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found out that they weren’t going to let a friend in because he was Jewish, he refused to join. “I just liked the fella,” he says. “I couldn’t believe they were treating him that way, and I didn’t want any part of it.” He didn’t make a big to-do over it; he just walked away.
     

     
    Daddy, then, was the strong and silent type, as they said in the movies. Mama was strong, too, but there was nothing silent about her.
    Despite the difficult circumstances of her youth, Mama had an indomitable sense of pride, a regal bearing and steely dignity that made an enormous impression on me. She was incredibly beautiful: she looked in her youth like Ava Gardner, and pictures from her teenage years, when her family was still struggling, show her in stunning dresses hand-sewn for her by her mother. But what was most impressive about Annie Kate was that iron will of hers. Even into her old age, through nine years of sickness, nothing dimmed the fierce light in Mama’s eyes.
    There’s an old saying in the South: “Remember who you are.” Contained in those four words is an entire way of life that most Southerners feel in their bones. It says that whatever the external facts of your life, your soul can remain untouchable, your character intact, if you refuse to yield to despair and vulgarity. Mama had firm beliefs about the way the world worked, and strict expectations for her children. Virtue, kindliness, and self-discipline were paramount for her.
    From the earliest age, Mama made sure we knew how we were expected to behave. As a schoolgirl, I remember sharing a carpool with other little girls from the neighborhood. One of the girls—whose family, Mama would point out, did not come from the South—got angry one day and called the mom who was driving a shockingly nasty name.
    “Sela, you can’t play with that girl anymore,” Mama told me. With tears running down my cheeks, I pleaded with her to reconsider. But Mama’s decision was final, as it always was. She said she knew this was tough on me, but that sort of behavior was intolerable, and she saw to it that her family distanced itself from children who disrespected adults and themselves so much.
    Today that may seem like an overreaction to some. But Mama was about nothing if she wasn’t about right and wrong, and she had an uncanny ability to judge character. She was always a tough woman, but that toughness sprang from an unflinching realism about human nature. The hardships she endured in childhood led her, for better and worse, to see things in black and white. She wasn’t about to raise children who behaved like “that element.”
    That might sound elitist today, but there’s something deeper at work here. Like all good Southern women, Mama believed in the secret power of manners—that they are the great leveler of social class. Good manners have the power to ennoble a poor man; they enable all who possess them to become, in the Southern writer Florence King’s phrase, “aristocrats of the spirit.” They are the means and proof of grace. And grace my mother had in spades.
    William Alexander Percy, a turn-of-the-century Mississippi writer, wrote that “manners are essential and essentially morals”—a neat summation of Mama’s philosophy of life. It would have been nearly impossible for my mother to separate a neighbor’s code of manners from the quality of his character, the state of his soul. To her, crude or indifferent manners were not simply a matter of ignorance; they were a signal to the world that you were dishonorable, uncouth. Good manners, on the other hand, made social discourse pleasant under the best circumstances, and possible under the worst.
    As with everything Southern, this devotion to social custom is steeped in history. “Rules of etiquette are not created—they are evolved,” notes the 1890 edition of the Blue Book of New Orleans, a social registry. “The gentleness that marks modern social customs is the outcome of the