Moonlight-and-magnolia

Here the myth of a moonlight-and-magnolia South founders on dry empirical realities.

The romantic South of myth and legend, the “moonlight and magnolia” South with which plantation epics captured the national imagination in the era of the Lost Cause, has acquired a nightmarish quality; […]

If a white employer could take so much interest in the child of a black employee, in whom he had no property interest, that would illustrate—as did Hentz's other fiction—the moonlight and magnolia world of Southerners' concern for their slaves.