“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 seeing, clearly. “There was in the Southern physical world,” the author observed, “a sort of …