A Turn in the South

  He was shy; he spoke softly; he looked down and away. As a Charlestonian he went right back, to Henry Woodward, who had explored and prospected the land for the foundation of 1670. I asked whether such an ancestry in Charleston wasn’t a burden, whether it didn’t constrict a man. He said it was a burden. His ancestry was one of the things that kept him in Charleston. There was a large part of him (in spite of his German surname) that would have liked to live in England; his late wife had been English. It was of England, and its curious effect on people—so many people, he said, seeing England for the first time, felt it to be their home—that he talked for some time; and it was of England, I felt, he would have preferred talking, if such a thing, so simple and free of complication, had been open to him. But there was the burden of the ancestry; and there was his Southernness. And it was to that, without my prompting just then, that he turned the talk.

  His father, Herbert Ravenel Sass, had been born in 1884 and had died in 1958. So his father was fifty-two when the rice-plantation book was published in 1936. Eighteen years later, when his father was seventy, the main civil-rights cause had been conceded. Marion Sass himself had been born in 1930. He would have shared some political defeats with his father; but the Southern cause, as he saw it, lived on in him.

  He told me that at the time the schools had been integrated his father had broken through the “paper curtain” the North had imposed on Southern views, and had published an article in the Atlantic magazine suggesting that mixed schools would lead to a mixed race. That had been proved wrong, Marion Sass said; with integration the races had in fact kept more to themselves socially. But that didn’t lessen the need for his political work, to which he now gave more time than to his law practice.

  This talk of political work, he said, might sound as though he were engaged in getting people elected to office. He had done that as well. But he was now more concerned with “resistance.” Resistance to the conquest by the North and resistance to Americanization, which was really Northernization. Though it was ironical, he observed, that some of the most important “American” things—Coca-Cola, and country music, and even the idea of supermarkets—were Southern. (Just as there are Swedes who can recite the five—or six, or seven—industrial inventions that made Sweden rich, so Marion Sass appeared to have at his fingertips the Southern contributions to the idea of America.)

  There was no need to define Southern values. “Southern culture is not simply a matter of the agrarian culture versus the industrial, or the ideals of honor against the crass values of commerce. Southern identity is important because it is Southern. We are Southern. That’s enough. It’s like the Irish. But they—the Irish—don’t have this terrible burden of an alien population in their midst.”

  There, again, a full fifty years after his father’s essay in the rice-plantation book, was the vagueness connected with “the problem.” How did he deal with that—the question of race—as a thinker?

  He said, “Our way of dealing with that? I try to have as little as possible to do with the race problem. A lot of the white-supremacist cause is in the North and has nothing to do with the South. The Southern cause and the Southern problem are really different things. The North uses the blacks all the time against the South. They did it in 1860, and they’ve done it in this century.”

  The North was now very concerned with all its minorities. It might have been thought that they would have considered the South a minority area. But they didn’t. The official Northern view could be put like this: “The white Southerner is not a minority. He is a backward fellow American who oppresses a minority, the Negro.”

  Had he looked at his father’s book about the plantations recently?

  No, not recently. But he knew the book well, and he had some of the feeling for the old plantation life.

  I said, “But you can’t feel nostalgia for what you don’t know?”

  “Although I didn’t grow up with any knowledge of the working life of the plantation, still, life on the plantations—when we went to visit them when I was a child—it was more like the old Southern countryside, even though we didn’t have slavery. It was the old easygoing rural life, and relations between the races were much more what they had been. So I can feel nostalgia for a past.”

  He was as concerned, even obsessed, as his father had been by the superficial destruction of the South—the highways, the fast-food chains—and pained by the alienation of some of the plantations to people and firms from outside.

  The past as a dream of purity, the past as cause for grief, the past as religion: it is the very prompting of the Shias of Islam to nobility and sacrifice, the dream of the good time of the Prophet and the first four caliphs, before greed and ambition destroyed the newly saved world. It was the very prompting of the Confederate Memorial in Columbia. And that very special Southern past, and cause, could be made pure only if it was removed from the squalor of the race issue.

  When—again as in a stage set—we got up from our chairs and went inside, for a salad provided by our hostess, I said I felt he was dealing in emotion without a program. He agreed; but then he said the program was being created.

  The talk became general. We looked at some of our hostess’s old books about South Carolina. We looked at copies of her family letters—many of them plantation letters—that were almost two hundred years old: the letters had been typed out and bound in heavy folio volumes. When they—Marion Sass and our hostess—spoke the names of plantations, Fairfield, Oakland, Middleburg, Middleton, Hampton House, it was as though they were talking of country houses. But then I understood that they were also talking in an allusive way of the very many families to whom they were related.

  He drove me back to the hotel in his untidy old car. He was nagged by what I had said about emotion without a program; and the next morning he sent me a copy of a letter he had written to the local paper in 1983 and a copy of an advertisement announcing a Southern publishing program. These copies were left at the hotel in a very large, used envelope, with my name and his name in very small letters; the envelope carried the printed name of a health organization.

  And then he telephoned; and as he spoke I could visualize his thin, sensitive face. He hadn’t done the publishing the advertisement had promised, he said; but the advertisement had drawn a response; he felt he had touched a chord. He told me that because of the developments of the 1950s his father had ended as a Southern separatist; and that was where he himself was now. The defeat of the South, the surrender of Lee, was for him an unappeasable sorrow, I felt.

  I asked him whether he knew the Confederate Memorial in Columbia. He said he had studied law in Columbia, and he liked the town, which some people didn’t like. He knew the words of the Confederate Memorial very well; he spoke some of them on the telephone. He thought the words might have been written by W. J. Grayson, who in the 1850S had written an epic poem called The Hireling and the Slave, a poem in rhyming couplets in the style of Pope. The theme of the poem was the superior condition of the slave in the South to the industrial worker in Massachusetts. He hadn’t read the poem right through.

  His cause had come out of an unappeasable sorrow. And I felt it could lead only to further sorrow: he himself knew that there was now another, and perhaps more predominant, side to Southern thinking. I thought of what Anne Siddons had spoken in Atlanta: the need at a certain age to hoard emotion, to spare passion from public causes for one’s own spiritual concerns, to make one’s peace with age and the frailties of one’s own human state. I spoke of that as best I could on the telephone. He said he understood; but still it worried him that at times he could so sink into himself that he could forget his cause.

  Then, courtesy returning, he said he would like to read some of the things I had written. But there was trouble with his eyes—those eyes whose sensitive rims and whose smallness had made an impression on me. He needed to have a cataract operation on both eyes. That was said to be a simple operation these days, but in the leaflet he had been sent (pe
rhaps in that overlarge envelope in which he had sent me copies of his letter to the newspaper and his publishing advertisement) he had read of possible complications. And he wished to trust to his own lenses for as long as possible.

  ONE HOT morning—hot for May, everyone said, and without the rain that the gardens needed, the rain that could sometimes fall every afternoon—on such a morning Jack Leland took me through what he called his “territory.”

  First we went to Mount Pleasant, on the east side of Charleston harbor. It had been the “summering place” of planters, and was now a rich-looking suburb with old trees, very shady. Not far below was the sea. We saw a trawler putting out. The Portuguese were the first to use those trawlers in Charleston, in the 1920s, Jack Leland said; he logged everything connected with his town. We had come to Mount Pleasant to see the Hibben house, the house of the family where Jack Leland’s New England ancestor had come as a tutor and stayed to wed. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac, a two-hundred-year-old house with columns, the house of the people who had once owned all the land of this suburb—a story of ancestors given unexpected reality.

  On the road again, he pointed out where black communities had grown up on plots of ground that had been given them after the war, the Civil War. “They’re not doing well. These Negroes up to World War II had land and they all had gardens. They raised a lot of their own food. Now you very rarely see a Negro family in the country that has a vegetable garden.”

  We drove through one black village, and Jack Leland showed the houses of two of his black “friends.” These friends were people he bought things from: his definition of black friends was South Carolinian. Some of the houses suggested that the owners were well off. I asked whether they were small businessmen. He said no; the blacks in those houses probably worked in the naval yard or had other federal jobs. The local black population had lost its most ambitious section with the migration to the cities in the North; almost every Negro of ambition had gone.

  “Does the name Stepin Fetchit mean anything to you?”

  It certainly did. Stepin Fetchit was adored in my childhood by the blacks of Trinidad. He was adored not only because he was funny and did wonderful things with his seemingly disjointed body and had a wonderful walk and a wonderful voice, and was given extravagant words to speak; he was adored by Trinidad black people because he appeared in films, at a time when Hollywood stood for an almost impossible glamour; and he was also adored—most importantly—because, at a time when the various races of Trinidad were socially separate and the world seemed fixed forever that way, with segregation to the north in the United States, with Africa ruled by Europe, with South Africa the way it was (and not at all a subject of local black concern), and Australia and New Zealand the way they were—at that time in Trinidad, Stepin Fetchit was seen on the screen in the company of white people. And to Trinidad blacks—who looked down at that time on Africans, and laughed and shouted and hooted in the cinema whenever Africans were shown dancing or with spears—the sight of Stepin Fetchit with white people was like a dream of a happier world.

  It wasn’t of this adored figure that Jack Leland was speaking, though. He had another, matter-of-fact, local attitude. He said, “The ambitious people went north, and we were left with the Stepin Fetch-its.” Now there was a movement back; not big, but noticeable.

  I said, a little later, that it was my impression that the blacks of South Carolina were very black people, not as mixed as black people in the Caribbean islands. He said there had been little mixing of the races. The planters thought it demeaning to have relations with a slave woman. There was a story that after the war the Union soldiers didn’t have those scruples. But there were not many mixed people.

  Did that make for more difficult relations between the races?

  No; it made for easier relations. “Mulattoes and quadroons and those are the angry people.”

  Later, some way up the highway, we turned off to have a look at a spectacular old oak avenue, partly in ruin: the kind of avenue with which Marion Sass’s father had begun his nostalgic recall of plantation days. And when we drove on, the sea was on our right, hidden by forest; and the river was on our left. Salt and fresh: where the land was salt, cotton had grown in the old days; where the water was fresh, there had been rice. Now, along one stretch of road, there was a large kiwi-fruit plantation.

  We turned into a side road then, and suddenly, in overgrown ground, attached to a Presbyterian church of 1696, there was a little cemetery, where, Jack Leland said, some of the first settlers were buried.

  We were entering sacred territory.

  Beyond a certain creek the old plantation of Walnut Grove began. It was the ancestral property, acquired in 1832 and sold during the Depression, in 1935. Still with us, the roadside woodland. And, now, the black village where after the Civil War blacks had been given plots of plantation ground.

  “When the children were small,” Jack Leland said, “and we crossed the creek, I stopped the car and made them get out and bow three times to the east. Sacred territory.”

  “What did the children think of that?”

  He laughed. “They got a great charge out of it. They still do it when they come here. And I do it with them. People see us bowing. They probably think we’re crazy. We probably are. But it’s a nice craziness.”

  And now, driving through his territory, memory overcoming him at certain spots, he filled out some of the things he had told me earlier. They had been poor, with little money coming in. But they had never been short of food. “Shrimps, crab, oysters. Clams. Fish. Venison. Wild turkey. Ducks, roes, partridges. There was just a wealth of wild food to be had. And, of course, my father had the farm where he grew the food.” And when on a morning he, Jack Leland, went out with the shotgun, the birds he shot were for the table. The hunting life—it was important here (to blacks as well); and when you saw the land you understood. And the land concealed something else. There was a creek at some distance with very pure water. The creek was called “the branch”; visitors would be offered bourbon and branch.

  We turned off into a narrower road. We passed a house in a wooded garden.

  “That’s a cracker house. Backwoods whites, poor white trash, as they say. And that’s another cracker house, I would say. About seventy years old, perhaps. They’re part of the picture. You can’t leave them out.”

  He had the local eye—just as in Malaysia the local people can distinguish a Chinese house from a Malay one, purely by the way the surrounding ground is used. The houses he had described as cracker houses had seemed to me attractive, with trees and shade and shrubs.

  He said, “They have a certain charm. But a lot of junk around. You can tell a cracker house by the trash, and the generally unkempt look of the place. Half a dozen defunct automobiles, say. That was very typical at one time.”

  The crackers, like the blacks, had their own place in the local caste system.

  “When I was growing up we went to high school and grammar school with them. But we did not socialize. Our social lives were entirely different. Most of the crackers were Baptists, Methodists, or Pentecostal Holiness—that’s the shouting religion. Whereas my family and the other families up here were Episcopalian mainly, and Presbyterian, and they were top of the heap.

  “I will tell you. At Walnut Grove we had a summer cottage, where my father’s younger brothers and their friends stayed during the summer. A four-roomed house on the river. This was shortly after 1902—my father had just married and brought his bride back. He was the eldest of eleven children.

  “One day my father got up early in the morning, at six, for his usual cup of coffee. And he saw some of his horses standing by the gate, saddled but with their reins cut. After a while the younger brothers and their friends showed up, walking. They had been to a square dance out in the swamps, where the crackers lived. They hadn’t found their horses afterwards, and they had had to walk back. And my father warned them not to go back. Because, he said, this—the cutting of the hor
ses’ reins—is the crackers’ way of warning you not to meddle with their women. ‘The next time they will take more drastic action.’

  “But they didn’t listen. They went again. They were riding back through a trail in the swamps when the crackers dropped out of the tree limbs above them with knives. Like the Indians. One of the men with my uncle was killed. It was in the night. Nothing could be proved against anybody. Nobody was brought to justice. It was the law of the swamps. You just did not socialize with those people. My father always said he preferred having the Negroes living on his property, rather than those crackers.”

  The blacks looked down on the crackers, and the crackers hated the blacks, because the blacks were in direct competition with them. But the crackers were as exploited as the blacks, Jack Leland said; and were probably treated worse by white employers because there was less feeling of responsibility towards them.

  “The crackers began to increase in number after the Civil War. Before the Civil War in this plantation area there were only planters and Negroes, and nobody in between except perhaps the overseers.”

  There was a church that Jack Leland wanted to show me, the family church, the one connected with Walnut Grove—St. James, in Santee parish, Santee the name of the river. It lay along the King’s Highway—the name coming down from colonial days, indicating a road made at the king’s orders, at a time when most people traveled by water. The road was unpaved. If there had been the usual amount of May rain, it would have been difficult; but it was easy. And soon we were there: an old red-brick church with a portico. There was another portico at the back. The church was meant to serve French and English, but the portico for the French, at the back, was now blocked up. The red brick had the appearance of something neglected in a damp tropical climate.