I don’t mind if we have some people cheering and some people booing during certain songs, because the debate over those issues is what’s important.

I remember the first day I went for a cup of tea in Oxford [Mississippi], and I looked up at the courthouse and saw the state flag, and it seemed very contradictory to me that this very gentle town with a university and an elegant bookshop with all these thoughtful and great writers would coexist [with that]. That coexistence is not always appreciated by people who make generalizations about the South or areas outside of its major metropolitan areas. They don’t realize that there are great writers or take in the literary or cultural dimension of these places. And yet there is the Confederate flag in the corner of the state flag that I would imagine some people take as an affront. But for some other people it contains a different significance, and with all these contradictions you have to really talk about them; you can’t just make sweeping generalizations. It’s very easy to say, “The Confederate flag symbolizes one particular thing in one particular culture,” but it doesn’t necessarily because it contains within it a unique history that’s not the same as another place. [For the South] it has to do with a different and complex history of the way the country was actually assembled and the contradictions within it of the allegiances of those people to their place and to the emerging federal authority against the imperial authority; it’s much more complicated than a flag.