I came to the town of Louisville, Georgia in June of 2008 to do a show, which I called “A Place Not Unlike Your Own.” I did not find the title presumptuous; nor do I know. In fact, it had a certain amount of resonance among Louisvillians, many of whom professed to like the title more than any of the others that had appeared before them over the last year or so. (Regrettably, some did not like the pictures nearly as well.)

Yet in presuming to link Everyplace together, I left out a great many things. For one, there are still regional differences in a country that likes its malls and computer gadgets more than its lakes and rivers. There are regional accents. There are regional flavors, no matter what the people at Sara Lee will tell you. There are regional sounds – in spite of all of the homogenizing influences that have spread across the land since the advent of sheet music. Or maybe since we marched Creek and Cherokee across the State of Georgia to Oklahoma, where – if we’d just sat down and thought about it – white Americans would eventually wish to live too.

(I didn’t know, until I picked up a local history journal, that a mini-gold rush in the State of Georgia was the trigger for this migration. Those damned Indians were displaced, not for settlers per se, but for prospectors! The gold has petered out since then and doesn’t, for all intents and purposes, matter.)

In Louisville, for example, you mostly do business where you are. There are malls, but the average citizen doesn’t just pick up, as we do in DC, and go to one. If you’ve got to get something, you shop along East Broad Street, a leafy little boulevard that stretches across the Eastern boundary of the town. (Kudzuland awaits those who go behind the stores for something.) Along East Broad, there has been a resurgence of interest and activity. A new eatin’-place has opened there, run by a very resourceful lady who greets every customer and sits him or her down in a seat, or booth, of her choosing. You can play Scrabble there while you eat. And you can listen to Johnny Mathis for as long as you’ve got a table. If you happen to show up on a weekend, you can hear live music of a sort you’d ordinarily have to catch fifty miles up the road, where the town of Augusta sprawls into the famous red clay hills and pine barrens of Old Georgia. Along East Broad, there are law offices, a real estate company, a bookstore, a small “fashion” outlet, and one of the town’s two Chinese restaurants. A trendy home-furnishings emporium and art gallery opened the week my show did and has been doing very well. Under its punched-tin ceiling, you’ll find eccentric sculpture, shapely baskets, and paintings that are not so bad that you can’t admire them for the honest attempt they make at portraying a tilted head or sun-drenched farmland. Down the street is the post office and, beyond that, the two garages that’ll fix your car or truck. The place is ideally suited to small budgets and walk-around traffic, though, during the summer, people do their errands in cars. It was hotter in Georgia than it was in DC, though temperatures on the thermometer were identical. (The sensation of burning in hell is very much in the perceiving.)

There are a couple of banks in town, but there is one dominant institution, which grew up there and has rippled outward to embrace communities of similar size and aspirations. The bank’s elder statesman had passed away some weeks before I arrived and mourning was general – and genuine. He died in his sleep after spending some eighty-four years in the community. Criticisms of the man were rare, and rendered sotto voce. I could not tell whether the hesitation came from fear or reverential enthusiasm for a great community leader. I suspect there were elements of both. Son has assumed the father’s mantle and wears it easily. Some people didn’t think he could do it – or at least do it with older man’s panache. He is likely to prove them all wrong.

You can take lunch at a renovated hotel that also functions as the bank’s main office. With its longish tables and auditorium-style dining-room – which adjoins a smaller one that’s adjacent to the steam-tables - it is the picture of a fine little family-friendly restaurant. And it is very genteel - just as you would expect it to be. The lady who brings you tea knows your name after your first visit and everybody goes from one table to another bearing the news of the day. You don’t have to dress to go there, but almost everybody is in his or her business attire and looks casually elegant. The cooking is not strictly Southern, even if staples such as okra and cornbread are always at the buffet. I was able to put together a goodly salad from ingredients that didn’t stop with lettuce and tomato.

Thirty years ago, I would not have had such a choice. Nor am I sure whether this is a good thing.

Church-life in the town is All. As many have said, if you don’t choose a place of worship and show up there now and then, people’ll think there’s something weird about you – though they’ll be polite to you and ask how your kitchen is coming along. (No home renovation project goes unnoticed there. In fact, nothing that makes noise, requires a pulse, or emits waves of human energy goes unnoticed.) And for such a small place, Louisville has got one of everything except a synagogue – though Jews have passed through there and are remembered for it. The Methodist church is possibly the town’s most spectacular place of worship, with Tiffany windows and woodwork – as someone from a rival denomination observed – to die for. But the Episcopal church is rather fetching too; it’s all white and stucco-sided, as if it needed an extra layer of something to stay cool during the summer - and all the other months of the year except January and February. The others I don’t remember because, heathen that I am, I don’t pay much attention to organized religion, or any other for that matter. I never got the habit and am under the impression that I am either not worth saving, or that salvation is not possible. I’ll have to see later on.

Flannery O’Connor once said something about the South being unique in how blacks and whites have to learn to treat one another. And I guess that still holds. In Louisville, blacks and whites don’t live together as they do here in DC. They do, however, mingle in commercial situations and are, from all appearances, comfortable with one another. I watched a hardware store clerk wait on a black man and get irritated with him – not because he was black, but because he was being so damned literal-minded. He, the black man, wouldn’t accept the fact that he could have done just as well with this one thing as the other and kept insisting on his way. I doubt if a white man would have tolerated a black man doing this fifty years ago.

On the other hand, there isn’t much social interaction between “the races.” I talked to the lady who cleaned the biggest house in town while I waited for some of my workshop pupils to show up for a class. I was invited to stay at this house and was both daunted and entertained by its old-world magnitude, which groaned with every large and ponderous heirloom an old Southern mansion ought to have. Portraits of its builder stared down from walls that were, no doubt, feet thick. Old lace and silver were out to be polished, admired, or examined for flaws only a serious appraiser might discern and then forget to talk about. This old-world magnitude had been the breadth and bailiwick of God knows how many sturdy black women over the years. Yet the lady who would stand at the unofficial front door of the house talking to me had been there for quite a while. She knew – as most servants will – the house far better than the people who merely occupied it. It was here that she changed the bed linens and scrubbed the toilet; here she reached under a sideboard for something she’d dropped and had rolled away from her. Here she gathered up The Augusta Chronicle and other odds and ends for presentation whenever the lady of the house arrived. There was obviously a cordial relationship between employer and employee, but it was not a social one. The cleaning lady talked about “the family” respectfully, but with a remoter spirit than one applies to friends and loved ones. The cleaning-lady was calmly observant and not self-pitying - a temptation that might be overwhelming to those whose possible aspirations are denied. She did what she did and reserved as much time for herself as she could get. What she did during the off-hours she could wangle away from the various house-cleaning jobs she didn’t talk about. She could have thought I wouldn’t be interested. More likely, she wanted to keep something to herself.

Compared to their counterparts in larger cities, black people in Louisville don’t seem to live badly – if you measure good and bad by an economic yardstick alone. But you don’t see them in the park where I painted this picture – or any other part of town except their own. There is a certain measure of defiance among the young. The practice of driving through town with rap music at an ear-splitting volume is common, as it is in DC and all of America perhaps. For the first week I was there, I kept on seeing “stray” dogs and was concerned about them. But as I walked around, I traced every dog to its owner. The whites say it is common among certain kinds of black people to let their dogs just roam around. They say this with just the proper balance of condemnation and regret.

As to my original premise about there being regional differences, I can’t help but think that I’ve just listed a few. As to the picture, it could be a lot of places – though the short-leafed pines that surround field and school-yard are most definitely peculiar to the region, where the lumber industry seeded the old cotton fields with trees that are so beautifully coordinated that they march row upon row to the saw. Oh, and the park from which I painted the picture had no litter. Or graffiti. Or people who “aren’t supposed to be there.” Except me perhaps.