‘Listen to the
Mockingbird’’ (reportedly a favorite of Abraham Lincoln, who also liked
‘‘Dixie’’) and innumerable associations of the birds with (as Woodward
wrote) magnolias and Spanish moss, in print and film. The mockingbird is
also the official avian of five southern states: Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi,
Tennessee, and Florida. Yet this creature, a resident, nonmigrating animal,
is found over most of the contiguous United States except the Pacific North-
west, northern Idaho, and western Montana—although, it is true, mocking-
bird counts are always highest in the South and Southwest.^2
Gray is indeed the mockingbird’s predominant color, particularly on the
head and upper parts. Under parts are whitish, and the bird has a long black
tail with white on the outer feathers, black legs, white wing bars, and yel-