“You have to read this book to understand the South,” my freshman-year history teacher told me. In my adolescent mind, she was herself the South — a chubby cheerful busy spinster whose family had run a small town upstate a generation before and whose memory extended into countless other families’ intimate affairs. At fourteen I didn’t want to understand the South, just to escape it. But school seemed to be a means to that end, and I was enough of a teacher’s pet to fulfill what I took to be an assignment: To read W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, published six decades prior, on the double-eve of World War Two and the author’s suicide.

The book shook me. Cash analyzed the Southern mind — that is, the mind of the white male Southerner, the mind of someone like himself, or, I worried, like me — as rather a refusal of thought. The South, as Cash saw it, was not congenial to thinking, or indeed to …