ing chapter titled ‘‘Pleasures.’’ Southerners embraced leisure, fun, and self-
indulgence. They adored dancing, drinking (rum, brandy, and whiskey of
all sorts, good and bad), tobacco (cigars and pipes, the chew, and dipping
snuff), gambling (cards, sporting events, and billiards), rough sports, riding
horses (instead of walking), the company of many dogs, and talking (as end-
lessly as the Irish) about anything. And boys and men fished and hunted,
often (it was widely reported) to the neglect of farming and business. A
concerned father, for instance, sought to discourage his son from constant
hunting and trapping in the forest—in lieu of school and punctuality at
suppertime. Finally the father baited one of the boy’s traps with an arith-
metic text, but the boy was unpersuaded by the rare snare. Travelers in
the rural South remarked on the extreme youth of expert marksmen, often
mentioning the trick of ‘‘barking off’’ squirrels—that is, firing at a tree limb
close to the animal’s head so that the creature would die from the concus-
sion of flying bark rather than a bullet wound.
Such mercy (if that be its name) did not prohibit, apparently, such hunt-
ers from the ‘‘pleasure’’ of blood sports. These included bearbaiting, the
teasing and often wounding of chained or caged bears; dog fighting; and
especially cockfighting.^5 I myself recall a caged bear outside a South Caro-
lina tavern and take-out as recently as . When I emerged from the busi-
ness with a six-pack, my companion, an inebriated ex-army buddy, was pro-
voking the bear. On opposite sides of the cage, man and bear had climbed
several feet off the ground, growling at each other and shaking the cage
dangerously.
Dogfighting may seem too ordinary and ubiquitous to be called sport,
but men have trained dogs to fight one another—out of pride and in order
to bet—for a very long time. Late in the twentieth century, when blood
sports had become illegal as well as abhorrent to most people in the West-
ern world, a well-known essayist and fiction writer, Harry Crews, Georgia-
born and a professor in Florida, relished his notoriety as a practitioner
of falconry and an admirer of fighting dogs. Cockfighting, meanwhile, en-
joyed enormous popularity among all social classes well into the twentieth
century. In Alex Haley’sRoots, one of Haley’s enslaved ancestors is called
Chicken George because of his skill at raising, training, and handling fero-
cious gamecocks—all belonging to his North Carolinian master, of course
—for high-stakes derbies. Almost a century later, the wealthy business-
man and planter E. R. Alexander of Tuskegee, Alabama, employed a black
man comparable to Chicken George throughout the s and s, and
the Varner-Alexander Papers at the Alabama Department of Archives and