By ROBERT FRIEDMAN, Perspective Editor
Published December 4, 2005
I met Aunt Bee, sort of.
I encountered Frances Bavier and her bodyguard/chauffeur about 25 years ago at a community event in Siler City, N.C., where Bavier bought a big house and retired after the Andy Griffith Show ended its run. Bavier had wary eyes. She didn't offer me a slice of pie. Her bodyguard looked like he might offer me a knuckle sandwich if I came any closer.
I had no right to expect Bavier to exude the Southern hospitality of her Mayberry character. According to a lovely story by Chip Womick in the Asheboro, N.C., Courier-Tribune , Bavier was an accessible celebrity during her first years in Siler City. She was active in local charities and patient with all the fans who traveled twisting miles of back roads to seek her out.
But by the time I saw her, Bavier had become more reclusive. People said she wearied of all the continuing attention: the pushy autograph-seekers on tour buses, the drunken fratboys stealing lawn ornaments in the middle of the night as part of some initiation ritual or scavenger hunt. Even in out-of-the-way Siler City, Aunt Bee couldn't escape the changes that were intruding on the Old South.
Twenty-five years ago, Siler City looked a lot like the fictional Mayberry. (Today, about 40 percent of Siler City's 8,000 residents are Hispanic, part of a demographic trend Howard Sprague and Mayberry's other city fathers never anticipated.)
I lived about 40 miles away in Chapel Hill. It, too, was a quiet Southern town in most respects, but the faculty and administration of the University of North Carolina and the nearby Research Triangle Institute had become dominated by Northern transplants by then. And Duke, 7 miles down the road, always had been.
Until I started coming up with good excuses to skip their cocktail parties, my carpetbagger friends would parade me around and introduce me like some mongrel dog who'd been trained to walk on his hind legs and bark the alphabet.
"AWWWwww! Thet's a FESC-inating ECK-scent!" they would say when they heard my drawl, apparently unaware that their own voices sounded like The Nanny's, only more grating.
Then, once they'd had a couple of drinks, they tended to launch into unsolicited disquisitions on the history of race relations in the South, in a tone that might not have been offensive if I'd been a former captain of the Selma, Ala., water cannon brigade. The folks back home wouldn't have thought I was a pointy-headed Communist if they'd seen me goin' all Lynyrd Skynyrd on those Yankee pontificators.
My new buddies didn't seem happy to be living in the backward South, because they came from beacons of intellectual ferment and racial tolerance such as Great Neck, N.Y., and Bloomfield Hills, Mich. But, for some reason, they never moved back. They and millions of their fellow Northern expatriates now overpopulate the white-flight exurbs that ring Atlanta, Raleigh and Birmingham.
To repay those cocktail-party lecturers for the gift of their insights, I still fly up to New Jersey a couple of times a year to crash prep school reunions and expound loudly on the history of waste management in Trenton and Newark. It's important to give back.
Anyway, the South that Aunt Bee once personified has just about vanished now. Only a few isolated pockets remain, sort of like what's left of the Florida panther's habitat. But as the Siler City grave marker of New York City native Frances Bavier says, "To live in the hearts of those left behind is not to die."
