“Honey,” the telephone operator in Nashville told my wife, “y’all dahllin’ too fayast.”

That was Marilyn’s welcome to the South. On her first day at work at the Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, her calls didn’t go through. So she called the operator, who said to slow down her dialing finger. Remember rotary dials?

That was one of several stories she liked to tell about our 20 months in Nashville. All were variations on the old idea that Southerners are slower than the rest of us — you may put your own definition to the word “slower” — and that their ways are, well, “differnt.”

Frequently the TV news jolts me back to the 30 months I lived in Tennessee — earlier, we had lived 10 months in East Tennessee — hearing some senator speak with that accent or seeing a hurricane trash buildings that wouldn’t pass code here. All my northern prejudices rush forward, and I have to remember that I have written in celebration of the differences among us. You know, one nation, many people.

Then, this week The New York Times published maps showing how people in their 30s are doing financially, considering the income levels in the counties in which they were reared. The blues/greens showed more upward mobility, the reds/oranges far less, if any.

A band of reds/oranges began in the lower prairies, covered the entire South and ran up through Appalachia into New England. Yeah, Maine was mostly red/orange. This idea isn’t entirely new, that the southern Appalachians are a lot like rural New England. But when you see it in black and white, or red/orange vs. blue/green, the idea hits home.

By the way, the study shows kids growing up poor in Piscataquis County will earn about $37,000 a year as adults. Not rich, but it’s the highest in Maine for kids who grow up poor. Franklin County, where I live, was second at $35,000. Cumberland County, which many of us might call “northern Massachusetts,” came in near the bottom at $32,000.

As this idea of Maine/South similarities rolled around in my head, some old questions rolled around with it. What about the South creates such great music and musicians? Jason Isbell (Alabama), Rodney Crowell (Texas), Emmylou Harris (Alabama again), Townes Van Zandt (Texas again). And writers. Flannery O’Connor (Georgia), Bobbie Ann Mason (Kentucky), William Faulkner (Mississippi), Zora Neale Hurston (Florida).

Whatever in the South turned on these bright musical and literary lights may also have given us such clear thinkers as Harry Golden, Will Campbell and Wendell Berry. All stayed in the South, bucked the entrenched system and pointed the way for many of us.

Golden, who published the “Carolina Israelite” in Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote in the ’60s that racial integration would come quickly if we just did away with chairs. Southern whites didn’t mind mixing races when everyone is standing up, he wrote, so take the seats out of the classrooms and buses. His tongue was firmly in cheek, but as a Jew born in Ukraine and reared in New York, he knew firsthand what the bottom of the totem pole looks like. The message coming through his books “For 2-Cents Plain” and “Only in America” was that the seeming rigidity of southern (or any) culture could be flexed out. If we just think creatively, we can think our way through this mess. Whatever the mess du jour may be.

Campbell was a Southern Baptist preacher known widely as the chaplain to the Ku Klux Klan. “I’m a chaplain to Ku Klux Klansmen, not to the Klan” Campbell told me in 1971, in his office, a log cabin in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. I was one of two reporters writing a series on the “New South” for The Kansas City Star. He sat in a barber chair as we talked. He insisted that redemption of the American soul for its racial and other sins lies in her individuals, not her institutions, and that redemption comes only to individuals who know they are worthy. You can take that lesson with or without its religion context.

Somewhere down-cellar are tapes of that interview. If I played all four hours, they’d boil down to something like these two quotes. “Anyone who is not as concerned with the immortal soul of the dispossessor as he is with the suffering of the dispossessed is being something less than Christian.” And, “Mr. Jesus died for the bigots as well.”

Time magazine ran a photo of Campbell standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, in front of the room that Martin Luther King Jr. was staying in the night King was murdered. That’s my second bond with Campbell and his South, because somewhere there exists a photo of me standing on that same balcony. The other reporter and I began writing our seven articles for The Star while staying at the Lorraine Motel.

Golden died in 1981 at 79. Campbell lived 10 years longer and died in 2013, four years to the day (June 3) before my wife, Marilyn, died. A symbolic, sadder link to Campbell.

Berry, 84, lives on his farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. He altered my life with one book, “The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.” In it, he made the case for the yeoman farmer, and, right away, I wanted to be one. Someone else will have to judge whether I made it, but I farmed here for more than 30 years. My unfulfillable dream is to sit down with Berry at Port Royal. (I’ll write more about him next month.)

In 1954, when my mother moved our family to East Tennessee, the Daily Post Athenian ran a front-page feature on a 100-year-old woman in Meigs County, next county over. She was proud that in her century she had never left Meigs County. I shuddered to read about what I have come to call the “prideful ignorance” of way too many southerners.

More often than not, when a reminder of the South comes up, I have to fight all these old Yankee prejudices, just as many southerners still fight in their hearts a treasonous war that their side lost. Yes, something in the soil down there nurtures good, but there’s still that damned accent. And that “prideful ignorance.” I need to think graciousness.

Bob Neal finds scenic similarities, too. His favorite rivers are stretches of flat water on the Kennebec below the Great Eddy in Skowhegan and the French Broad in Tennessee.