A Turn in the South

  “Come,” he said suddenly, moving briskly in spite of his bad ankles, leading me in through the fence. “Come, let me show you where I’m going to be buried.”

  It was hot, no wind, and there was a hum of mosquitoes. All around, in the pines, were the cries of birds of various sorts. In the small churchyard, dry, full of brown leaves and fallen pine needles, were tombstones.

  “All these people are relatives.” Jonah Collins Born 1723 Died 1786. “He’s the son of the man who brought the sea chests from Barbados.” William Toomer 1866–1955. “My mother’s uncle. A lawyer and a judge.” His sprightliness at being near the site of his burial place took me aback, then imposed reverence on me.

  “There.”

  An ordinary, bare spot of earth, a little vacant space between the headstones. That was where he was going to be buried.

  “I want to be buried with a flat-topped marble tomb, right here by Jonah Collins. It will have my name, the date of my birth, the date of my death. And at the bottom there will be a line: Have one on Jack. And I’m leaving two thousand dollars to the church, so that every year at the spring service they can have wine, whiskey, or whatever. I think people will remember me because of that.”

  The mosquitoes and other insects were a nuisance. He had expected them; he had come with a can of insect repellent. Without a breeze the heat was oppressive, scorching the head. But there was often a wind, he said.

  “There’s no sound like the sound of the wind soughing through the pine trees. And that’s where I want to be buried, so that I can listen to it forever.”

  Inside, the church was very plain, with the mustiness and shut-up smell of a building not often used by people, without that warmth. The church had been built in 1763. (So the Pompion Hill chapel had been built in the same year.) It had a rough, tiled floor, and the building materials were brick and stucco and timber. There was no stone in these parts; and the windows had timber surrounds, dressed like stone: local work, local trees, slave work, perhaps. The pews were enclosed; a family in its pew would have been hidden, as if in a high-walled box, open at the top. Perhaps, Jack Leland said, the pews had been built like that to keep the children in, or perhaps in cold weather they were easier to heat, with the warm bricks that were used for that purpose.

  How had he got the idea of death and celebration?

  “There was a Professor Ogg of Oxford University in England. He came over twenty-five years ago. He told me a story I’d never heard of. There was a rice-planter’s son, a Mr. Trapier, who was visiting Oxford in the 1830s. The son of a rice-planter from Georgetown, South Carolina—making the grand tour in the 1830s. He was being entertained by the dons”—Jack Leland spoke the word precisely—“of New College. I believe it was New College. And he asked for a mint julep. They’d never heard of a mint julep. So when he came back he had a sterling pitcher made and sent back to the college as a gift, with money for mint juleps.”

  We went on to McClellanville, on the sea, the summer resort of the family. And it was still, literally, a family resort. There were cousins or relations in almost every house in the white part of the village. Most of the blacks lived outside the village proper. Jack Leland knew the history of every house. That magnolia tree had been planted by his father in 1892, in what had then been Jack Leland’s grandmother’s yard. His father had brought the seedling over from Walnut Grove in his saddle bag. And Jack Leland himself had planted a line of oaks on the street in front. He had done that in 1934, the year before his father had had to sell Walnut Grove. They were now very big trees. But that planting had been part of a federal program—and they contained a reminder of the poverty of those days. A woman ran the federal tree-planting program. She employed about fifteen high-school boys, and they were paid a dollar a day.

  We had lunch at a restaurant on the highway, not far from McClellanville. The very young waitress turned out to have the name of Leland; she was a cousin.

  I read him the words from the Confederate Memorial in Columbia. He was affected by them.

  He said, “I think it’s great.”

  Did he still have feelings about the Civil War?

  He did. “When I was a boy there was a story in my family about the burning of one of the family plantations after the war was over. The place belonged to one of the drafters of the ordinance of secession. That was in 1860. And that, of course, brought on the war. After the Civil War this whole area was under martial law, and the colonel in charge of the area of Christchurch parish was a Colonel Beecher, a brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. They were great abolitionists from New England, and I think I can say that that book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, did more than any other single thing to provoke the war. It irritated the South, where only thirteen percent of the people owned slaves, and it worked powerfully on people in the North.

  “The story is that the wife of Colonel Beecher went around in Christchurch parish burning plantation houses. I grew up thinking it was perhaps a folk story. But in recent years a diary has come to light of a Dr. Marcy, who was a Union Army surgeon. He was one of the people authorized to take books, art treasures, and what not out of the houses down here and ship them north. And my daughter—she is doing research out of Middleton Place: she is part Middleton—got a copy of this diary. In it she read of the burning of Laurel Hill. That’s the house owned by the drafter of the ordinance of secession. There was proof there, in that diary. She burned perhaps twenty houses, Mrs. Beecher. Torching people’s houses. The Beechers were Puritans. These people have a mentality that is very hard to understand. When they sent missionaries to Africa the first thing they did was to make the Africans wear clothes, cover up.”

  Early afternoon. On the road again, we passed black church congregations dispersing, driving away in cars. I asked about blacks and cars, remembering that in Trinidad ownership of cars among blacks became widespread only after the second war. He said that for some years blacks weren’t allowed to drive cars; they were thought to be reckless drivers. “And they were.” And in the old days, he said, black churches had their Sunday services in the afternoon, because many of the black women would have been at work in the morning in white houses, cooking lunch.

  The green highway signs measured off our progress back to Charleston. There came a moment when Jack Leland stopped leaning forward, his hand on the back of my seat.

  He leaned back and said, “We are now out of my territory.”

  IT WAS Alex Sanders, chief judge of the South Carolina Court of Appeals, who had directed me to the Confederate Memorial. I had had an introduction to him; and when we first met in Columbia he had given me lunch at the Faculty Club in the university. Our conversation had been general. I felt he had been puzzled by our inconclusive meeting. But it wasn’t possible for me to tell him exactly what I wanted from him; for the simple reason that on this kind of journey one doesn’t know what one wants from a man until one has spoken to him.

  He was a big man with a strong accent that could divert one from the precision and economy with which, as a lawyer, he could speak. He had sent me to the memorial, he said later, to enable me to understand something about the South. He himself, though he found the words moving, wasn’t certain about the cause.

  “Lost causes are espoused or romanticized by the second generation.” The memorial had been put up in 1879, 14 years after the end of the war. It was astonishing to him that people in 1879 had found the money to make the memorial, at a time when there wasn’t enough to eat. He remembered talking to one or two veterans on the Confederate side. One of them said, “I gotten my arse shot off for other folks’ niggers.”

  “He didn’t have any, you see. And the vast majority who fought in that war didn’t have any. They were fodder for the aristocracy. Identity is more than just remembering the past. We have to be like museum curators. In the dynasty of Ming there was obviously a lot that was beautiful. But I am sure there was a lot that was junk. The job of the curator is to pick and choose.”

  But didn’t he, when he was growi
ng up, have an attitude to the South?

  He didn’t, any more than a fish has an attitude to the ocean in which he swims. “It was only after I’d grown up and left that I developed an attitude. And at first my attitude was that I was ashamed of it. But the older I get the more I realize that the transgressions of the South were the transgressions of mankind, and that there were certain things that were superior. There is a cultural attitude in the South that embraces respect for family and God and in some ways for country. Although patriotism is not among the highest virtues on my list, still, the patriot believes in something larger than himself, and it is therefore a virtue. There is an attitude in the South that there is more to life than the moment.”

  “Honor? It’s such a theme. So many people talk about it.”

  “I was trained that way. To believe that truth is an ultimate virtue. The watchword for life was unselfishness.” He stopped. “But I don’t know that any of this is peculiar to the South. I am inclined to think, however, that the closer you get to the equator, life tends to be exaggerated.”

  “Did you try to distance yourself from the South, after you’d become ashamed of it?”

  “Particularly when I was with people from the North. And even when I was in the South I spoke out against things I didn’t like. That meant the racism.”

  “It must create disturbance, turning against what you had grown up with.”

  He said: “It produces a certain schizophrenia. But as I get older I get more tolerant. I become more tolerant of intolerance. If you find a Klansman to talk to you, and you ask him what the Ku Klux Klan stands for, he would say it stands for law and order, and love and friendship, and brotherhood. If you would ask him how he would set about achieving those things, he would say, ‘Whatever it takes. Whether we have to blow up that building or attack that man.’ He doesn’t see how those two ideas are not in harmony with one another. You can’t deal with that kind of schizophrenia.”

  At our lunch he had spoken of the South’s acceptance of civil rights as a kind of recognition by the South of the immorality of its earlier position. I wanted to know whether he could chart particular stages of that recognition.

  “I have a hard time explaining that to myself. It is a wondrous thing. If you had told me in the late fifties and early sixties that in the very near future we were going to have an integrated society, I wouldn’t have believed you. I thought then that it might have been a hundred years in coming. It may even be divine, the change that has come about—I don’t know. It’s hard to understand. But people all of a sudden saw that it was wrong. And that is miraculous, for people to say that their own behavior had been morally defective. Nobody ever confesses on that scale. And here we have not only a somebody, an individual, saying that, but a whole society.”

  And commercial pressures were now bringing about social change. There had been the recent uproar about a black IBM executive being denied membership of a club in Columbia. IBM as a result had dropped an idea about putting up a local plant. Neither IBM nor the executive had wished to talk about the matter or make race the issue; and it wasn’t, therefore, easy for people to deal with. The consequence was that there had been no bluster on the part of the club; they had simply changed their policy and invited some blacks to join.

  Judge Sanders spoke as a lawyer. Through the law he had arrived at a larger identity.

  He said, “The common law is a majestic thing. It has a remarkable capacity to resolve disputes in a way which not only preserves civilization but enhances it. It is not unusual for me to find myself guided in a decision by a decision which a judge made a thousand years ago. I am aware I’m serving a larger civilization. And I know I’m serving it.”

  “So you don’t have a problem of identity, no trouble between background and profession.”

  “Not any more. I am more at peace with myself. Of course, that may be a matter of getting old and less judgmental and more understanding.”

  His family had been in South Carolina “forever.” An early ancestor on his mother’s side had come out as a missionary to the Indians, and had then become a missionary to slaves.

  3

  TALLAHASSEE

  The Truce with Irrationality—I

  PEOPLE IN Charleston had been complaining about the lack of their afternoon rain. As if to make up for this, on the day I left, and almost as soon as I had cleared the town and was going west, there was a fierce cloudburst. The tall trees tossed, the leaves showing their undersides, every big bough in separate convulsion. The rain slapped the windshield; nervous cars parked off the traffic lanes with their lights on. Not many miles away it became clearer, midafternoon again; though still from time to time approaching cars—when they had their headlights on—alerted one to the storms ahead.

  Tropical weather, of continental violence, matching the landscape: the swamp of South Carolina running into the marsh of northern Florida, reeds green and brown, patches of water silver or black, a landscape impressive by its great size. And soon enough, from this tropical swamp, Charleston—which one had begun to take for granted: so perfect a creation—began to seem far away. It was hard to think of that town being set down here—as it was hard to associate all this coastal land with African slavery, land so much of the New World, so unlike any other, land one wanted to contemplate, to enter a little into its wonder.

  The slavery of the British Caribbean islands began to seem small-scale, even domestic. Slavery in the British Caribbean was really an eighteenth-century institution; when slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1834, England had become a manufacturing and trading country and could afford to write off both the plantations and the islands. Slavery in the Southern United States was most important in the first half of the nineteenth century—most important, that is, when slavery was on the point of becoming anachronistic, an absurdity in an industrializing country. But business people are concerned with the here and now (it is fearful to read of the slave-owners’ wish to extend plantation slavery to the Western territories); and it took a war to do away with slavery in the South. The freed slaves remained, in inescapable numbers, no longer mere units of labor and wealth, a kind of currency; and it was they—for whose sake, one way or the other, the war had been fought—who bore the brunt of the South’s anguish.

  A slave is a slave; a master need not think of humiliating or tormenting him. In the hundred years after the end of slavery the black man was tormented in the South in ways that I never knew about until I began to travel in the region. Jack Leland had told me that in the early days of the motorcar in South Carolina blacks hadn’t been allowed to drive. In Tallahassee I heard that blacks were not allowed to try on clothes in stores; they had to buy anything they tried on. In Mississippi blacks could not be educated beyond a certain point; in South Carolina there was a time when attempts were made to deny blacks education altogether.

  And there was in the South something we never knew in the Caribbean of colonial days: violence, and the absence of law. How did a black family react to news of lynchings? What happened to the bodies? How were they buried? A man I met told me that when he was a child he was not allowed by his father to be a delivery boy. The father feared that a white woman might accuse the boy of being a Peeping Tom or of attempting rape.

  In the Caribbean the black man, after a hundred years of colonial neglect, a hundred years of separation from slavery, found himself in a majority on his own island, with the power of electing his own leaders and his own government. The black American, at about the same time, found himself just liberated but in a minority in the world’s most advanced country, and among the most denuded in that country. His possibilities, as an American, were far greater than those of a West Indian. But there could be no easy movement forward for the mass; they had lived through too much; the irrationality of slavery and the years after slavery had made many irrational and self-destructive.

  It was in the news every day: drugs, crime, street life, “negative peer pressure” at school (blacks b
eating up those blacks who did well at school). In Atlanta, Anne Siddons had spoken of her need after a certain age to hoard emotion, to save parts of herself for herself. It seemed that blacks of all ages—living out their cause in their lives—felt a similar need. But in their more desperate condition this looking inward could separate them from their cause and often work against it.

  “Finally, I suppose, the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality.” The words by James Baldwin (among the most elegant handlers of the language) had stayed with me since I had read them, nearly thirty years before. “Reality”—it was what I remembered and what I accepted; but now, in the South, in the middle of my own journey, I began to wonder whether the truce that every black man looked for hadn’t in fact been with the irrationality of the world around him. And the achievement of certain people began to appear grander.

  THE REVEREND Bernyce Clausell lived in Tallahassee on Joe Louis Street. “Not in the project,” she said on the telephone. “Tell the driver not in the project.” And the white driver not only went straight to the house, but spotted the lady in her collar in the street, talking to a member of her congregation.

  Reverend Clausell was a Baptist pastor, and she had some reputation both as the only Baptist woman pastor in this part of Florida and as someone who did social work. She had been in the news for having sent a relief mission to Mississippi, to the town of Tunica, in a poor region with the name of Sugar Ditch. She had sent a truckload of supplies. Down the side of the truck there had been a professionally lettered banner: TALLAHASSEE TO TUNICA. There had been a copywriter’s feeling there for effect, I thought. But the lady I saw in the street when the taxi-driver pointed had nothing forbidding or assertive about her.

  She was small and slender and mild-featured, academic-looking in her collar, someone suited to the quiet residential street, with its little houses and neat yards; definitely not a street in the “project.”