A Turn in the South

  “How many summers?”

  “It’s more like the first twelve years of my life. I know I feel differently from some other people, but I just don’t know why.”

  “Religion?”

  “I do think my religion makes the difference, and the feeling that we are all made in God’s image. Probably not as a child. I’d have to have more understanding to think that.” Then she said, “And these stories about people doing mean things.”

  Mean things, in a loving childhood?

  Ellen said—memory working, unrelated pieces of the past fitting together, as she said they had begun to do while she talked, answering questions that had never been put to her before—“My mother told me about hiding her maid from the Ku Klux Klan. It shows just how far we’ve progressed. My mother had a maid. Her name was Mollie Wheeler, I think. And the Ku Klux Klan was trying to get her. I don’t know why. My mother didn’t talk very much about it. I think the Klan wanted to give the maid a good beating and send her away for some reason. My mother said she hid her in a laundry basket in her house to protect her. Of course they wouldn’t come into my mother’s house. This was really before I was born. They—the Klan—they were probably young men, OK people in the town.”

  “Didn’t this frighten you?”

  “I don’t think it frightened me. It gave me a great sense of disgust for something like the Klan.” She added, “The rednecks—that story I told you, it probably happened before I was born.”

  And I understood what Ellen was saying better than I said. No situation or circumstance is absolutely like any other; but in the Indian countryside of my childhood in Trinidad there were many murders and acts of violence, and these acts of violence gave the Trinidad Indians, already separated from the rest of the island by language, religion, and culture, a fearful reputation. But to us to whom the stories of murders and feuds were closer, other things were at stake. The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.

  Imagine this scene in a Trinidad Indian village of the 1920s or 1930s. A village big man, say, is murdered. The next morning, after the legal formalities, the body is displayed in a coffin, which is perhaps set out on two chairs on the road outside his house. This is a statement of defiance by the family of the murdered man. Among the people coming to pay their respects is the killer. He has to come; he cannot stay away; and he is almost certainly known. And now two men’s lives are spoiled: the killer’s, and that of the relation of the dead man who will have to kill the killer. The code demands no less; it isn’t open to a man who wishes to be at peace with himself to walk away.

  So deep, for me, was this idea of honor and the feud that the film of Romeo and Juliet (with Basil Rathbone) was one of my earliest true theatrical experiences, the story to me being not so much a story of love as of the family feud. What fear, what horror at all that was to follow, when the blood darkened the shirt of Mercutio! Honor—that was what I understood, or saw, in some of the murders around us. Not the barbarism that, as I understood later, outsiders attributed to us.

  Some such way of feeling I attributed to Ellen, in her childhood in the small town where she had spent such happy summers with her extended family. Violence, where it existed, would not have appeared to her as naked as it would have done to absolute outsiders. Too many other things were attached.

  Violence then; and there was violence now. The violence of her childhood had been white. The violence people spoke of now was black, and was of the cities.

  She said: “I think it’s just the frustration. So much of the violence is now in the black community. The black people don’t like me to say this, but if you go to the penitentiaries you’ll see it’s true—a high population of young blacks.”

  How had she arrived at her civility, her calmness, her wish to be fair—in a state with the reputation that Mississippi had?

  She said: “I went to college. I think that made an impression on me. I had a very good professor. They took a personal interest in you. And my father died when I was young. I was barely thirteen. That was when I started looking at myself and other people. I think I had to grow up too soon. I was living in a small town. My father didn’t leave a lot of money for us to live on. And so my mother had to go to work. She was a nurse, and she went back to work. And I—I went back and lived with my aunts, to go to school, in that same little country town. My mother worked very hard to send me to college. She was very successful in her occupation. She was a strong woman, and she believed in fairness to all people. When she was in training she nursed everybody. She grew up with a great regard for all people.”

  Abruptly, then, out of random memories that were coming to her, Ellen said: “This story really did impress me. I was talking about it to one of my relations not long ago. This really happened, and I was there. I was eight. I was visiting my aunt, and she had a wonderful maid; and several of my cousins were there. Myrtle—the maid—played the piano. She could play anything by ear. She kept all us children entertained with her music and everything. One time she had a little roadster car and she took us riding. And we really loved her. She was a black maid. Maybe one of her boyfriends gave her the car. She was quite a girl. She wore bright lipstick and she had a big gold tooth in front.

  “Anyway, she was missing one day. She lived in a house behind my aunt’s house. And finally they went out to see about her. And they found her, and she was dead—in a wardrobe, upside down. She had been hit on the head with a pine knot. They called it a lighter knot—it was to start fires with. They thought it was one of her boyfriends, but we never knew. It was awful. I knew that was wrong. My aunt was grief-stricken. I think that if it had been a white woman killed like that, they would have found out who did it. But I think that’s something I’m thinking now. I don’t think I thought that when I was eight years old. To me Myrtle was Myrtle. I didn’t think of her being black. She would snap her fingers and dance.” And Ellen, remembering, sitting in her upholstered chair, made a gesture and snapped her fingers too. “She was just a lot of fun. She was the daughter of the woman who went from house to house doing the laundry. They did it in great big pots. This was before rural electrification, when they started having running water in most of the houses. My aunt had running water and a bathroom inside, because my daddy had built a water-tower when he had lived there—before I was born.

  “I went back to her house.” Myrtle’s mother’s house, at the back of Ellen’s aunt’s house. “They had removed her body. But I saw where it was. That was just nosy. My aunt didn’t want me to go see it. But I wanted to, and she let me.”

  What a story, from a memory of twelve happy summers! And that story released another memory in Ellen.

  “My mother and father used to tell me about when they would hang people in the courthouse square. Legal hangings, not lynchings. That was when my father and mother were children. And my daddy was born in 1897. And that was just abhorrent to me—and it was to them. These were stories that people would tell you as you were growing up. I think we’ve come a long way. It seems like people are becoming more civilized, I hope.”

  The stories told to Ellen as she was growing up were frontier stories; that was how I regarded them. They had echoes of any number of Western films; and it was remarkable to hear them from someone who had just turned sixty. In one lifetime, then, it seemed that she had moved from frontier culture, or the relics of a frontier culture, to late twentieth-century Jackson and the United States. It gave a new cast to my thoughts, and a new cast to my conversation with people.

  There are some film directors who prefer to work in natural light, the light that’s available, the light they find. And travel of the sort I was doing, travel on a theme, depends on accidents: the books read on a journey, the people met. To travel in the way I was doing was like painting in acrylic or fresco; things set quickly. The whole shape of a section o
f the narrative can be determined by some chance meeting, some phrase heard or devised. If I had met someone else my thoughts might have worked differently; though I might at the end have arrived at the same general feeling about the place I was in.

  Ellen’s thoughts, just before we separated, were of her father, who had died when she was thirteen. “My father told me you never got ahead by stepping on somebody’s back. We all need to come up together.”

  That had been the great discovery of my travels so far in the South. In no other part of the world had I found people so driven by the idea of good behavior and the good religious life. And that was true for black and white.

  MY THOUGHTS were running on the frontier, the life at the extremity of a culture. And I went early one afternoon to see Louise, nearly eighty and living alone in a big house in Jackson, in a garden too much for her now, and dry after many weeks without rain.

  In her old bookcase, American work from perhaps 1840, cherry-wood that had taken on a lovely deep color after nearly a century and a half, there were small, leather-bound volumes of an edition of The Spectator—of Addison and Steele—issued by a Philadelphia firm in 1847. A reminder of the colonial past here, of an idea of civility and education so at odds with the world around. A reissue in 1847 of The Spectator—American publishers having in those days the camp-following attitude to English books that English publishers today have to American books. The Spectator, a hundred years out of date, at the time when Parkman was making his journey on the Oregon trail and coming across reminders, almost as terrible as bones, of the settlers who had passed that way: abandoned furniture, pieces perhaps of the early 1840s, like Louise’s bookcase, which those settlers had loaded onto their carts and wagons, hoping to take them to the West.

  In a drawer of the cherrywood bookcase there were documents and copies of documents connected with Louise’s family history. Her family went back to colonial times.

  Her husband’s ancestor came from Pennsylvania. He came to Mississippi in about 1820. “All wilderness, you know.” He was part of a group, families who had intermarried. They hadn’t come directly to Mississippi. “They had traveled together in their migration through Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama.” She gave this idea of the kinship of the migrating group: “When the two young men”—her husband’s ancestor, and another man in the group—“were of an age to marry, they went up to Oxford”—the Mississippi Oxford, in the hills to the east of the Delta, the flat alluvial river plain—“and married two Tankersley girls they had met.” The Tankersleys were one of the families of the migrating group. “The land hadn’t been cleared and travel was hard. And when they got there they stayed.

  “My grandfather was a sixteen-year-old boy when he went to the Civil War and fought at Shiloh in Tennessee. He survived it, and came back to northeast Alabama and started his family. Things were hard after the Civil War, and then my grandfather died. My father left home at the age of fifteen and came and stayed with an uncle in the Delta in Mississippi. He had some education, and he paid a Baptist minister to teach him bookkeeping, and he opened a little store and began buying land in the Delta. And it was beautiful country. Now it’s one big cotton patch—all cleared and drained. But then it was like William Faulkner’s ‘Bear,’ one of his finest pieces of writing. It was just wilderness country—great oaks that had not been harvested. This was before the plantations. It was just gorgeous.

  “It was a land of flowers, all kinds of wild iris and wild violets, water lilies and alligators. They were just beginning the plantations in the Delta. It was hard. You see, we had malaria. I had malaria every summer when I was a child. It took a little while to clear the Delta. It flooded every spring.

  “When I was a little girl—say in 1915—they were still clearing it. They would go and chop around these mighty oaks and they would let them die and then they would cut them. When they were going to clear out a field they would kill the trees. I never paid any attention to it. It was what they did. I took it for granted. I played in the woods. If you were not at home for meals you were punished, because you had gone too far away and they had to go out and look for you seriously. Everybody had so many children then, you know. There was no birth control. We had so many. And many families lost lots of children.”

  Pioneer land, the Delta region of Mississippi. Yet Mississippi, for a frontier state, had the curious complication of slavery, from the days of the cotton plantations beside the river. The frontier, the pioneers, the solitude; but then, also, the cheap black labor. What did Louise think now? The black population was now very large in the country where as a child she had been delighted by the wildflowers and the big trees of the forest.

  She said, “There is not much reason for being in the Delta unless you were a big landowner. You could hardly have cleared it yourself. Parts of it were just canebrake.”

  “I’ve read that word. What is it?”

  “A wild type of cane, not anything you cultivate. We had plenty of help, servants. After they were freed they just stayed where they were, you know. They lived and multiplied everywhere. As many of the whites grew up, they left. But the blacks stayed. And one reason they stayed—it’s interesting to read the obituaries even now—is that they are very gregarious people. They don’t bother too much about lines of marriage and that sort of thing, but they are very devoted families.” And black people liked to come back to the place they considered home.

  That idea, about the importance of the family, I had heard about in West Africa, in the Ivory Coast. It overrode the other idea—if it existed at all among Africans—of marital fidelity. I had been told that in the Ivory Coast it would be considered frivolous to give infidelity as a cause for divorce. And that went with another, African idea: you didn’t marry a person, you allied yourself to a family.

  Louise said, “I feel very concerned about the black thing, the black problem. My maid told me this morning that up and down their street they are out running and shooting guns in the air—these young blacks.” A twisted version of the frontier, here in the city of Jackson. “I don’t know how we are going to come out of it. Some of them are very intelligent and ambitious. Some are primitive. Some white people are too, but maybe not so many. We are not multiplying as fast as they do.”

  She offered an unrelated memory, in which the ideas of the pioneer life and black people ran together. “When I was growing up in the Delta I had a nanny, I suppose. She even wet-nursed me. There were no formulas. Doctors didn’t know anything about babies. In fact, they had only gotten a little beyond leeches, but not much further. They did not have much skill.”

  The wonderful forests of the Delta, where a child could play among the wildflowers, had been cut down. And her father had created a plantation. What had happened to that plantation?

  “My father died when he was fifty. He sold about a thousand acres just before the Great Depression, and he had about seven hundred acres left.” But forest no longer. “Mud in winter, dust in summer. My father bought a Chalmers automobile. This was even before the time of radio. It was a diversion.” Sometimes they just sat in the Chalmers, for the pleasure, not going anywhere. “We lived quietly. If a town was five miles away, that was a long way.” But later, when the roads improved and the cars improved, people in the Delta became famous in Mississippi for their willingness to travel long distances for dinner or other entertainment.

  And then Louise touched a topic that linked the Delta region to the Trinidad of my own Indian community. Chinese had been brought in to work the Delta; just as Chinese and Portuguese and, more enduringly, Indians from India had been brought into Trinidad and other colonies of the British Empire (including South Africa) to work the plantations, after the abolition of Negro slavery.

  Chinese here, beside the Mississippi!

  Louise said: “The Chinese lived strictly among themselves. And they still do. There was one at Vance, and the low-class whites would tease him unmercifully. My father looked after him if it got bad. After my father died the Chines
e man left Vance too. They deviled him. The schoolchildren on their way home would pass his store and say:

  Chico Chinaman

  Eats dead rats.

  Chews them up

  Like ginger snaps.

  And he would come out—it may have been his sense of humor—and shake his fist, and they would laugh and run away.”

  Still lodged in her memory, this meaningless children’s rhyme, clearly from another country, and adapted to the Chinese of the Delta. As ineradicable as the rhyme lodged from childhood in my own head about Chinese in Trinidad, a rhyme sung by black children—and just as harmless:

  Chinee, Chinee, never die.

  Flat nose and chinkee-eye.

  Who was the originator? An adult—or a child, speaking verse naturally, as certain children can do? There must have been an originator, for my Chinese rhyme as well as for Louise’s.

  It would have been pleasant to talk for a while about Mississippi children’s rhymes. But Louise had other memories. She was getting tired now, and no longer as able to complete a train of thought as when we had started.

  She said: “The blacks were so oppressed during that time that it was a peaceful place. They didn’t do the sort of things they do now. We had very little trouble. They went their way; we went ours. We were used to having help. During the Depression my sister had a maid. She had a daughter the same age—” But this story was never finished. Perhaps it was too painful to recall; perhaps Louise wished to keep it buried. It led to this thought, unexpectedly: “I have a great respect for what the blacks call poor white trash. I think they have suffered. They too need opportunities.” Then Louise said wearily, as if with the weight now of her illness and age, “But the needs of the world are so great that they are overwhelming.”

  The combination of thoughts about blacks, and poor white trash who needed help as much as anybody, and her sister and the Depression, led to the dredging up of this story: