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beating him on the back with a Fool’s Scepter from which dangled two gilded pig bladders; or the figure of Columbus dancing drunkenly on top of a huge revolving globe of the world; or Revelry dancing on an enormous upturned wineglass—wouldn’t you see the world in different terms, too?
    South of the Salt Line
    The South of every country is different, and the south of every South is even more so. I come from that stretch of Gulf Coast South which is another kingdom. Mobile is a Separate Kingdom. We are not North America; we are North Haiti. Because we are so different from the rest of the United States. The spirit is closer to the Caribe than it is even to Montgomery. I mean, with so many black people, banana trees, Carnival, corrupt politics, and all the little cottages in every color of the rainbow—pinks and corals and purple and turquoise—like Southern belles in ball gowns. It’s the Caribe. It’s another climate.
    Someone driving southward will note a change about fifty miles before reaching the coast: a change in vegetation, a whiff of something in the air. It’s called “the salt line,” that invisible frontier between the Black Belt and the coastal plains. Coming south, at a given moment, you suddenly finish with hills and you’re on flat, level ground, and then you will begin to see palmettos and you begin to see certain large-leafed swamp things, and if the wind is right, you smell the salt air from the Gulf. You smell the salt. Then you know you’re south of the salt line.
    And of course my dear friend, the writer Elizabeth Spencer, wrote a novel called The Salt Line. I met her in Rome. She had a fellowship at the American Academy, and she was writing that book about Rome they made into a film. The Light in the Piazza, or whatever it’s called. But she also wrote The Salt Line, where she revived that nineteenth-century phrase. It’s the idea that attitudes change, life is different, when you cross over the salt line. She is from a small town in Mississippi, and she is Something Else Again. She is not the usual Southern belle. She is not the amusing, intellectual Southern maiden lady. She is not the domestic Southern lady. She is not the socially conscious Southern lady. She is a little law unto herself. For many years she lived in Canada, and I think she got Canadized a little bit. Miss Elizabeth. She was very jolly when I knew her in Rome. We had many laughing evenings together.
    But that’s an ancient Gulf Coast concept, the salt line. It’s probably Indian. Because you know the Indians used to come down to get salt. They dug salt from somewhere around this part of the world because there was a salt deposit here. And I guess when they did their little expeditions from up there to come get salt, they could smell the Gulf and knew they were crossing the salt line. And the sailors on the riverboats, you see, they would know they were getting close to the coast because they could smell it.
    It’s a genuine frontier. It might be the frontier between a somewhat Anglo-Saxon South and a world which is a mélange of French, Spanish, English, and Confederate, with a thoroughbass of African and Indian. Or an invisible defining line between the Sunday South and the Saturday-night South. It means Mardi Gras and parties on this side, and it means Sunday school on the other. On that side of the line you have the plantations and the slaves and the cotton and all that. It’s the landed gentry with a rather British country house style. This group goes to call on that group. And that group goes to call on this group. They ride horses or carriages or whatever twenty miles for dinner. All that English country life—Southern country life ain’t so different. But when you get to the coast, you see, you’ve got pirates and drama and Carnival and fishing fleets and smuggling and so many different skies and thunderstorms, like this constantly changing pageant in the background. It’s another country. And that’s