The most famous hunting scenes in Southern literature must surely belong to “The Bear.” William Faulkner’s novella, which he began publishing versions of in 1935, chronicles the yearslong pursuit of Old Ben, a giant black bear with a maimed foot and fifty-two lumps where shotgun slugs had failed to pierce his hide, like the broken harpoons bristling Moby Dick. Every November, in the “gray half-liquid” of autumn in Mississippi, Faulkner’s hunters convene at a camp at the edge of the Delta for the chance to fell Old Ben at last, engaging in what they see as “the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules.”
As historian Julia Brock shows, in Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South, those rules were neither ancient nor immitigable—not in the market-hunting heyday of the 1870s and ’80s, when the novella was set; not in the 1930s, when Faulkner wrote it, when Mississippi’s black bear population had dwindled to a dozen or so animals; and, of course, not in the present day, when hunting practices are—in theory, at least—strictly regulated by law and science.
How and why those rules emerged and evolved are what’s in Brock’s scholarly crosshairs. “In a region in which roughly 5.3 million people have hunting licenses, there exists a broad section of southerners (and not just men) whose annual calendar is defined by hunting seasons and related social events: the dove hunt, the dog trial, the night hunt, the hunting camp weekend,” she writes. These rituals and pastimes, she notes, are often tagged as “traditional.” “But to put what is now a set of largely recreational…activities in the category of ‘traditional,’” she writes, “masks a complex past defined by dramatic change in law, custom, and practice.”
Brock, who teaches history at the University of Alabama, focuses mostly on the Progressive Era (from the 1890s into the 1930s), when those changes were most dramatic, and tracks three historical figures through them: John H. Wallace, Jr., the architect of Alabama’s game and fish laws, who fused his conservation ethics with a virulent strain of racism; Charlie Young, a hunting guide in Georgia’s Red Hills region who observed the rise of the elite sportsman in the South (often a Northern industrialist) and the related advent of the “hunting plantation”; and Fannye A. Cook, a scientist, teacher, and friend of Eudora Welty’s who made protecting her native Mississippi’s wildlife her life’s work.
That the state of Mississippi had only a few more bears in all its woods than Memphis’s Peabody Hotel had ducks in its lobby is just one data point to show why game laws were needed. Another: In 1906, as John Wallace was struggling to convince Alabamians of the merits of hunting regulations, he estimated that market hunters were shipping half a million Alabama quail to out-of-state restaurants. The passenger pigeon was less than a decade from extinction. “We have a strong tendency,” as the writer and hunter Jim Harrison once put it, “to act the weasel in the hen house.”
But some Southerners, then as now, were skeptical of centralized regulation. “Too much law and not enough liberty,” as one Mississippian protested hunting statutes. While Wallace successfully appealed to his fellow Alabamians’ better angels, evangelizing for clean water and protected habitat and the ethics of fair chase, he also appealed to their baser natures by promoting game laws—which determined who was allowed to hunt and where—to fortify the racial caste system. In 1912, five years after Alabama enacted its first game and fish laws, Wallace boasted that “the great army of pot-hunters and negroes that at one time patrolled the state, in quest of game, has practically been disarmed.”
That’s just one component of the “complex past” Brock was referring to above. Over the years, game and fish laws exposed other fault lines: between rich and poor, landed and landless, utilitarians and mutualists, bird hunters and bird-watchers. In her afterword, Brock quotes Durrell Smith, a Georgia hunting guide and dog trainer who founded the Minority Outdoor Alliance in 2020: “It wasn’t just enough to say, ‘The outdoors are for everyone.’ Okay, great. But what does that actually mean?” Game laws, like environmental laws, have served as tethers between the natural world and the political arena, and as with all matters political, power and access have held sway. Only by understanding the history of hunting and the politics that shaped it, Brock suggests, can we come to “an open season to reimagine the field.”
Culture for Dinner
Flavors and stories simmer in a new cookbook
T hree is a magic number for the food historian Jessica B. Harris. In her gorgeous new cookbook, Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine (Clarkson Potter), she weaves together a trio of major culinary influences: Native American, European, and African, plus many subgroups within them. “Each brought much to the bubbling cauldron of cultures that would spawn the nation’s food,” she writes. “The result, as we all know, is savory and varied indeed.” She peppers in words from her many food-world friends and beyond, threading in colorful photography and recipes to prove her tasty points: venison stew seasoned with mushrooms; succotash in which she substitutes African okra for lima beans; classic New Orleans pralines. —CJ Lotz Diego
Garden & Gun has an affiliate partnership with bookshop.org and may receive a portion of sales when a reader clicks to buy a book.
